I’ve been doing this gig for awhile now but never have I reviewed…sexy chocolate, or maybe it’s just sex chocolate, I really don’t know. At any rate, I was informed that Ann Summers had a sale on their online store and two of their chocolate products were reduced to just £1 each with free shipping, so I picked them both up. They arrived yesterday and I figured today I would review these chocolate rabbits.

The question you can see on the front of the tin these rabbits come in is pretty straight forward: ‘Better than sex?’ Well it’s my quest to find out. The top half of the tin has a woman holding a chocolate rabbit in her outstretched arm. The back of the tin is a little more plain, simply white text on a black background where they list the ingredients which are fairly simple, and at the bottom there’s a big message in capital letters reading ‘THIS IS AN ADULT PRODUCT’. Now I’m almost a little scared, when I open the tin will some sort of sex object pop out at me?

Well the answer is no. Instead there’s a plastic packet with all these dusty, scratched up chocolate rabbits inside. I opened the bag and poured them into the tin and they just about fit. Now I’ll be honest here, they look and smell terrible. Opening the bag up and seeing these all scuffed up and chipped is not a good first impression, and they just smell cheap.

That’s how they taste too. They taste like cheap Easter Egg chocolate that’s been sat in grandma’s cupboard for too long. Stale, tasteless, nothing but disappointing. I’m sorry Ann Summers, but back to the drawing board with this one. The only sex this is better than is sex with your aforementioned grandma, or with a cheap hooker who leaves you with an STD. Stay away.

I’ve previously reviewed the 12 piece Couture Box from Artisan du Chocolat, but when Forman & Field, a fine food (and more important, chocolate) mail order company, offered to send me a sample I couldn’t exactly turn down the opportunity to have a go at these again.

Now before you stop reading, Artisan du Chocolat produce 45 different flavours for these boxes and so this one is different to the one I had before. It’s nice to revisit and without any sort of guide on the flavours, trying to guess which is which. Also when ordering from their website, they do not add in Tobacco flavour unless requested…perhaps Forman & Field requested it on my behalf…

The packaging this came in was very good, even better than Artisan du Chocolat’s own if I remember correctly. Forman & Field packed it very carefully and with their own branded ice packs to keep the chocolates cool, it was a fantastic little touch.

So there’s our 12 chocolates, some with crazy patterns, some with little sprinklings of things, some very plain. Making my way from left to right, top to bottom (so starting from the top left) we have a hazelnut and dark chocolate ganache, it got me thinking that I don’t think I’ve ever had hazelnut with dark chocolate before in all the times I’ve had both, which is amazing in itself, and this chocolate was extremely good. Next was our tribal yellow chocolate, and I couldn’t place what the flavour was. Floral, again with a dark chocolate outer coating, it was creamy and almost nutty again, and then before I knew it it had melted in my mouth and was gone. Our last sprinkled bar in the top right was dark chocolate within dark chocolate, but still very sweet, and it hinted at other flavours, honey maybe, something was definitely balancing the bitter dark chocolate flavours.

The next row down, over on the left was a solid chocolate, it yielded like a caramel at just above room temperature, still holding its form but very easy to bite through. The taste was very subtle but it’s definitely caramel, I wish it hit a bit harder as it was very good. Next up was another dark chocolate within dark chocolate, except without any of the sweetness. I could not fathom what flavour I was eating, definitely floral, almost spicy in places, it was pleasant but I really don’t know what it was. Finally our yellow tribal chocolate almost broke apart in my hands, the shell cracked everywhere, this one just tasted like creamy ganache to me, I feel like I missed something with it.

The chocolates continue on like this, the tribal looking ones tend to be floral, I was never able to pinpoint any of their flavours, they all taste different and very good in their own way. Most of the others are far more delicate with their flavours except for the one at the end which was simply marzipan. It’s an interesting box, not something I see for personal consumption and I feel it’s something you should be sharing with at least one person or a great chocolate gift, half the fun is trying to see what each flavour is. The chocolates are just big enough for two bites, so I highly suggest sharing these with a significant other and enjoying each little chocolate while it lasts.

Obviously very similar to yesterday’s Milk & Hazelnuts bar, is today’s White & Hazelnuts Belgian Chocolate bar from Guylian. This review will be shorter because this bar is essentially the exact same thing, except with white rather than milk chocolate.

