After discovering Fry’s Turkish Delight‘s fall from grace, I picked up the 4-pack of Chocolate Cream’s with some reservation. Was this to be another nostalgic return only to be dashed by the bitter reality that things always taste better when you’re a small child? Was I better off leaving them enshrined in memory as the best bitter confectionary in the world?
Well, I’m glad I didn’t.
The Fry’s Chocolate Cream was the first chocolate confectionery ever to be made on a factory scale, so as such is the granddaddy of all chocolate bars. The tagline is “dark chocolate with fondant centre”, which to be honest, I’ve always considered to be fairly poor and unenticing description. Not that I could tell you a better one.
On unwrapping, you are confronted with a long D shaped bar of dark chocolate, about 12½cm long, 3½cm wide and just under 1cm at the thickest part of the D. The word FRY appears at intervals separated with an indented line on the surface, implying you could break it into chunks, but in practice is just decorative – far better just to chomp straight into it.
Biting into the bar, you get a decent mouthful of rich and bitter chocolate. The fondant centre is moist and I swear that it’s a mint taste, not an overpowering one, but mint all the same… yet according to the ingredients and the product description there is no mint. Perhaps a trick played on the mind with the contrasts of bitter and sweet?
All in all, this is still my favourite bitter chocolate by far; I wasn’t disappointed. One bar is enough though, it’s rich and leaves you feeling like you had a decent chocofix. The second bar does leave you feeling a bit sick (well, I had to try in the interests of a proper review after all). This is a classic chocolate bar that still holds its own well in a saturated market.
Upon hearing the news that Cadbury are to launch Flake Dark next month, I immediately went out and bought a multi-pack (5) of the original Flakes. Call it my mini protest if you will.
I noted upon opening the multi-pack wrapping that the Flake was…smaller than usual. Please oh lord of all things cocoa let the reason be that multi-packs are meant to have smaller Flakes in them and not a. Cadbury have reduced the size of the Flake or b. I have grown so big that everything seems smaller these days.
Ignoring the smallness of the Flake I must say that they were it was as yummy as ever. (of course the other 4 remain in the pack for later) I put forward the same question as with Cadbury Chocolate Buttons, ‘same chocolate, different taste/experience?’
The Cadbury Flake bar was originally launched in 1920. The concept of the Flake was discoved by a Cadbury employee who filled the chocolate moulds. Once the moulds were full, the excess chocolate used to spill over the edge and fold down in a stream of chocolate. Once this stream cooled, the Flake product was created as the texture had many thin layers of chocolate and was very crumbly and flakey!
God bless that employee!!
Now I must mention the wrapper. It is a foil wrapper with a thin line of glue holding it together along the length. It is then twisted xmas cracker style at each end. It wasn’t always like this. For one, there never used to be the glue and it it was easier to unwrap. It needs to be easier to unwrap because you don’t want to break the Flake. Cadbury Flake is a delicate little bar of scrumminess and should be worshipped in it’s completeness prior to the devour.
The other thing that has changed, is the wrapper material itself. It wasn’t always foil. I’ll be honest I say I can’t quite describe it (can anyone help me on this?) but it was a plasticy/paper that you could FOLD. To enjoy your Flakey moments you need to be able to fold the wrapper. The climax of the Flake experience is gathering all the Flake crumbs and allowing them to slide down the folded wrapper onto your tongue. I was left with no option but to gather up the crumbs by sticking my tongue out in order to pick them up. Most unbecoming of a sophisticated chocablogger…
Talking of sophisticated chocabloggers, I’m hoping that Simon will be kind enough to give us his opinion on Flake Dark when it is launched. I have to admit that the idea of a Flake made from dark chocolate just doesn’t appeal to me and I really can’t imagine sticking it in my ice-cream “99” style.
Questions – is dark chocolate posher than milk chocolate? Will you switch to dark because of the health benifits? Does the higher quality of dark chocolate affect our ‘treat time choice’?
Before I proceed, a little history. When I was 9 my parents bought me a sweet shop (well, they thought they were buying a business opportunity, but I was 9). I lived in the shop for three years and consumed many times my body weight in Cadbury, Mars and Nestle.
These days my tastes tend towards high cocoa content choccies (30% or more for milk, 70% or more for plain). Belgium and Switzerland ought to give me a medal!
Earlier this year we went on the London Eye and there was a competition to win a holiday in America. All you had to do was to spot a giant golden egg that had been concealed on a rooftop, and then say how high it was in millimetres. Well, my wife did some fairly serious calculations, but only managed the runner up prize – a gold plated bar of chocolate!
The chocolate was made by Xocoa of Barcelona as a strictly limited edition, only available up to July this year. As you can see, the bar has been covered in (edible) gold leaf.
We opened the box with great anticipation (I’d done some research on Xocoa and their products look pretty fab).
The bar lay there, gleaming. Too nice to eat? Nah, course not.
We started with an ungilded piece. The chocolate is 73% – about the limit for eating chocs really – and smelled fantastic. It wasn’t too sweet, and as it melted you could catch a hint of the roast cocoa beans. Smooth as silk and deliciously rich, this is definitely one of the best dark chocolate bars I have tasted. It’s certainly enough for me to be VERY interested in other Xocoa products.
Of course, we didn’t monster it all immediately – the advantage of such dark chocolate is that it’s actually quite hard to eat a large quantity in one sitting. The gold leaf is almost unnoticeable (I thought it would play havoc with fillings, rather like foil) but was pleasantly surprised.
There may be some minor health benefit to ingesting gold, but I think it was just there for show.
Without doubt the poshest chocolate I have eaten to date, and well worth a taste (although you’d have to do without the gold).
It’s Ritter Time again!
Regular readers will know how much I liked Ritter Sport’s Cappuccino and Peppermint varieties, so it was with much anticipation that I unwrapped this 100g square of chocolatey goodness.
This one however, is a little different, being solid dark chocolate. From the word “Fondente” on the wrapper, I had half expected it to have soft centre, and found myself slightly miffed that it didn’t.
In fact, in a fit of disappointment, I used Google to translate the word fondente. You can imagine my surprise when Google came back and told me that “fondente” was German for “Duck Rear”.
Now I was starting to worry about what exactly was in the bar and checked the ingredients. No mention of ducks. Or any other avarian posterias.
Satisfied that Google was lying to me, I relaxed and started enjoying the chocolate. This is 50% cocoa solids, so it’s not as bitter as the Green & Black’s Dark 70% I reviewed a while back. It has none of that aftertaste you sometimes get with dark chocolate, and is very smooth.
It’s also very moreish. I’d polished off the whole bar in five minutes – and I wanted more. And that’s my only real complaint about this bar. There’s just not enough of it.
So, if anyone from Ritter happens to be reading this, I have a suggestion. Instead of making your chocolate bars in 100g squares, you should make them in 1000g cubes… and then send them all to me.
