Another of the bars I was sent from Oxford Ethical is this Austrian made ‘dark mountain milk chocolate filled with mango and Brazil nuts’. The ingredients are fairtrade certified and from controlled organic cultivation.

The wrapper is very retro looking and quite arty, not like something you’d see in the supermarket but in a specialist shop. The ingredients make for interesting reading, you’d expect to see sugar or chocolate at the top of the list, but no, instead ‘mango & mango mash (32%) tops it. Mango mash? I’m not sure if that sounds great or terrible, but it did make me laugh, I wonder if it’s like the monster mash.

Within the paper wrapper is a nice foil-paper wrapper, and within that is our bar. It looks very plain at first sight, it’s just a tablet style bar. It’s very greasy to the touch, and quite melty, and the taste is unlike anything I’ve ever had before.

The amount of mango in this bar is unreal. 32% is a lot, a heck of a lot of mango. It’s definitely mashed mangos, and they seem to be on a bed of Brazil nut paste. So basically we have bittersweet chocolate, and within is one layer of mango on top of one layer of Brazil Nuts. It’s quite thick, very fruity, and very tasty. I’ve never really had mango before and I’ve certainly never seen a bar use it anything like this before.

Zotter have created something special here, this is how a real fruit and nut bar should work. Screw throwing a few raisins and hazelnuts into a bar, let’s grind up some mangos and Brazil Nuts and stick a massive amount of it in. Good job Zotter, probably the best fruit and nut bar I’ve ever had.

Once again me and Oliver share an intimate moment. Another 52% dark chocolate bar, this one with candied orange pieces within the bar. It’s a little surprising that he went with this, as you’d have expected him to have coffee bean pieces in the espresso bar if he was going to do it for this bar, but whatever.

So the bar has 7% candied orange peel as well as orange flavour in the bar itself. Sounds nice and orangey. The wrapper is of course nice and plain, the only real thing setting his bars apart in terms of appearance being the actual text on the front of the bar.

Inside is our foil wrapper is…the chocolate bar! It’s the regular relatively thin chocolate that I have come to expect from Oli. You can also see where the candied orange sticks out from the bar in places, which is strangely quite nice.

And that about sums the bar up. The orange pieces, due to their candied nature, are a little bit crunchy and yet still soft, and they give off a lovely orange tang, The chocolate is ok, not too sweet or bitter, and it compliments the orange well. Overall pretty nice, and I’d probably take it over the coffee bar if I had to have either again, with the milk chocolate bar definitely being the loser overall.

Very similar to the Blakes Coconut bar, this is a 38% cocoa solids, 100% organic, fairtrade milk chocolate bar with a praline filling, despite this it has a different title to the coconut bar but hey ho. An interesting note is that it says on the wrapper is that this product is ’suitable for Coeliacs’, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bar mention that before but if you’re coeliac then I guess you’re in luck with this one.

Unfortunately though you’re going to be out of luck when it comes to the flavour. To call it bad would be a huge disservice, but to call this praline also seems to be odd, as I could hardly detect any. They say there are hazelnut pieces here but I couldn’t detect any, as it was also a praline paste. Unlike the coconut bar though, which had a lovely coconut taste, this was pretty much just milk chocolate.

Like I said, it wasn’t bad, I still enjoyed this, but it wasn’t what I signed up for. I’ve never had a praline bar that tasted less of praline before.

I recently had an email from the owner of Oxford Ethical, an online store based in Oxford who sell tea, coffee and of course, lovely chocolate. He sent me 4 bars which he personally recommended, and I had to go for coconut first. This is 38% cocoa solids milk chocolate, made up of 100% organic ingredients.

The bar also sports the fairtrade logo, so it puts Blakes in the same sort of category as Divine and Green and Black’s. The bar itself was made in Switzerland and they themselves are an Irish company, which is why I personally hadn’t heard of them before and had never seen any of their bars around either.

It looks nice, with a fairly plain wrapper. It’s made of a thick paper, and whilst you’d expect foil within, it’s instead a strange plastic wrapper, and inside that is the bar. It’s very, very soft at room temperature, to the point where the bar is sort of pulled apart rather than snapped.

There’s a large amount of coconut filling, but there’s no grain to the coconut at all, it’s more of a paste than anything else, despite the bar having 18% coconut flakes on the ingredients. This didn’t seem to affect the pretty great taste of the bar, it wasn’t overly sweet and it had a lovely authentic taste. Coconut fans looking for something nicer than a regular Bounty should look no further.

Once again me and my favourite German chocolatier, Oliver Kuhl (i.e. the only one I know by name, except for Mr Ritter) join forces again. I previously consumed his organic milk chocolate bar and found it to be completely devoid of flavour. Will this bar pack a punch or will he be limp wristed again?

The first difference between the two bars is that this uses dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate. 52% dark chocolate to be exact. It simply say it’s “with espresso”, and so consulting the ingredients shows it to have 9.5% espresso powder within the bar. It’s also fairly high up the ingredient list so to be fair on Oliver, it sounds like he’s tried to really pack some flavour into this. I guess he read my previous review, didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, dude.

The wrapper is still plain as hell. I guess that’s the look he’s going for? Anyway open the bastard up and inside we have a foil wrapper, open that up and BAM coffee smell all up in your nostrils. Actually not really, the bar seems to lack any real smell at all. Not the best first sign.

