It’s been a while since I bought any Lindt chocolate, so I was quite looking forward to getting my teeth into some more Swiss loveliness.
I was browsing the shelves when I spotted this addition to the Excellence range. Now milk chocolate is not my usual cup of tea, but as we all know, Lindt do make VERY good choccy, and their milk chocolate is one of the better (i.e. more cocoa) varieties.
As detailed before, the packaging is very up-market. Slim box, gold foil, tastefully illustrated. The chocolate is very creamy, rich and smooth with a hint of vanilla – a very nice blend indeed. My only issue with this particular bar is the amount of caramel they’ve managed to squeeze in.
I don’t know if anyone else does this (but I suspect you do) but if I’m eating chocolate with ‘bits’ in, then at some point I will allow the chocolate to melt and then swallow it, leaving me with a mouthful of whatever has been suspended in the bar. I did this while tasting this bar, and was amazed at just how many little nuggets of caramel there were. There seemed to be far more than would allow the bar to retain its form! (although plainly that isn’t the case.)
The caramel itself is very crunchy. So crunchy that chewing this chocolate quietly would be almost impossible to do. It’s also very sweet, not sugary sweet, but more ‘honey-sweet’ and so the ‘mouthful of caramel bits’ experiment left me feeling a bit over-sweetened and wishing I’d just eaten the bar as Lindt intended me to. The rich sweetness was a bit much for my palate on it’s own.
The overall verdict on this bar is that it is made of very high quality ingredients. Both the chocolate and the caramel are – as one might expect – excellent. Just don’t extract the caramel from the chocolate!
Congratulations to Zahrah Jassim from South Shields who is our Hotel Chocolat Easter competion winner!
Well done Zahrah! Your Easter Hamper is on its way!
We had over 400 entries for the competition, so a big thanks to everyone who entered and to Hotel Chocolat for organising it.
Oh – and if you’re wondering, the secret password was ‘signature’.
I don’t like to sound ungrateful. It was a gift and I appreciated the thought. But the reality is that the chocolate was horrid.
I didn’t expect much from the small squares of chocolate. The point, the gimmick as it were, is the photographs with the silly captions “to appeal to those with a taste of humour”. Each chocolate has a different one, all relating to chocolate in some way. Some witty, most at least faintly amusing. They are clearly a bit of a gag gift and I didn’t expect quality chocolate.
I did expect it to be edible though. The milk chocolate looked nice enough, a creamy colour and decent width. I broke off a corner and popped it into my mouth without even thinking about it. I didn’t expect a magical moment but this was just insipid. It tasted like someone had bought the absolute cheapest cocoa powder mix they could find, the type with lots of sugar and next to no real chocolate, mixed it with water and skimmed milk and then found a way to solidify it.
I know I can be a bit of a chocolate snob so the sensible solution was to get a second opinion. I got another square and handed it to my British boyfriend. “Try that.” He ate it in one gulp and then made a face. “Ew. That’s terrible,” he said. “Is it American?”
After the ensuing fight about the merits of American chocolate and a rather reluctant reconciliation, I checked the labelling and was thrilled relieved to see that it was an English company on the back of the label: Heavens Above with the House of Dorchester website. House of Dorchester? Quality chocolate since 1963, commemorative chocolate presentations for Buckingham Palace, confectionary excellence! What went wrong here?
All the other chocolates sold by the the House of Dorchester look lovely and are clearly aimed up-market. Heavens Above are sold “under license” but I couldn’t find any other reference to them. Perhaps House of Dorchester felt decent chocolate would be wasted on pranksters more interested in the packaging than the content.
It’s a mystery indeed. Regardless, you’ve been warned: the retro look is interesting and the captions are a giggle but don’t expect the chocolate to be anything special.
I’m calling this a ‘mini egg’ as it doesn’t appear to have a real name. The (rather plain) foil wrapping just has the ‘Lindt Lindor’ brand on it and not much else.
Whatever you want to call this egg (I called mine Kylie), it’s a bit of an oddity. It’s very small (28g) and sits on the shelf in the shop looking a little sorry for itself, when in actual fact it should be shouting and making a noise.
You see, while it has a few flaws in its design, it’s really rather nice.
When opened, the egg splits in half lengthways, with each half filled with a delicious, creamy truffle. Except that it’s not quite ‘filled’ to the top. This is presumably so you can split it in half more easily, but in reality it just leaves you feeling a little short-changed.
The milk chocolate shell is typical Lindt – smooth, creamy and very tasty. Lindt is certainly one of my favourite makers of milk chocolate and this doesn’t disappoint. Except for the fact there’s just not enough of it!
With a little bit of attention to detail, this could easily give Cadbury Creme Egg a run for its money, but in its current form it seems like a bit of a half-hearted effort from Lindt.
On the offchance that anyone from Lindt is reading this, I have some suggestions on how to improve this offering for next Easter:
- Give it a proper name! (Kylie is a nice name, isn’t it?)
- Make it bigger! It needs to be at least as big as a Creme Egg to get my attention.
- Make the shell thicker
- Fill it up completely. I don’t like paying for air – even high quality Swiss air)
- Give it a funky wrapper
- Send me f
ree chocolate a review sample
I look forward to tasting Kylie’s sibling (erm…) next Easter. Until then, I might pick up another one of these in passing, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy them.
