Laima Miks Bar

When I saw this Laima Miks bar in my local import store I thought it was a Latvian version of Snickers or something. Upon examining the ingredients however, I became a bit more interested as I learnt that it contains apricots, various types of nuts, raisins, dates, coconut, roasted sunflower seeds and even banana chips. This sounded pretty unique to me so I couldn't resist giving it a try!

I certainly didn't expect this to be a bar of what is essentially apricot jelly coated in fake chocolate compound! Dissecting it, I found lots of different nuts and bits of dried fruit embedded in the jelly centre:

"What a bizarre chocolate bar" was my first thought upon tasting this. The apricot jelly had a weird "air freshner" kind of taste, which is the only way I can describe it: fake, artificial and perfumey. It wasn't very pleasant.
The fruit and nuts added a bit of texture to the jelly and were kind of interesting, and even the chocolate compound coating added a little bit of cocoa flavour, but ultimately this bar was just too weird for me. The odd artificial flavour from the jelly was really off-putting and the various fruit and nut elements were hard to detect.

Overall I would file this into the "interesting to try once, but never again" category. I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who has tried this bar, because it's kind of perplexing to me. Who buys this sort of thing? And why? Is it a case of a once-popular brand being cheapened with poor ingredients?

I checked out the Laima website, and their description of this bar (run through google translate) goes something like this:

"When you need energy for mind and body, is useful nutritional bars Mick. Article 42 grams hidden beneath the glaze and delicious jelly, or dried fruits and whole nuts - a real treat, encouragement and energy reserve for any life stage."

So there you have it. This bar is supposed to give you energy for the mind and body, at any life stage. Personally I'd rather have a Snickers!

Price: Around the 50p mark.
Nutritional facts/ingredients: Contains apple, apricot, hazelnuts, raisins, dried dates, almonds, oats, dried banana, coconut ices and roasted sunflower seeds.
Company info: Laima are a Latvian company and "one of the few European producers where full production process from cocoa beans to chocolate is ensured". They recently celebrated their 140th anniversary. I've previously reviewed their "Christmas Chocolate" bar which you can check out here.