The box looks almost identical, and again there’s 14% hazelnuts in this bar. Some things I didn’t mention before were that this these bars are actually made in Belgium itself, and are also available in Australia and New Zealand according to the back of the box. Obviously I don’t know much about that myself but I’m sure some of my readers from Down Under will have seen these bars around.

Again the bar comes wrapped in some lovely gold, Guylian emblazoned gold foil. I decided to take a picture of how the bar looks when you open the foil this time, to show you just how many hazelnuts are packed in. There’s a lot! Flip the bar over and it looks just like the milk chocolate version, except of course, it’s white.

My problem with the milk version was that you could hardly taste the actual chocolate, the nuts were great, it was a delicious bar, but I know that Guylian make great quality chocolate and I wanted to taste it. Unfortunately that problem is with this one too. The bar is sweeter than the milk chocolate version, I’m sure that blindfolded I could tell which one was milk and which was white, but apart from that, it’s really very similar, you just can’t taste the chocolate.

It’s still a really good tasting bar, the hazelnuts are numerous and crunchy, but it’s a bit too thin, and not chocolatey enough, which is weird for a chocolate bar. Try either bar out, there’s not much of a difference between them, I don’t doubt you’ll enjoy them, provided you like hazelnuts.

A little while ago Guylian released two 100g chocolate bars in milk chocolate and white chocolate varieties. I’ve never seen them on any sort of special offer and so hadn’t been too tempted to pick them up, but I finally bit the bullet and paid £1.49 per bar at my local Sainsbury’s, and today we’ll take a look at the milk chocolate version.

It comes in quite a stylish, almost Japanese style cardboard box which I really like the look of. The box has a pull tab close to the bottom which then pulls the bottom of the box off. Alternatively the back of the pack can be torn off should you wish to just rip into the thing. The back of the box describes this as “Belgian milk chocolate with pieces of hazelnut (14%)” which isn’t necessarily new to me, but I’ve reviewed a few Guylian products in the past and they don’t disappoint, so the hope is that they’ve put their own unique touch on the classic hazelnut-milk chocolate combo.

The bar comes within a gold foil wrapper, and is actually turned the other way when you first open it. It’s full of tiny pieces of hazelnut and as you can quite clearly see, as soon as I put my fingers on it the prints stayed on, which isn’t something you see too often. The bar is very long but not too thick at all, though as I mentioned they still managed to cram a lot of hazelnuts in there, and the taste definitely matches that.

The bar is great tasting, with a really strong hazelnutty taste. The chocolate is masked a bit by the hazelnuts which is a shame but it’s still a really good bar. I’m not sure if this bar will last in the rather bloated market, but Guylian have a good reputation and this lives up to it, and I’d recommend this bar over a lot of similar bars.

I’ve seen the Bar of Plenty bars in my local supermarket for awhile now but haven’t been too tempted to pick them up, but I was happy to accept a sample from Cadbury themselves. This particular edition is limited to Morrisons stores only which is quite interesting, let’s delve in.

The bar looks quite small but weighs in a fairly hefty 140g. It sports the usual Dairy Milk purple theme, with a large picture of honey and pecans on the front. It also says ‘Charity Pack’ on the front, the reason for this is because 10p from every sale will go to Help the Hospices in conjunction with Morrisons’ Charity of the Year, which is a pretty cool idea.

I’m unsure of what Cadbury is going for with the Bar of Plenty brand, they already have sharing bars in the form of their regular Caramel, Turkish Delight, Crunchie, etc bars, so I assume that these are supposed to compete with higher end stuff such as Green & Black’s and Lindt. I’m not of the opinion that Cadbury are quite at that level and think of them as a complete middle of the road chocolate, but there’s nothing wrong with trying to branch out.

The bar is quite thick and chunky and you’d expect there to be big pieces of pecan, but this isn’t the case. Instead there are numerous slivers and little pieces, which was somewhat disappointing as I’m a big pecan fan and I’d have liked to see Cadbury give them the same treatment that they give their hazelnut bars, perhaps it’s a cost issue? Unfortunately this means that the bar is far more chocolatey than it should be, which is a weird thing to write, but it’s more plain than I was both expecting and hoping it would be.

