Chocolate Archives - Page 5 of 8

July 26, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Cadbury Burnt Almond Dark – Decent Dark Chocolate with Crunchy Almonds

Chocolate

If you’re looking for a chocolate bar without too many frills, Burnt Almond is right up your alley. Featuring a scant seven ingredients (which is impressively low for a mass market product like this), it’s just dark chocolate and toasted almonds. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

It’s quite tasty. Is the dark chocolate here going to blow anyone away? Not likely; it’s decent enough, but it lacks the complexity of better quality chocolates. Still, it gets the job done.

As you’d expect from a chocolate bar called “Burnt Almond,” the almonds are front and centre. The almond chunks are generous, and their very toasty flavour does a great job of balancing out the bar’s sweetness. They also add welcome pops of flavour that bring some interest to the somewhat one-note chocolate. And they’re nice and crunchy, which works quite well with the bar’s creaminess.

Manufactured by: Cadbury
Nutritional info (9 squares, 38 grams): 200 calories, 13 grams of fat (6 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat), 0 mg of cholesterol, 5 mg of sodium, 21 grams of carbohydrates, 2 gram of fibre, 18 grams of sugar, 3 grams of protein.
Ingredients: Dark chocolate (sugar, unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter, milk ingredients, soy lecithin, natural flavour), almonds.

July 22, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Hershey’s: Milk Chocolate, Peanuts & Reese’s Pieces – Candy Crammed into Middling Chocolate

Chocolate

Hershey sure loves to cram things into a Reese product, or cram Reese products into things. I’ve already reviewed Reese Outrageous! Stuffed with Pieces and Reese’s Stuffed with Crunchy Cookie, and now here’s a Hershey chocolate bar stuffed with Reese’s Pieces.

Hershey’s chocolate has a pretty unmistakable flavour. It’s quite sweet, and it has a mild but distinctive sour tang that may or not share chemical properties with vomit (no, really). It’s certainly not my favourite, but if it’s the only chocolate around, yeah, sure, I’ll eat it.

The problem here is the addition of Reese’s Pieces. That sounds delightful (Reese’s Pieces are delicious, after all), but in practice it’s a bit much. Hershey chocolate is very, very sweet; so are Reese’s Pieces. Combine the two with nothing to balance them out (the tiny peanut bits are barely even noticeable and definitely do not perform this function) and you’ve got a recipe for sweetness overload.

The texture wasn’t great either. I don’t know if it was the addition of the chunks or if Hershey chocolate is always like that (it’s been a while), but the chocolate wasn’t particularly creamy. It’s actually pretty grainy.

Manufactured by: Hershey
Nutritional info (1 bar, 43 g): 220 calories, 12 g of fat (8 g of saturated fat, 0 g of trans fat), 5 mg of cholesterol, 55 mg of sodium, 27 g of carbohydrates, 1 g of fibre, 25 g of sugar, 3 g of protein.
Ingredients: Milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, skim milk, milk fat, lecithin (soy), salt, natural flavor), sugar, peanuts, partially defatted peanuts, hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm kernel oil, soybean oil), contains 2% or less of corn syrup solids, dextrose, palm kernel oil, corn syrup, artificial color (yellow 6 lake, yellow 5 lake, red 40 lake, blue 1 lake), cornstarch, salt; confectioner’s glaze, lecithin (soy), modified cornstarch, carnauba wax, vanillin, artificial flavor.

July 15, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Crunch – New and Not-So-Improved

Candy Bars, Chocolate

You may not realize this, but you couldn’t buy Crunch for a little while; in 2018, Nestle sold Crunch to Ferrero, who pulled it off the shelves so that they could “reformulate” it.

Well, it’s back, and either I’m remembering Crunch being better than it was, or it’s gone down in quality. Which is weird; you’d think the jump from Nestle to Ferrero (the makers of Nutella, Ferrero Rocher, and many other delicious things) would be a clear upgrade. Alas.

Still, it’s not bad. It’s also not “good” per se; the chocolate is fairly bottom-of-the-barrel, with a generic sweetness and not a whole lot going on in the flavour department, and even the crispy rice is a bit more anemic than you’d expect (it’s mildly crispy, but the texture isn’t quite there).

