Guest Chocablogger Terry Scannell of The Chocolate Review takes a look at a new twist on a British institution…
‘It’s totally tangy!’ is the proclamation on the front of the box. This a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, with ‘crunchy zingy citrus-y bits’ inside.What that means exactly is that it has crunchy lemon flavoured pieces mixed into the chocolate. Not that you’d really notice though, you can hardly taste the lemon at all. You can notice the crunchy pieces, as they change the texture slightly, and not necessarily in a good way, it just depends if you like tasteless crunchy bits in your chocolate.The chocolate melts very easily as well, it was all coming off on my fingers at room temperature which was messy and made writing this a pain in the ass. Letting the chocolate melt in my mouth didn’t allow the lemon crystals to come through in taste either, instead they just got stuck in my teeth, and even then I couldn’t taste them!
So basically, it’s a standard Terry’s Chocolate Orange ‘egg’, with crunchy bits in it. So I highly recommend you forget about this and just get the standard egg. The quality of the chocolate is pretty good, the orange is nice and overpowers the chocolate completely, but isn’t too strong in taste itself, and is obviously a tried and tested formula.
Per 3 segments, Chocolate Orange Tangy has 136 calories, 1.8g of Protein, 15.5g of Carbs (amazingly, that’s ALL sugar), and 7.3g of Fat (4.3g of which saturates).
As a confirmed chocoholic, there is one relatively new family-sized block of chocolate that is making the long South Australian winter stuck at home working a much more bearable situation: Nestlé’s Club Classic Cappuccino. Their dark ‘Club’ range has been available for at least thirty years, but they’ve introduced a ‘dark mild’ version that eases the bitterness and whole-heartedly serenades the flavours inside such as peppermint, cherry, almond and raisin.
Classic Cappuccino belongs to their dark chocolate range which are all superb (trust me, I will write about the other flavours in due course). With 40% cocoa solids, the chocolate itself is bittersweet and yet somehow has a creamy mouth-feel to it compared to the sometimes graininess of other dark chocolate varieties. The pale, coffee-flavoured mousse-like filling inside provides the perfect complement to the dark chocolate and if you want to have the full holy trinity of memorable mouth experiences, eat it (or suck it, very slowly) with a freshly ground and brewed cup of coffee or piping hot cup of tea for a cheap but worthwhile thrill.
It is a tad disappointing afterwards to read the ingredients label (I must stop doing this, for the fat content alone is enough to make me depressed and therefore reach for another block), but there doesn’t seem to be any actual coffee in the ‘cappuccino’ filling. Oh well, whatever they’ve managed to create in their secret laboratory using sugar, vegetable oil, antioxidant, cocoa mass, milk solids, good old emulsifiers and flavours has worked embarrassingly well, even for a choco-snob like myself.
Nestle may have recognised this oversight and tried to make up for their flavour fakery by brazenly sticking the label ‘A rich source of antioxidants’ with a red ‘tick’ logo on the top right hand corner of all of their dark chocolate range. After Googling ‘how much dark chocolate is good for you?’ and getting a list of 2,360,000 sources, it was clear that the dark brown stuff we love has a valuable antioxidant called ‘flavonoids’ in it that helps reduce blood pressure and heart disease. A couple of clicks later revealed that studies varied on how much chocolate should be given to benefit the patient.
Put it this way: I’m much more inclined to believe the study that gave their human lab rats 100g per day compared to another study where they only got to eat 6 grams!
I have to admit, I was a little apprehensive when I bought this. If you’re read any of my previous Ritter Sport reviews, you’ll know how much I’ve loved them. But could a white chocolate possibly be as nice?
Well I’m glad to say, the answer is a resounding “Yes”. Ritter have managed to create a white chocolate that’s both deliciously creamy, but not overly sweet like so many other white chocolates.
The format of this bar is exactly the same as the other Ritter Sport bars I’ve reviewed. A 100g square of chocolate divided into chunks. But if you turn the bar over, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s packed with nuts – they stick out of the underside more than any other bar I’ve seen. It’s obviously made upside down in a mould with the nuts and chocolate poured in to keep the front side (and the Ritter logo on each chunk) looking nice.
When you first open the bar, there’s a pleasant vanilla aroma. Not too strong, just enough to tempt you to break off a chunk or three.
The chocolate is very smooth and creamy, and has just the right level of sweetness. Rather than being packed with sugar like British white chocolate tends to be, it’s quite similar to the kind of flavour you’d expect from Kinder.
But the best biggest surprise this bar is just how crispy it is. You see, in addition to whole hazelnuts, it also contains puffed rice. And while neither the nuts or rice add a great deal to the flavour, they do signinficantly enhance the texture. They also help to make this bar a little lighter and more refreshing than a solid bar of white chocolate would be.
Definitely recommended, and further proof that Ritter Sport represents the pinnacle of German engineering.
It was actually some months ago that I first picked up one of these bars. I remember thinking that it could go either way – the coffee flavour might be too ‘Revels‘, or the praline too bland – but I am happy to report that this is an absolute stunner of a bar.
Now, looking at the bottom of the box, one cannot help noticing that three squares (that’s THREE SQUARES) contains 24% of your RDA of saturates. That’s pretty steep, and methinks mainly due to the hefty dose of cocoa butter used in the praline filling, so I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone attempting a strict diet.
It smells lovely – a rich mixture of coffee and chocolate that makes you feel like you’re sat in a very nice cafe somewhere in Europe, while the baristas serve up numerous coffees and hot chocolates. When you pop a square in your mouth you are immediately aware of the additional cocoa butter.
It melts on the tongue so quickly, spreading its coffee and chocolate loveliness across the palate in seconds and distributing the tiny bits of coffee bean all around your mouth, leaving you with a crunchy treat for when the chocolate has slid down your throat.
It’s rich, it’s very creamy, and it’s slightly naughty. In short, it’s a damned fine piece of work, and one which has prompted me to pay much closer attention to supermarket own brand chocolate. If you’re partial to a ‘proper’ coffee and you love your chocolate then look no further – this is the best combination of the two flavours I have come across so far.
