Kev's Snack Reviews

A couple of years back, I tried the Dairy Milk Hoppy Bunny bar and wasn't too impressed with it. Since then, it's remorphed into The Dairy Milk Spring Edition, with a new wrapper to reflect the Spring season rather than just Easter (I suspect this helps Cadbury squeeze some extra sales from it and justifies it sitting on shelves for longer!). The bar still looks the same, there's a white chocolate bunny design on each block. The bars are only 85p in Sainsbury's right now, which isn't too bad although once you taste the chocolate you'll kind of understand why - it's pretty rubbish, and doesn't even taste much like Dairy Milk. Booo! To be honest I only bought this bar as I had a reader request to review it, and I was curious to see if it had deteriorated further in quality since I tried it a few years back. Well, I don't think it's actually changed at all, it still tastes pretty bad in terms of quality. I don't know how on earth ...

There's a lot of cool and fancy Easter Eggies in the shops right now ( see my post on the best ones here ), you'll be spoilt for choice this Easter, seriously! My money is on the Tesco Finest Coconut Egg being the best of the bunch (see Hannah The Review Addict's Review ), but sadly I don't have much money to splash out willy nilly, so when I fancied an Easter Egg fix I decided to make do with this cheaper Tesco Finest White Chocolate & Coffee Egg which costs £3 for 100g. I loooove coffee, and I looooove white chocolate, so having the two combined in one egg sounded like coffee heaven. I tried Marks & Spencers Coffee Lovers Egg last year and that was pretty awesome, but this sounded potentially even better...? Unfortunately, it was nowhere near as good. Boo! It's described as "Belgian white chocolate egg with Finest Colombian coffee and Belgian milk chocolate decoration", but reading the ingredients (after I'd already bought and eaten...

Cosmic, dude!  There's a lot of weird, wacky, and beautiful Easter Eggs in the shops this year, moreso than any other Easter it seems. Tesco and M&S are leading the way in innovation, and for today's post I'm going to give a rundown of some of the most interesting ones I've seen so far. This is by no means an exhaustive list...please see my Instagram page for loads more! Exhibit A (shown above): the very pricey and beautiful Giant Cosmic Egg from Marks & Spencer. There's only 5000 of these in existence, which isn't surprising since they're £40 each! There's also this Saturn Egg with Marc De Champagne Chocolates from M&S, which resembles something Lady Gaga would put on her head... A chocolate planet!  There's loads of new flavours too; Tesco do a glorious White Chocolate Finest Coconut Egg (check out The Review Addicts Review here !) as well as flavours like Passionfruit, Pistachio, and a  Milkybar Cookies & Cream ...

It's been a while since I tried the White Magnum Signature chocolate bar last year, in fact I wasn't all that interested in these bars to be honest because they're pretty much just using the same chocolate that's on a Magnum and putting it in bar form. And as nice as it is, the chocolate isn't really the main attraction of a Magnum ice cream is it? Still, these bars can be found for a very reasonable £1 in WH Smiths so they're a good choice if you're on a budget and only want to pay a quid for some quality chocolate. I decided to go for the Dark Signature bar this time, which contains cocoa nibs as well as the dark chocolate used on dark Magnum ice creams. It tastes as you would expect; fairly rich semisweet dark chocolate with a bit of extra cocoa crunch. I wouldn't say the cocoa nibs enhanced the taste all that much, in fact I'm not fond of the texture of cocoa nibs so they didn't do much for me. But still this was a nice enough bar...

When I saw these "White chocolate caramel" coated rice cakes in Tesco's Free From section recently I got rather excited...not only are they gluten-free, but it sounded like they were topped with a potentially Caramac-like chocolate coating! Yay! Sadly it tasted nothing like Caramac. The rice cakes were tasty enough and the coating did liven them up a bit compared to regular rice cakes, but it wasn't quite the caramel hit I was hoping for. I tried eating the topping in isolation which was difficult, I had to nibble bits off the rice cake, and it just tasted of regular sweet white chocolate with a vague hint of caramel. Nice enough, but nothing majorly different from the regular white chocolate rice cakes from Nature's Store. Overall, if you're looking for something gluten-free, healthy but slightly naughty, these are worth a try but I'd recommend the White or Milk chocolate versions instead. 7 out of 10. 

Whilst in Tesco recently I noticed this Reese's bar that I've never seen before...I thought I'd tried everything from Reese's but this took me by surprise! Reading the description, it sounded like an amalgamation of Nestles Butterfinger and traditional Reese's peanut butter, which sounded like a potentially lethal, sweet and nutty combination!  And that's pretty much how it tasted; it's very reminiscent of Nestle Butterfinger with a hard crunchy interior, which is nice but a bit overly sweet. The peanut butter saved the day though, bringing that unmistakable Reese's peanut butter loveliness.  Overall, this is a nice enough bar, it's sweet, crunchy and nutty...but I think Reese's Nutrageous and the traditional Reese's cups are much better, this one is just a bit too sweet.  7 out of 10. 

Recently Guylian offered to send me a box of chocolates...not for me, for my Valentine of course...so I couldn't really refuse that! They arrived promptly by courier, and as soon as I gave them to my Valentine (before Valentine's Day of course...oh it's a tough job being a snacks reviewer!), before I knew it half the box had vanished. I think that's testament to just how tasty they are! They're "hazelnut praline filled chocolate hearts", and of course very similar to the Seashells Guylian are most well-known for. Rich Belgian chocolate, creamy hazelnut praline...what more could you want? Overall, if you're stuck for a Valentines gift this weekend you can't go far wrong with these Guylian chocolates. They're far nicer than Milk Tray or Dairy Box so do the right thing and go for these instead! You may be rewarded for it later... ;) 8.5 out of 10