Kev's Snack Reviews

Whilst perusing Marks and Spencers chocolate aisle recently I spied this bar of Milk Chocolate with Caramelised Macadamia Nuts reduced to £1, so could hardly resist giving it a try. It's described on the box as "Extra fine milk chocolate with a touch of ground hazelnuts sprinkled with caramelised macadamias" and contains 35% cocoa solids and 12% macadamia nuts. Opening the wrapper I was met with a creamy, nutty aroma. It smelled amazing! It tasted amazing too. Creamy, smooth, and with just the right balance of rich cocoa and milky sweetness. The chocolate melted in the mouth very easily and the macadamias tasted crunchy, fresh and were very moreish. I soon managed to scoff most of the bar along with a cup of coffee (in my defense, it was a thin bar of chocolate!) I'm not sure why these bars were reduced in price but I hope they aren't being discontinued (as the white chocolate Creme Brulee bar  reviewed here by The Snack Review seems to have been)...

When I saw these "Ice Cream Sundae Fondant Cremes" at Morrisons I just had to try them. Firstly because they were reduced to £1 (they're usually £1.99) and secondly because I love fruity chocolates, especially fruit cremes (I'm one of those rare people who likes the strawberry cremes in Quality Street). Described as "Milk chocolate coated fondant cremes with peach melba and raspberry ripple flavoured centres", they come in a little plastic bag inside the box: It's all a bit tacky looking, but considering the cheap price tag I will let them off. The raspberry ripples are white chocolate coated and come in a pink wrapper, whilst the peach melbas are milk chocolate coated and come in an orange wrapper : Cutting into them revealed a thin layer of fruit "jam" in the centre of each fondant: Taste-wise, they were throat-searingly sweet. I should have expected this since fondant cremes are usually sugary by their very nature, ...

What's this? Tea flavoured chocolates... surely not? Well, not exactly. This Morrisons Afternoon Tea Chocolate Collection is "Inspired by teatime treats, all wrapped in British chocolate". And as usual, it's a load of marketing nonsense to get you to buy them. They usually cost £2.99 but had been reduced to £2 when I bought them. The flavours include Strawberry Shortcake, Chocolate Fudge Cake, Carrot Cake and Earl Grey. Sounds interesting, right? I thought so and was interested to see what an earl grey truffle would taste like. Well, turns out it's not that nice. I'll go through each flavour individually: Strawberry Shortcake Strawberry Shortcake: Described as: "Strawberry & cream flavoured truffle enrobed in smooth milk chocolate and sprinkled with biscuit pieces". This was an okay chocolate. The filling was a mild tasting milky strawberry flavour, and tasted quite powdery. The little bits of shortcake added a nice crun...

Here we have the El Blanco bar from Willie Harcourt Cooze, famous for his "Willie's Wonky Chocolate Factory" TV show. I was intrigued by the El Blanco because other blog reviews suggest it's one of the better quality white chocolates around. Looking at the ingredients list I could well believe it; cocoa butter is the first ingredient, followed by milk powder, and sugar is last. Now that's very rare for white chocolate! It also contains no vanilla flavouring, another rarity for white chocolate. I found this in a local department store for £1.90. It's very well presented, with a classy looking box design and matte foil wrapper. The blurb on the back says:  "This is white chocolate as it should be, light and milky. The secret is beautiful ingredients and balance. Natural Venezuelan cacao butter, sugar cane from Guadaloupe and British milk, all in perfect harmony". The chocolate itself looks great - very clean and smooth, with "Willies f...

Dark Chocolate M&M's aren't anything new in the snacking world. They made an appearance in pound shops and discount stores last year as "65% Intense Cacao" (see review here by Grocery Gems), but it seems Asda are now officially stocking this limited edition version, for the bargain price of 50p for a large pouch! Like the Intense Cacao M&M's these contain 65% cocoa solids, and are made my Mars Polska. I found these very moreish, and enjoyed the savoury taste of the peanuts combined with the rich dark chocolate and sweet crunchy shells. I'm also glad to see that at least some companies aren't afraid to use bright artificial colours on their products (has anyone seen how boring Smarties look nowadays?!). The pink M&M's seemed to be a bit larger in size than the rest. Some kind of feminist statement, perhaps? Overall, a delicious and moreish snack, and such a bargain too - snap these up from Asda while you can! Mine had a...

