It was not without a sneaking feeling of trepidation that I approached this bar. It has been on the Aussie scene for a few months now, but with little fanfare. Apart from a poster featuring an Anna-Nicole Smith clone dressed in a tight white nurse’s uniform above the bar at my local bus shelter, it hadn’t registered on my ‘Oh wow, that sounds delicious – I must try it NOW’ radar. Nor had I heard any rapturous recommendations from any of my fellow chocoholics but that could have been because of the recent Christmas bonanzas that were generously thrown our way; most especially the ‘special’ flavours of Lindt balls that are often only released during the silly season.
Back to Kit Kat. This may be an ill-informed generalisation, but eating raw cookie dough seems to be a predominantly American occupation (as with their raptures about combining peanut butter and chocolate) – we here down under would much rather eat the raw cake mixture left in the bowl and on the beaters after our Mums had put the cake in the oven to cook.
That said, I’ve never let cultural confusion get in the way of trying new chocolate.
Hmmm. The cookie dough filling (presumably meant to resemble the real ingredients of cookie – or biscuit as they’re called here – such as flour, egg and sugar) really just tasted like a solid paste.
To counteract the disappointment provided by the cookie dough layer, the Kit Kat Kreators have added a thin layer of caramel on top of the dough as a kind of consolation prize. The overall effect is that of biting into a chunky Kit Kat with some kind of indistinguishable, sweetish, stodgy filling inside.
As you can see from my sterling photography, it might as well be peanut butter for all I could tell and the ‘cookie dough’ flavour (whatever that might be) certainly didn’t make its presence felt on my taste buds. Indeed, being an in-bred of the generously-proportioned Kit Kat Chunky family, the bar has already got a lot of busyness in it – big thick chocolate bottom, three thin layers of wafer, generous chocolate sides and top and then it throws in some doughy paste and a final dash of caramel. Instead of creating a kind of confectionary fairytale in the mouth, it just blends in to a bland, forgettable sweet mess. This is not the sort of bar you want to be tasting with a blindfold on and a gun to your head…
I wouldn’t trouble myself to buy this again – I’d prefer to go for the Kit Kat caramel bar for a fix of extra sweet sticky stuff with extra thick chocolate. At least then I’d enjoy the full-on flavour of the caramel in a more generous amount than just a thin layer on top of old dough.
What I would rather Nestlé Australia do is forget about these non-appealing flavour combinations and instead try a chunky in Dark chocolate. Nestle do a beautiful range of family-sized dark chocolate blocks, so surely they could fling some Kit Kat Chunky’s way? If so, I’ll be the first in line.
We’ve already reviewed Fry’s Chocolate Cream on Chocablog, but now it’s time to take a look at its fruitier sibling. Now, having a fruity sibling might be something the average human being would be slightly ashamed of, but in this case it’s definitely something to be proud of.
On the surface, this bar looks exactly like the Chocolate Cream. A flattened ‘D’ shape bar of dark chocolate divided into chunks with the word ‘Fry’ on each piece. And as with its sibling, the chunks are purely decorative – the filling runs through the length of the bar and you can’t really split it along the lines anyway.
But this is a good thing. You see, the problem with a chocolate bar divided into chunks is that it implies you should be sharing it. And you really don’t want to be sharing this!
The dark chocolate is tasty and smooth without being overly bitter, and the filling is surprisingly delicious. It doesn’t quite have the flavour of real oranges, but it’s smooth, tangy and zesty. Almost sorbet-like. It is, however, very orange.
The overall effect is delicious and refreshing chocolate bar that leaves you wanting just one more bite.
One of our readers recently pointed out that there used to be a similar bar called Fry’s Five Centre with five different fillings that changed slowly in taste and colour down the bar. Unfortunately, this bar seems to have been discontinued in the early 90s, which is a real shame as it was without doubt my favourite childhood chocolate.
Still, I do think we should be grateful that the late Five Centre left behind three wonderful siblings (Orange, Chocolate and Peppermint Cream) which are still every bit as good as I remember from my childhood.
Green & Black’s Organic Ginger vs Waitrose Swiss Plain with Ginger
As an interesting diversion (and an exercise in self-indulgence, naturally) I thought I’d have a little head-to-head competition between two similar sounding bars.
Something I have always been very fond of is ginger. Not ginger flavour, but root ginger. Crystallised, preserved, or just added to foodstuffs, the warming kick of ginger has always brought a smile to my face. I’ve also been rather partial to chocolate flavoured with ginger. This Christmas I was given a box of Hotel Chocolat Dark Chocolate Fix, and the Ginger creme in there was lovely. So, I decided to have a little contest between two Ginger chocloate bars, just for the fun of it.
In the red corner, we have Green & Black’s Ginger Bar:
Coming from the Green & Black’s stable, and with an impressive pedigree, the Ginger bar boasts 60% cocoa content ‘bittersweet dark’ chocolate impregnated with pieces of candied ginger.