Now don’t get me wrong, Cadbury’s chocolate is nice, I liked this bar quite a bit, but for an upmarket bar saying it has pecans, it didn’t have enough of a pecan taste for my liking. I’ve had bars with caramelised nuts in the past that have a real crunch to them and they’re delicious, but this didn’t have enough of that. When the bar melted slightly the pecan and honey came through a lot more though, so if your taste buds are similar to mine you might want to try eating this at room temperature or slightly warmer and letting it melt in your mouth.

At an RRP of £1.59 I’m not quite convinced on this one, it’s nice and it’s interested me enough to try the other bars in the near future, but I don’t think I’d buy this one again unless it was on sale. Again, keep in mind this is only available from Morrisons and I assume for a somewhat limited time, so if you do want to try this then make sure you’re shopping in the right place.

Maltesers Ice Cream have just launched an Ice Cream Forecaster application on Facebook that you can find right here. The app lets you know when the weather has hit ice cream eating highs and features a thermometer with the average UK temperature at that time of day, perfect for when you need a chocolate fix. You are able to share it on your wall to let your friends and fellow chocolate fans know when the time is right for Maltesers Ice Cream.

Cadbury recently brought their milk chocolate bars into the biscuit market, with these Turkish Delight biscuits, as well as Caramel and Crunchie biscuits. These are, according to the pack, ‘A delicious shortcake with a Turkish Delight flavoured jam, covered in milk chocolate’. I’m a big Turkish Delight fan so it’s nice to see Cadbury offer it in other forms, and it’ll be interesting to see how it is with shortcake.

The pack is standard Cadbury fare. It looks almost identical to their bars, with the dark purple Cadbury theme and the large amount of light purple for the Turkish Delight, as well as a picture of one of the biscuits. Honestly there’s not too much else to comment on in regards to appearance, Cadbury have their own distinct look and they stick to it, so let’s open the pack up.

Now as you can see we have a long plastic tray with eight biscuits within. Straight away you can tell that these biscuits can’t be shared round too much, there simply isn’t enough, as compared to the majority of other biscuits on the market. I broke one in half to show what it looks like within, and it yielded quite easily. The shortcake is soft but firm as it should be, and the Turkish Delight is thinner than in their regular chocolate bars, but there is less space for it to fill as the biscuits are fairly flat, as opposed to the chunky chocolate bars.

These do taste quite nice as you’d probably expect. It’s rare that Cadbury’s put a bad product on the market, the downside of this though is that it’s hardly anything new. It tastes very similar to a regular Cadbury’s Turkish Delight bar, except with a biscuit taste added in, that’s stating the obvious a bit because that’s exactly what these are, but it just doesn’t excite me. If you like Turkish Delight and you’re looking for something just a little bit different, give these a go. These are quite nice, Cadbury’s chocolate is good stuff and the Turkish Delight isn’t too sweet and has the traditional rose flavour.

2 days ago I received an email from Galaxy, or rather an agency acting on behalf of Galaxy, who asked me I wanted to sample a product they’re about to launch in stores. I’m a big fan of Galaxy chocolate so the opportunity couldn’t be turned down. I was sent some information sheets about the product – Galaxy Counters – which were supposedly around between the 1960s-1980s, so a bit before my time. They’re disc shaped pieces of Galaxy chocolate, and I suppose they’ve seen how well Cadbury did with the revival of the Wispa, so they’re going for a bit of nostalgia too.

After reading the blurb I sent an email back saying “hey, these sound a lot like Minstrels” and was told that basically, they are! Take away the hard outer shell of a Minstrel and this is what you get. It’s really quite a simple formula and from what I can tell is almost just a rebranding of Galaxy’s regular chocolate bars, they just take their milk chocolate and process them as discs instead of bars, and hey presto we have a new product on the market.

As you can see from the first picture, this came in a rather large bag, 130g to be exact. And just above are the contents of the bag. The packaging itself is quite nice, it’s the regular Galaxy look so it has various shades of brown with a simple image of what the Counters look like. As expected they do look like Minstrels without the shell, and are quite simply discs of milk chocolate.

As far as taste goes, they’re really very good. This isn’t surprising because, as I mentioned earlier, they’re Galaxy’s regular milk chocolate in disc form, so if you like a Galaxy bar then you’ll like this because it’s the same thing. Galaxy are going for a sharing vibe here, while you can get big versions of their bar it’s a little harder to share, here you can simply set a bag down and let people go nuts. These will have an RRP of £1.69 per bag and will be available from April.

Just yesterday I received a small parcel in the post containing this box of 6 truffles. I had been emailed the previous week offering a sample and was surprised to see this suddenly turn up.

