The last of my Kshocolât trio and the only one I wasn’t particularly excited about trying. Described as ‘mini nuggets of natural mint fondant encased in rich dark chocolate’, I’m not a particularly big fan of either dark chocolate or mint and so pairing them together doesn’t get my juices flowing in the same way that it may get other people’s.

There’s really not much else I can say about the box at this point, so see my previous two reviews if you want some in-depth analysis there, suffice it to say, it’s a little black box.

It’d be unfair to say I didn’t like these, but with the other two boxes, I could hardly put them down. These though, I found myself eating one or two and being done. They don’t do anything wrong, it’s a decent, peppermint fondant within some plain tasting dark chocolate, but it just didn’t do anything for me. It’s also quite easy to find mint-chocolate pairings in your local supermarkets and in my opinion it isn’t worth going out of your way for this one.

I’ve had chocolate covered coffee beans in the past and as a coffee lover I quite enjoy them, so I went into this one with some high hopes. Another part of Kshocolât’s ‘little black box collection’, these are described as being ‘whole Costa Rican peaberry coffee beans, roasted and encased in thick milk chocolate and dusted with cocoa powder’.

That’s quite a lot to fit onto the side of one of these tiny boxes, but Kshocolât just about managed it. It’s as minimalist in appearance as their Milk Chocolate Toffettes, and the box itself is pretty much identical.

The beans are quite small, about the size of my index fingernail, and they are as they say – a whole roasted coffee bean covered in chocolate, and then dusted with cocoa. I’ve eaten coffee beans by themselves and while I enjoy the taste I find them to be a little overbearing in richness and flavour, the chocolate here takes the edge off though, adding a much needed bit of sweetness. You get a decent amount here too and I have to say I really enjoyed them, if you’ve never tried eating coffee beans before then give these a go, the milk chocolate will help ease you in.

Kshocolât are a company that seem to have popped up in recent years but I’ve never had an opportunity to try any of their products for a few reasons. The first is because they are almost exclusively sold in John Lewis stores, which I never visit, and another is that I simply didn’t really know they existed. I have heard of them but for some reason they’ve never stuck in my head. Still, I had an opportunity to try these little milk chocolate Toffettes along with two other products of theirs and so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Part of their ‘little black box collection’, this is quite a stylish looking product. Toffee is typically fairly large and heavy though, so with such a small and light (40g/1.4oz) box I really wasn’t sure what to expect. They describe this as being ‘tiny pieces of toffee encased in luxurious milk chocolate’, and I was quite excited to give these a shot.

As you can see, these are definitely tiny pieces of toffee! Almost like tiny ball bearings, I wasn’t sure how much toffee there could really be here but they ended up surprising me. Eating these in big handfuls you get a great combination of toffee and milk chocolate, and while the texture of the toffee seemed slightly off in that it was almost crunchy (I prefer it to be quite soft), I did still really enjoy these.

Linden Lady Chocolates are a company I’ve not heard of before, and a company with a website that has nothing on it except an image, so it’s hard to get some information on them, but these were bought through House of Frasier. They come in a nice looking clear, plastic box with a ribbon attached, but apart from that there’s unsurprisingly not too much info given.

Within the box are medium sized, thin chocolate discs – dark, milk and white, with an almond, hazelnut, walnut and raisin pressed into each disc. There are four of each disc and so you get a decent amount of chocolate here for your money. I’m sure they would normally look quite pretty but unfortunately they got a bit bashed in transit as you’d expect, and so there were bits of nut and chocolate dust around the box as well as a few nuts that had fallen off their discs and were sitting at the bottom of the box.

Each disc is identical except for the chocolate itself, and I felt that the milk chocolate one was the best. The dark chocolate was just a little too bitter and plain and the nuts didn’t add any sweetness, and the white chocolate was a little too sweet. They are very nice though, and they mainly taste of walnuts as you will see from the picture they are far bigger than the other nuts involved. For the right price these are a decent take on the fruit and nut brand and it’s nice to have dark, milk and white chocolate, but you may find these difficult to source.

