Hell if I know what the title of this is. I found this in my local Tesco Express, just sitting near the checkouts and picked it up without even looking at it. Their impulse buy plan worked! After finally looking at the pack, the entire thing is in German, well, except for the ingredients on the back.

So these are crunchy biscuits with chocolate cream filling (14%), sprinkled with crispies (8.2%) and covered in milk chocolate (40%). Looking through the ingredients shows that these also have almonds and hazelnuts too, though they’re literally right at the bottom of the list. So let’s open this up.

When I first took those two pieces out of the bag, my reaction was “oh wow, they’re melting already”, but no it turns out these are actually just really greasy. To be honest, it’s really off putting, but I’ll gloss over it for now. So as you can see the puffed rice really sticks out of these things, they also have a biscuity base and the chocolate cream filling is between these two, with the entire thing then covered in milk chocolate.

So these have a biscuity, chocolatey taste. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the chocolate taste, I guess it’s chocolatey and creamy, but I think it was quite buttery as well, which would explain the greasiness and, after examining the ingredients again, also explain the butter oil they use.

So yeah, these are actually really good. I can see myself buying them on impulse again. Not for everyone what with their greasy feel, and slightly buttery taste might be off putting, but I enjoyed them. I certainly finished the bag wanting more, which is always a good sign. Worth a look if you can find them.

So we’ve had milk chocolate Rocky Road, white chocolate Strawberries & Cream, and now dark chocolate Chilli & Orange. I didn’t actually plan that out but it works well. This is a 72% cocoa solids dark chocolate bar, with chilli and orange blended in.

Whoa wait, what’s this? Two slabs now in the same pack? What’s going on here then? Well I guess they learned that having dark chocolate in those huge slabs was a bad idea and so they split it up, so we now have two 50g slabs and frankly this should be much easier to eat than the previous beast.

As you can see the bars are really bloody dark. They have a very polished look about them but they’re not without their scuffs and scrapes. Despite the fact I received these at the same time as my other bars, the expiration date was actually three months longer than those bars as well, just thought I’d let you know.

So let’s get to the flavour. Well, orange is definitely there, the bar has a very good balance between the orange and dark chocolate flavours. Despite being 72% cocoa solids it’s really not that bad at all. The orange is a good, deep flavour, completely unlike Terry’s or what have you. The chilli on the other hand is a bit of a disappointment. Now granted I dump tabasco sauce on everything (I almost put some on this bar), but I wasn’t able to taste it here at all. From time to time when it melted there was a small tingly sensation, but nothing more than that.

Overall it’s a good bar. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and to a good standard. The only negativity is the lack of kick with the chilli, and that it felt a little gimmicky, but other than that everything was pretty darn nice.

A chocolate fusion. With the sweet tartness of the strawberries and the gentleness of the cream, this is a classic British dessert. This is a pure white chocolate bar shot through with ripples of strawberry smoothie. Yum.

It uses freeze-dried strawberries, and these are frappéd together with white chocolate. Now this is the same format as Friday’s Rocky Road bar, and so the fear is that we’ll have a big ol’ 100g slab of white chocolate with little to no strawberry taste. Granted though this is much less busy than the other bar so fingers crossed.

The box is relatively plain. It’s pink, no surprise there, looks exactly the same shape and whatnot as Friday’s, okey dokey. Hotel Chocolat are extremely proud of being a British company, and seem to be pushing that a little bit. With a British flag, a message about them being British and…wait, actually that’s about it. Where was I going with that?

Whoa, baby, whoa. Look at that. What a stunning bar. Even if the taste is disappointing the look of this bar is impressive enough to make me love it. So we have a half white, half pink slab of chocolate, with freeze dried strawberries thrown onto it. I’m sure the white and pink colours are just for show, but there’s only one way to find out.

Ok, so freeze-dried strawberries when sliced are…weird. They felt mushy and soft, and despite their tangy taste I hate the texture, so my opinion on them is divided. The white chocolate is nice enough, it’s quite ordinary really but it didn’t kill my teeth so that’s a good thing. The balance was actually fairly decent, a bit more chocolatey than strawberry…ey with the taste but each time my tongue touched a strawberry I had an instant tangy, fruity hit that overrode everything.

Overall, I really liked this. It’s a big chunky bar, not a massive amount of flavour but it beats Divine’s bar (sorry guys), though at £4 or so I just cannot recommend this.