Helsham Chocolates themselves are a new company, only established in 2009 by Helen Wood and Shami Doshi, and it was Shami herself who emailed me. Like a lot of modern companies they have their own Facebook and Twitter pages for you to follow which is quite nice. Everything they make is handmade, and their chocolate is sourced from Belgium. So that’s the company, how about the chocolate?

Well, the box is as plain as it looks. Just a small, nice quality brown box with a ribbon on. The ribbon can be slid off rather than undone (which is what I did), and inside, before we get to the chocolates, is a small piece of paper telling us what the truffles are exactly. None of them have specific names, instead a little, somewhat crude drawing of each and a short description of what each of them contains.

So rather than just read the descriptions, there are our chocolates and we’ll go from the top left hand corner in clockwise fashion. As you can see each chocolate comes in a little paper cup, and survived the trip from Leicester to Buckinghamshire quite well. The first truffle I had was a hazelnut covered in milk chocolate and rolled in caramelised hazelnut pieces, now I’ve had a lot of hazelnut in my time and rarely do companies caramelise their nuts, I don’t know if it’s expensive to do so or a design choice, but I really do think us consumers are losing out because caramelised nuts are delicious, and this is no exception. I don’t need to describe hazelnut flavour to any of you I’m sure, but caramelised hazelnuts are crispy and crunchy, with a slightly buttery flavour, and they turn what could have been something quite ordinary into a delicious treat.

Next up is a pink foil-wrapped truffle. This is raspberry pieces within milk chocolate ganache encrusted with sugar. It’s actually very pretty looking, the sugar makes the whole thing sparkle in a way I never thought chocolate would, but the taste I found was a little disappointing. Now don’t get me wrong, milk chocolate ganache and raspberry is delicious, and so was this, but I expected a little bit more raspberry. The balance seemed a little off, and maybe it was because I didn’t let it melt in my mouth, but I found this to be quite heavy on the chocolate flavour and a little light on the raspberry. Still a winner though.

Our next truffle got a little chipped in transit, and it’s a chocolate truffle with Irish Liqueur covered with chocolate shavings. I’m a big Irish Liqueur (read: Bailey’s) fan, and this was simply divine. It had that unmistakable creamy taste and with a slight lingering sensation that meant you knew you were eating something with some real booze. Definitely one of the best chocolates I’ve had in a long time, it was over too soon.

The bottom right truffle is white ganache with Sicilian lemons and Bombay Sapphire Gin, covered in dark vermicelli. Now as far as I’m aware vermicelli is a type of pasta so this one had me a bit confused, but I didn’t worry about it. Now like caramelised nuts, I do wonder why there aren’t really any mainstream chocolate bars with lemon, it’s a great combo. This is a delicious chocolate, light and creamy and tangy, just how it should be. I don’t know what they mean by dark vermicelli but it didn’t seem to effect anything, this was very nice.

Obviously our next truffle is white chocolate, and this is simply filled with strawberries. White chocolate and fruit go together very well, and this is certainly much more tangy and flavoursome than the raspberry chocolate. You can feel each piece of strawberry on your tongue as bursts of flavour, it’s just right.

Last up is a dark chocolate ganache, dusted with cocoa and filled with pieces of ginger. I’m not a fan of ginger or dark chocolate and honestly I didn’t like this one. I found it very dry, the cocoa dusting was quite heavy, certainly when combined with ginger and dark chocolate, and I found it all to be a bit overbearing and not very satisfying. You’ll know if this one would be to your liking or not prior to eating it.

Overall, a lovely selection. One last thing to add is that they really do use fresh ingredients, it says these chocolates must be eaten by 23 March to be at their best, which is nearly a week after I got them, and I would assume a week or two after they made them, which is a real sign of quality.

I was recently contacted by Dorset Cereals who were kind enough to send me a box of each of their new chocolatey cereals – Granola with Dark Chocolate and Coconut, and Granola with Dark Chocolate and Macadamia Nuts. I’ve had them both (straight from the box!) and they were both great, and in return I’ve agreed to pass on details of a competition being hosted on their website. If you click the picture above you will be in with a chance of winning a Jute Bag containing 3 boxes of each of the aforementioned cereals as well as a Dorset Cereals bowl.

10 of these can be won every month, so be sure to check back to be in with a chance. Alternatively you can click here to be taken to the website.