Nestlé’s Dairy Box has always struck me as a very middle of the road box of chocolates, never really tempting and hence it’s a little unsurprising that up to now I’d never actually reviewed them up until now. Nestlé’s answer to Cadbury’s Milk Tray, this is a 200g box consisted solely of milk chocolates with various fillings.

There are ten varieties of chocolates, with the box containing two of each type. Three of them are almond which is a little boring, and there is also a hazelnut chocolate and a praline chocolate (with chopped almonds in), so half your box contains nuts. The other half is also a little unremarkable – caramel, two fruits (orange and raspberry) and two truffles.

The chocolates themselves actually look quite nice, though clearly they’re all made identically in a factory. The Caramel Creme was quite nice, I was expecting runny caramel but it was instead almost a thick truffle with a caramel taste. The others were nice, but as someone who’s been spoiled by great chocolate over the years I found them to just be a little plain.

For the price though (just £1.99 for the box) this is a great deal, and would make an inexpensive gift or something for a night in with a loved one, just don’t expect anything you haven’t had before.

To celebrate its favourite season, Cadbury Hot Chocolate has turned the ‘99’ ice cream on its head to introduce the ‘66’, a hot chocolate winter warmer topped with cream, instead of ice cream topped with chocolate – and served in a mug instead of a cone.

Throughout December and January, an ice cream van magically transformed to hand out warm mugs of hot chocolate will tour the UK to offer people free warm mugs of Cadbury ‘66’.

Richard Holden, Head of Marketing for Cadbury Hot Chocolate says, “What better way to celebrate this time of year than to transform a traditional summer favourite into a wonderful winter drink and share it with people across the country. We really hope people enjoy the Cadbury ‘66’ and that it proves to be as much of a classic as its summer sister.”

People can win the chance for the van visit their street and bring some winter cheer and yummy ‘66’s for them and their neighbours. People keen for a van visit should visit www.facebook.com/CadburyHotChocolate to register their details. The van will be stopping in the following locations:

Leeds – Monday, 6 December
Manchester – Friday, 10 December
Cardiff – Friday, 17 December
Glasgow – Friday, 7 January
Birmingham – Friday, 14 January
London – Friday, 21 January

So if you live in one of the aforementioned cities and fancy a free cup of hot chocolate, hop on over to Facebook and check out all the details there. Stay warm!

Claire from Berry Scrumptious was recently kind enough to send me one of her Mulled Berry chocolate bars which I was more than happy to receive and taste for her. I hadn’t looked at the bar on the website before it arrived so I was a bit surprised to see that it’s not your standard chocolate bar.

Instead as you can see it’s pre-snapped. The cynical part of me says that this means they can get away with the bars being a bit smaller than what most people are used to (these weigh only 85g) but I’m sure it’s more to do with saving costs on paper and foil, plus it looks a little bit different and that’s not a bad thing. You can see in the picture that there’s stuff in this bar. Freeze dried raspberries and blueberries, orange, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves to be precise. Quite a lot going on!

I’m not sure of their cooking methods but that’s the bar when it’s all out of the packet, and the whole thing is very uneven with ripples all over and odd shapes abound. Again it’s different, I actually really enjoy the look as it gives it a homegrown style that most bars don’t have. Galaxy bars may be very pretty to look at but there’s an artistic quality here that I dig. The bar also has a lot of different smells coming from it! Orange was what I picked up on mostly but I knew that the freezedried raspberries and blueberries were waiting to burst with flavour once bitten.

And I wasn’t wrong either. The bar has a very satisfying snap to it, and this was at room temperature (though arguably a very cold November room temperature), and there’s a bit of crisp in the bar itself with the fruit within. Being freezedried the contents aren’t chewy like big raisins, instead they tend to announce their presence suddenly with a small explosion of flavour before disappearing down one’s throat with the chocolate they’re a part of. What can I say, it’s really a very pleasant bar.