After my disappointment that the Gubor Winter Apfel wasn't apple flavoured, I've been on a mission to find some decent apple flavoured chocolate.  Laima's Christmas Chocolate Apple-Toffee  was disappointing, but when I found these Feines Duett truffles by Gubor, I was a bit more excited.  I saw these in Tk Maxx for £1.99 pre-Christmas, alongside a plum flavoured version. Unfortunately they no longer stock either flavour, boo! They're basically little truffle balls in a similar vein to Lindor, half filled with calvados truffle filling and half with apple filling. I'm happy to report that they were very yummy indeed! The calvados truffle wasn't too strong, which is a plus for me because I don't like strongly flavoured alcoholic chocolates, and the apple filling had a nice balance of sweet and tartness. The chocolate itself was excellent quality; creamy, rich and with a smooth taste that melted in the mouth nicely. My only complaint was...

Whilst browsing my local Thorntons recently, I noticed they've changed their store layout and product range quite a bit - apparently they're doing this across all their stores at the moment. There's a lot of new novelty and gifting products, most of which didn't appeal to me (I could have sworn I saw a chocolate handbag!) until I saw this. I thought it was a bottle of jelly beans at first, but these are actually "cherry flavour white chocolates with popping candy". They cost £3.99 per bottle or you can get 3 for £10, and there's also a lemonade flavour. The bottle is kind of weird, it looks almost like a tomato ketchup bottle but I think it's meant to resemble an old-fashioned pop bottle (incidentally, does anyone else remember when lucozade used to come in glass bottles?) Unscrewing the cap I could smell a nice tangy cherry aroma coming from the Bubbles; they smelled just like sweets. They're irregularly sized, kind of knobbly and nugge...

When I heard Mars were bringing out these "new" Snickers varieties I was a bit skeptical. They're not really new at all and have both been done before (More Caramel was previously known as Snickers Maximus ). It baffles me why snacks companies can't come up with something truly different instead of constantly re-branding products they've already done. According to this article (warning: it's from the Daily Mail), cheap snacks will fuel consumer spending during the recession. If that's the case I hope it means we'll get some true  product innovation in the coming years rather than re-branded stuff. Anyway, enough complaining. Being the snacks hunter I am, I had to give these bars a try. I found both in Morrisons, but I've also seen a multipack of the More Caramel in Poundzone, which I find a bit odd. If they're selling at 4 for a pound then Mars can't have much confidence in them selling well as single bars. Snickers More Carame...

This is my final review for the new Kitkat flavours released as part of Choose a Chunky Champion. So far I feel all the flavours have been a bit lacklustre and haven't offered a great deal of excitement, including these two. When I opened them I was surprisingly more tempted by the smell of the Choc Fudge as it had a delicious fudgey smell going on. The coconut in comparison smelled quite artificial, and certainly didn't smell as nice as a Bounty bar that's for sure. Out of the two the Choc Fudge was also the only one to add something different - the chocolate fudge paste. The Coconut was just coconut flavoured chocolate and that's all. I feel Nestle could have put more effort into it and done some kind of creamy coconut filling or something. It's almost like they don't *want* it to win the Chunky Champion. Coconut Chunky The Coconut  Chunky tasted alright, it was a nice change from the norm and had a decent coconut flavour, but it got a little bit sickl...