Also, this is purely psychological, but I miss the old design of the bar, with the big embossed “Crunch” lettering. The new segmented bar is boring in comparison.

And yet… I mostly enjoyed it. The chocolate has a nice creaminess, and while the rice doesn’t bring the assertive crunch you’re looking for in a bar called Crunch, it still has enough of that creamy/crispy contrast to be satisfying. If I didn’t have nostalgia for the old Crunch bar my opinion on this would probably be a bit lower, but I do, so here we are. I didn’t particularly like it at first, but it (mostly) grew on me.

Manufactured by: Ferrero
Nutritional info (1 bar, 43.9 grams): 230 calories, 12 grams of fat (8 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat), 5 mg of cholesterol, 60 mg of sodium, 29 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fibre, 24 grams of sugar, 2 grams of protein.
Ingredients: milk chocolate (sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, nonfat milk, milkfat, lactose, soy lecithin, natural flavour), crisped rice (rice flour, sugar, barley malt, salt).

June 14, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Ritter Sport: Butter Biscuit and Chocolate Creme – Tasty Cookie, Mediocre Chocolate

Chocolate

I recently reviewed the coconut variety of Ritter Sport, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was under the impression that Ritter Sport had gone downhill, but eating that made me question myself. Maybe I’m wrong about Ritter Sport, and by extension, my entire life??

I figured I should probably try a different flavour to figure out what’s what.

Thankfully, it looks like my existential panic can stop (for now), because the Butter Biscuit and Chocolate Creme variety was okay at best.

The main issue is the chocolate itself. I noted in the coconut review that the chocolate flavour was a bit too mild, and that issue is even worse here. The flavour is all generic sweetness. It’s not outright unpleasant, but it’s nothing anyone is going to get too excited about.

The cookie is nice. It’s got a good amount of crunch and a decent buttery flavour. But it doesn’t go all the way to the edges of the bar. Which means that while the middle pieces — which feature cookie all the way through — have a good balance of creamy and crunchy, the edge pieces are a bit overwhelmed by the middling chocolate.

Manufactured by: Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG
Nutritional info (6 pieces, 38 grams): 210 calories, 13 grams of fat (8 grams of saturated fat, 0.1 grams of trans fat), 5 mg cholesterol, 50 mg of sodium, 22 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fibre, 18 grams of sugar, 2 grams of protein.
Ingredients: sugar, palm fat, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, wheat flour, lactose, whole milk powder (6%), skim milk powder, cream powder, butter fat, butter (1%), soy lecithin, wheat starch, glucose-fructose, salt, whey powder.

May 24, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Les Reclettes de L’Atalier: Raisins, Almonds & Hazelnuts – Creamy, Crunchy, and Chewy

Candy Bars, Chocolate

You know that a company is trying very hard to make their candy seem gourmet when they pull out the French. Les Reclettes de L’Atalier; oh la la. Well that must be fancy.

Aside from the pretentious name, this is basically a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar, but with the addition of hazelnuts.

It’s good (sorry — I mean c’est bon). If you like Fruit & Nut, it’s a safe bet you’ll like this; the flavour of the chocolate is actually quite similar, and the addition of hazelnuts is a welcome one.

I mean, the chewy/crunchy/creamy combo is always going to be great, and the quality of the chocolate is pretty decent. It’s sweeter than it needs to be (the addition of more sweetness thanks to the raisins doesn’t help), but the nicely toasted nuts do a decent job of balancing it out. It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind, but if you’re looking for a decent quality piece of chocolate, you could certainly do worse.

Manufactured by: Nestle
Nutritional info (3 segments, 42 grams): 230 calories, 13 grams of fat (7 grams of saturated fat, 0.1 grams of trans fat), 10 mg of cholesterol, 25 mg of sodium, 23 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fibre, 21 grams of sugar, 4 grams of protein.
Ingredients: Sugar, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, raisins, almonds, hazelnuts, sunflower lecithin, vegetable oil, natural vanilla flavour.