Take a bite out of it and the first thing you taste is a bit of dark chocolate, within a second or two though this is eradicated by the strong coffee taste. Definitely more espresso than capuccinno, this is a dark coffee taste without being too dark. The fact that the chocolate is only 52% works in its favour here, as anymore and it would have been far too bitter for my liking. The coffee is nice and strong without being overbearing, and is just the right kind of flavour.

It’s a smooth dark chocolate bar, the coffee is simply blended in, and overall it’s really good. I always prefer my coffee bars to be more creamy than dark, but this one got it in the middle, perhaps vearing towards the dark side a bit, and did it very well. I criticised Oliver in the past for lacking flavour but this one had plenty of it and what was here impressed me.

Choccies! Choc choc choali-oh wait, I’ve made that joke before. Ok, well, here’s a more regular toffee version of those lovely choccies I had before from Thorntons. For the uninitiated, this is praline, fudge, oats and toffee covered in milk chocolate, and it’s just as lovely as it sounds.

I still think the box looks kinda cheap, all of the boxes in this range do really, it’s a very small point but I’m not too fond of the design. There’s no faulting the execution though, 200g of bitesize pieces of lovelyness.

They taste oaty, they’re very soft and yield easily, with crunchy bits of toffee inside. The hazelnut doesn’t have much of a taste but there is a nutty taste to it in parts, and the chocolate is of the good, milky variety. Overall, these are delicious, not just nice, but really nice. If you can buy these then you should, if you like oats and warm flavours, this will just do it for you, there’s something here that isn’t in any other type of chocolate. Lovely stuff.

More 99p store wonders! This is a 125g box of chocolate truffles filled with a Cointreau cream filling. I do like Cointreau, or at least I liked it in that bar I had before.

So this is from Hungary, with Nestlé’s Hungarian office being in Budapest. The box looks pretty stylish, and I could see this selling for a lot more if it was manufactured here.

The box’s top flips open revealing a plastic tray with 10 of these little truffles in. They’re regular truffle size, and they look a little like Ferrero Rocher only without the hazelnuts. Inside the chocolate shell is, of course, the Cointreau cream filling, and it’s some seriously strong stuff. I was getting that burning feeling in the back of my throat and my nose when I ate them, as if I was practically drinking the stuff myself. I only ate one or two at a time to make sure I didn’t get drunk eating these.

Overall though, they were really delicious. Good quality chocolate with a powerful orange cream inside. For 99p these were an absolute steal and well worth getting quite a few more boxes. Even at double that price they’d still be a decent value, but don’t tell that to Nestlé.

We’ve had a 99p shop open in my town for awhile now that I’d yet to venture into because it makes me feel like a cheapskate, but I finally decided to, thinking there might be some obscure chocolate for me to buy. Boy was I right, and I picked up this massive 150g bar for only 59p.

The packaging is fairly simple, in fact even on the back there’s not much there. A small ingredients list, some Spanish text, an address and a website as well as a small list of nutritional ingredients. I went to their website and was surprised to see an English section, though their news section hadn’t been updated in nearly 2 years.

One thing that made me laugh a bit was the line “May contain traces of fruits of rind” on the back, traces of fruits of rind? Well it made me laugh anyway.

Now as you can see the bar is pretty huge, it looks pretty, and if you think it doesn’t look quite right it’s because it was broken in half. It has an interesting yet again quite plain design, and this is essentially just a milk chocolate bar. What separates it from others though is how creamy this is. It’s much creamier than an ordinary milk chocolate bar, and still carries a strong cocoa flavour as well. To be honest, it was downright delicious, and to think I got 150g of it for only 59p. If you can find this anywhere it’s well worth your time, I’ll certainly keep an eye out for more from Elgorriaga.

The last, and most delicious sounding, Seeds of Change bar. Long time readers will know I love coconut and I resent the fact that there are so few chocolate bars that utilise it. This will be the first time I’ve ever had good dark chocolate with coconut so it’ll be a new experience if nothing else.

Once again the coconut is bottom of the ingredients but it shouldn’t really matter (in fact ‘Natural flavor’ is below it but I have no idea what that is). Like all these bars it has 61% cocoa solids, and this bar ends up being more like the Mango bar than the Cherry bar.

“How’s that?”, you ask? Well it’s because of how balanced the flavours are. The chocolate isn’t bitter at all, and the coconut has such a strong flavour, it’s almost like eating a Bounty bar. It’s solid dark chocolate with little nibs of coconut dotted about it, but the coconut is plentiful and so it carries a lot of flavour. The dark chocolate can be tasted a bit but there was as powerful a coconut taste as I could have hoped for.

Overall this series of bars from Seeds of Change has been pretty good. I’m not the biggest dark chocolate fan but these aren’t the darkest of chocolates. They’re at the sort of level I like, and the Mango and Coconut bars were definitely to my liking. Obviously not living in America I don’t have access to the range but I can recommend them, and I will do so.

I do like a Mars bar from time to time. A nice bit of caramel and a huge bit of nougat, nothing major to write about with them but nice enough. So how does a Mars bar with no nougat and lots of caramel sound? Bit weird? Well, they made it in Canada so let’s have it.

I actually had two of these but they both came in pretty bad condition from Cybercandy, but I don’t think it affected the flavour too much. It’s the same length as a standard bar but is a bit less thick, obviously because of the lack of nougat.

There’s a lot of bloody caramel though, probably the most caramel filled chocolate bar I’ve ever had. The taste isn’t amazing as the caramel doesn’t have much flavour to it. It’s quite thick and sticky, but lacks a real defining flavour. All in all, it’s ok, I enjoyed it while it lasted but like so many bars I’ve had in the past, there was nothing to make me say “I really want to try this again”.