In the Blue corner, the newcomer. Waitrose Swiss Plain chocolate with ginger:
Waitrose have a reputation for producing very good foodstuffs under their own brand label, and although I was not familiar with their chocs, I expected it to be a worthy adversary for the might G&B. The Swiss Plain chocolate is higher in cocoa content, and the ginger pieces aren’t as sugared.
Round One: Appearance
Green & Black’s bars are pretty standardised. What you get is the stock G&B package design, colour coded to reflect the contents.
Waitrose on the other hand, offer a tantalising glimpse of a block of their choccy, sandwiched between a surgically-precisely cut piece of root ginger. Very tastefully done.
Green & Black’s chocolate is organic, whereas the Waitrose bar is not. Could have a bearing on taste.
Once the wrappers are off, the differences become more apparent. The G&B bar is definitely a light shade, and the Waitrose bar has that classic shiny look that all good plain chocolate should have. Both contenders look good with their shirts off.
Round Two: The crucial taste test
I had to choose one to go first, and the privilege went to the newcomer. I figured I’d let the new boy have a go at dazzling me with first impressions. The dark Swiss chocolate has a good cocoa content, and starts to melt almost as soon as it hits the tongue. The ginger pieces are a good size – not so large that they overpower the chocolate, but not so small that you feel as though the sweepings from a ginger processing plant have been shovelled into the Waitrose choccy vats.
After the initial good first impression though, I have to say that I closed my eyes, popped another square in and went into Serious Taste mode – and was a little disappointed. The chocolate seemed to be lacking that crucial burst of dark cocoa richness that characterises a good quality dark choccy bar.
Time to let the opponent have a go, then.
Luckily the squares of chocolate are roughly similar in size, so I repeated the process. I popped the first square of Green & Black’s into my mouth and had a good old chew. The first impression I got was that there is an awful lot more sugar in this one. The chocolate is sweeter, and so is the ginger. The fact that it’s crystallised adds to the sugary hit. The second square went in for the gentle melt test, and again I was overwhelmed by the sugariness.
This bar was disappointingly sugary – almost to the point of resembling some cheap confection beloved of small hyperactive children.
The Verdict
I would say that in an ideal world I would take the ginger pieces from the Waitrose bar and mix them with the Green & Black’s chocolate. The G&B bar suffers from slightly sweet choccy with added sugary ginger, which sent it way off my sweetness scale, whereas the Waitrose bar lacks chocolatey flavour but has good ginger.
Personally, I won’t be buying either of them again. The quest continues for a truly excellent ginger chocolate.
Luckily for us Aussies, the two words, ‘Cherry’ and ‘Ripe’ don’t have quite the unsavoury sexual connotations they do in the US, ala the ‘Porky’s’ videos I remember seeing as an impressionable teenager in 1982 or thereabouts.
Here, ‘Cherry Ripe’ means a very popular, yet sophisticated chocolate bar. The photo to the right is the new 240g version but it is still the classic 50g bar that sells by the bucket load. Cadbury also package them in packs of 12 ‘fun sized’ bars that are only about four centimeters long but I’ve always failed to see what’s so ‘fun’ about a tiny bar when I can always inhale a king-sized one at 80g.
However, one shouldn’t merely inhale a Cherry Ripe – this is the only bar that Cadbury makes in Australia that is coated in dark chocolate – excepting the ‘old gold’ bars, so it is rather unique and automatically stands out as a bit more ‘special’ than the usual Cadbury fare. Inside the lovely almost blackish coating is a deliciously moist, Bounty-like coconut mixture generously studded with glace cherries. It tastes much nicer than its rather ordinary depiction. In my opinion, dark chocolate does a much better job complementing cherries and coconut than milk chocolate. As an aside, it is nice to see that the Bounty dark chocolate versions are almost as popular as the milkier originals.
Cherry Ripes are best enjoyed in winter, on the sofa after dinner in front of a good movie. Nibbled with alternating slurps of hot herbal tea, coffee or – strangely enough – an ice cold shot glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Actually, they’re pretty good in summer too, especially straight from the fridge and go down a treat with the unofficial non-alcoholic beverage of choice in South Australia, the Farmers Union Iced Coffee (or FUIC for short).
Actually, they’re not too bad for breakfast either. Taking huge, satisfying chomps out of a king-size bar, reading your emails before the phone calls start with a decent cappuccino at your side is a pretty bloody great way to start a day. If that shocks the nutrition nerds out there, I’ll let you in on MillyMoo’s chocolate diet tip – follow your choccie-fest with an apple or orange: the goodness of the fruit completely negates the evil of the chocolate, so you’re even. [Are you sure about this, MillyMoo? – Ed]
My older brother Rob, who is as thin as a whippet with legs a flamingo would envy, adores Cherry Ripes. So much so that my father bought a corner-shop box of 48 for his birthday one year. He managed to make them last until his next birthday – a feat of self-restraint never experienced by this writer/his sister!