Over the Christmas period I finally got the chance to visit a 99p store. They had a lot of interesting European brands there but these Halloren Kugeln Irish Cream caught my eye the most. Apparently Halloren are a German company that were founded in 1804 and own Germany's oldest chocolate factory, and: "The most famous product is the "Halloren-Kugeln", or Halloren globes, which receive their name from the early salt workers, whose buttons the chocolates resemble. The brand was especially popular in Communist East Germany and remained popular after reunification."  (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloren_Chocolate_Factory ) So apparently we are dealing with something quite special and historic here! I loved the presentation of these chocolates, they come in a little tray with a paper insert that makes them look quite special: The Kugeln have an interesting shape (thanks, salt workers ;)) with a sweet irish cream aroma. I hate to sound like som...

After hearing about Gnaw Chocolate and perusing their  website  I had to check out their stuff. They are a small Norfolk-based company producing handcrafted chocolate bars, with varieties including peanut butter, jelly beans, lemon meringue, banoffee pie and more. Sounds exciting huh? Here is the blurb from their website: "Our bars come in over 30 different (and sometimes surprising) flavours, using the most delicious ingredients we could lay our hands on and recipes perfected by experienced Gnawfolk chocolatiers. The folks at Gnaw have had a lot of fun getting creative with our chocolate range – and whether you crave devastatingly dark delicacies or ludicrously munchable goodies, we hope you enjoy them as much as we do!" This "Go Bananas" variety cost me £2.99 from a local organic store. It's described as "Cocoa butter based yellow confectionery with banana flavouring and a milk chocolate dipped foam banana topping". The wrapper is transpar...

Here we have my last Nestle product review for this week, and this time it's for the Hazelnut Kitkat Chunky from Choose a Chunky Champion. I've always thought Nestle should make a hazelnut Kitkat and I'm surprised they haven't tried this before. I guess if you count Kitkat Senses , then they have done this before. But Senses were rubbishy, smaller, inferior versions of Kinder Bueno specifically marketed to appeal to women. No, I've always wanted an actual Kitkat Chunky with Hazelnut in. So far I haven't been able to find the imported "green wrapper" Kitkat Chunky Hazelnut Cream  as reviewed here by Grocery Gems , so I was excited that Nestle UK were bringing out their own version. Unfortunately it's a bit disappointing. On opening the wrapper, it smelled very nice; hazelnutty and creamy. The filling is a creamed hazelnut paste that is nestled (heh heh) on top of the wafer, as shown here: The problem is that this Kitkat tasted too sweet...

Ladies, look away now! Because here we have Yorkie Man Size Buttons, which are manly chocolate buttons, especially for men. Yes, I finally discovered these after being bemused that Nestle would launch such a product. I like to think they're meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it's hard to tell since products are increasingly being marketed at men and women separately these days. Yorkie have been doing this for ages of course, so it's not much of a surprise, but it's the first time they've launched Yorkie outside of the traditional bar format. I found these on offer for £1 in Tesco alongside Mini Matchmakers (maybe those are for the ladies?). They're huge compared to regular chocolate buttons and because of this there's less in a pack, which is a good excuse not to share them I guess! Each button measures 4cm as promised on the pack: They taste nice; sweet and milky with that distinctive "Nestle taste" like you get with Kitkats. I actually foun...

So here we have the Kitkat Chunky Mint which is part of the "Choose a Chunky Champion" range. I haven't tried any of the other flavours yet (which are coconut, hazelnut and choc fudge) but I bought this along with the Hazelnut on a 2 for £1 deal at a local Premier store. I wasn't expecting much from this to be honest, as mint flavoured product variations tend to be underwheming, I find. However that wasn't the case with this Kitkat Chunky Mint. It tasted very minty and delicious! Kitkat Chunky is delicious anyway, but the addition of the mint flavoured chocolate to the crunchy wafer made it even more addictive. It tasted quite strong, just how I like my minty chocolate! I can't help but think it would be even nicer with a layer of mint creme filling, similar to After Eight. Heck, they should just make an After Eight Kitkat! (imagine the advertising: "Now you can have your Kitkat after eight!") I somehow doubt this will win the "Choose ...