It’s been a long time since I had a Cote d’Or bar, and so when I was in my local Tesco and I saw three new bars, one of which was a Tesco only bar were on special offer, I decided to pick them all up. This is to me the most alluring of the three, and I’m in a milk chocolate mood, so let’s hope this satisfies my cravings.

So this nice looking cardboard box houses 100g of “smooth milk chocolate and caramelised almond pieces”. The picture on the front is of a square of chocolate with the Cote d’Or elephant emblazened on, and a few caramelised almonds. In the piece you can see that the almonds are obviously only little slivers, not that we expected anything different.

The almond pieces make up 12% of the bar, and there’s not too much more I can say expect for that this bar was actually made in Belgium and then shipped over for Kraft UK, who own Cote d’Or, so I guess that’s interesting. Let’s open this bar up.

So the box tears open easily at the back, you then have a nice silver foil wrapper to cut open, and there’s your bar. Now I didn’t do the snapping there, it did that for me as soon as I picked it up. As you can just about see, the underside is as usual littered with nuts, while the overside is the smooth Cote d’Or look, each pieces being seperated clearly and marked with the elephant stamp.

So what difference did caramelising the almonds make as opposed to roasting them? Well, for one thing they were already roasted and then caramelised, and doing so gives the bar less of an ordinary, I’ve-done-this-a-million-times-already nutty bar. I’m loath to call it a caramel taste but it’s definitely creamier, obviously slightly nutty but with a more relaxed taste. There’s no real kick to the bar and it’s almost as if by caramelising the almonds they’ve taken away some of their flavour.

This bar certainly satisfied my cravings, but the almonds were slightly lacking. I’d quite like to see a bar like this that tried to mix actual caramel with nuts, perhaps caramel pieces and almonds mixed together. The 100g bar has 560 calories, 7.6g Protein, 49.5g Carbohydrates (48.5g of which sugars) and 36.5g Fat (20g of which saturates).