With a lingering taste of orange I can’t help but wonder what other flavour is still on my tongue. I honestly don’t know if it’s the cloves or the nutmeg, possibly the cinnamon, no doubt they’ve all come together to wish me a fond farewell. 85g of chocolate goes too quickly and before I know it the bag is empty and the pretty little ribbon goes into the bin too. Berry Scrumptious do a lot more chocolate, obviously berry (of the rasp and straw variety) based and it’s certainly whet my appetite for more. If you’re interested yourself you can currently get yourself some free delivery if you spend £30 or more when you enter FREEDEL10 at the checkout (ending 22nd December). It definitely has my recommendation.

It’s been a long time since I had a Galaxy bar and so I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into my local Sainsbury earlier today and saw this on the shelves, and on promotion too! Here we have a milk chocolate bar with orange and shortcake biscuit pieces within.

I’ve had a few Galaxy bars in the past and I’m sure most of my British readers have too, so I had a good idea about how this would both look and taste before I even had it. For those of you who don’t, I’ll tell you how Galaxy describe the bar on the back of the wrapper: ‘Soft orange pieces and luxurious shortcake covered in smooth Galaxy chocolate’. The bar is 90% milk chocolate, with 5% orange pieces and 5% shortcake which is a fair amount.

Surprisingly when I opened the wrapper my room wasn’t suddenly filled with the smell of oranges, this is very subtle in smell. In fact if you smell the bar up close it just smells like chocolate with very little hints of orange which is quite unusual but not a bad thing at all. This is how the bar tastes too, it’s very chocolatey with small hints of orange whenever you hit a piece, and with a lot of crunch from the shortcake biscuit. It’s a break away from the norm and a welcome one, there are a lot of bars which are too eager to hit you in the taste buds with whatever flavour they are rather than concentrate on the quality of the chocolate, but Galaxy here have used their awesome milk chocolate and let the orange flavour last as an aftertaste.

After reviewing the Zingy Orange Matchmakers last week, here we have the second and currently only other Matchmakers edition on the market. Obviously these are identical to the orange Matchmakers except with a mint flavour, so we’ll skip past most of the description.

The box is a bit different, I get a 2 month free DVD rental with Empire Movie Club with this box. I’ll be sure to not take advantage of that, but that’s kinda how Matchmakers are advertised these days. You get some friends round, put on a DVD and pass round a box of Matchmakers. In my opinion the box isn’t really big enough to be passed round for very long, but I am a bit more of a pig than most people.

So I’ll keep things pretty short and sweet, we again have a 151g box of thin, chocolate sticks with mint flavoured boiled sugar pieces thrown into them. It’s definitely a cool mint, when I bit into one my mouth instantly cooled, and it’s almost a refreshing chocolate. Like the orange Matchmakers I was pleasantly surprised, I quite liked these, perhaps not quite as much as the orange flavour because I’m simply a bigger fan of orange than mint, but once again I’d recommend these if you see them on offer. At full price I’m not so sure but for £1 a box I really can’t complain.

I was quite surprised to find that before now I hadn’t actually reviewed Matchmakers from Nestlé before, despite them being a permanent fixture on supermarket shelves I guess they just never tempt me. I saw them at Sainsbury’s for £1 a box though and I thought that was a pretty fair price so picked up the two flavours they currently run and opted to go for the orange ones first.

Originally released in 1968 by Rowntree’s and given more brand awareness in 2003 by Nestlé, Matchmakers are basically long twigs of chocolate with boiled, flavoured sugar pieces within. You get a decent amount in the 151g box but for some reason they just don’t stand out to me too much. I’m not sure why they’re now part of the Quality Street range as well and what bearing that has on these, but on the back of the box they refer you to qualitystreet.co.uk.

They call these zingy orange and it’s a good title for them. These actually surprised me somewhat because they’re actually very nice. The chocolate is relatively ordinary but the orange is very sweet and tangy, the way it’s mixed with the sugar means it almost bursts with flavour in your mouth. For just one pound I was very impressed, though with an RRP of almost double that I’m not so sure. If you see them on offer and quite like orange flavoured chocolate then give these a go.