A milk chocolate Rocky Road bar with 40% cocoa, in a lovely little purple box. There’s a whole lot of description on the front which you can’t see, but basically it’s 100g of milk chocolate with chocolate chip cookie and puffed rice added for texture, and they call it one of their most popular creations. Yum.

More blurb on the back. Supposedly it’s perfect with a cup of coffee, but I had lemonade to accompany this. With their house 40% milk chocolate. They also mention there being butter almond and chocolate chip cookie pieces, and chunks of white chocolate. Sounds freaking delicious, and sickly. I can’t wait!

So I finally open the box up, and in it is a little black wrapper. Inside that is…this…BEAST! What a freaking monster. This is the size and shape of all their 100g bars, but on the underside is the giant cookie piece where you can see chocolate chips inside it, a massive amount of puffed rice and huge chunks of white chocolate. It looks as good as it sounds.

The taste is actually…a little bit…eh. Like yesterday, because of the way the bar is, there’s so much thick milk chocolate that it dominates the bar. The cookie and puffed rice are tasteless, they mention it’s just for texture but frankly it’s just not worth it. The white chocolate is also tastless, it adds a slight bit of sweetness to the bar but there’s no taste. The whole thing lacks taste! It’s just milk chocolate and then there’s a bit of an aftertaste from the puffed rice.

Ugh, what a disappointment. These slabs really need to be worked on, I’m sensing a pattern here, and I have two more to go.

100g of thick, 72% dark chocolate with whole almonds scattered throughout. The almonds are roasted, ya know, if you care. “Roasted almonds and chocolate are made for each other”. Well, if anyone would know, Hotel Chocolat would.

So these bars look tiny, but they’re bloody thick. That has its ups and downs, on the up it means they can use whole almonds, on the down it means when you take a chunk of this, there’s a lot of bitter dark chocolate in your mouth, and because it’s so small there isn’t a lot of space for the almonds.

And there’s the crux of the matter really. The chocolate-almond combo isn’t much to my liking. Because I’m not the biggest dark chocolate fan, to keep me interested in this bar, there needed to be a nice amount of almonds, but I didn’t think there were. So sometimes I had a big mouthful of dark chocolate which isn’t really appreciated.

I guess if you’re a dark chocolate fan you’d have more fun with this than I did, but it wasn’t really for me.

Yeah, it’s not a Ritter Sport bar, it’s a Ritter Sport box! It’s been awhile since I took pictures of my chocolate and this was a perfect opportunity to do so. This is a lovely little box with six flavours of Ritter Sport cubes inside - Mandel Split, Cappuccino, Crocant, Caramel Crisp, Creme Coco and Edelnugat.

So I’ve had the Edelnugat before, and the Creme Coco I think is the coconut one I had yesterday. The others sound interesting, Cappuccino is always a favourite of mine. Mandel is almond so an almond split? Definitely interesting…don’t know what Crocant is and Caramel Crisp speaks for itself. As you can see the box is quite purdy, it’s got a bunch of tabs and openings on it, let’s see how you do this…

Well that was hard to take a picture of. Anyway the box is chock full of those little cubes mentioned, and there’s a good variety of them all. Mandel Split is indeed very almondy, with a thick paste in the middle as well as little fragments of almond. The chocolate comes through more than the almond though, weird, but nice. Cappuccino is an odd one. I guess it tastes like a cappuccino, only a very chocolatey one, so it’s more of a mocha, which isn’t bad but it has a pretty strange taste to it. Not bad, not great, just not what I expected. Crocant has puffed rice in the middle, it tastes a bit darker than the normal Ritter too. Relatively plain, again not bad but not great.

Caramel Crisp is…whoa, totally unexpected. It’s got the paste stuff that most Ritter Sport bars use, expect it’s caramel flavoured and it has crispy pieces in too. The caramel tastes different to our caramel, not sure how to explain it, but it’s absolutely delicious, and this is coming from someone who’s thoroughly sick and tired of caramel and milk chocolate bars. Creme Coco is…well, see yesterday, and same goes for Edelnugat, see the earlier review.

Overall, a nice taster box of various Ritter Sport bars. This introduced some new flavours to me, some of which were really good and others which were…different. Of you want a whole bunch of Ritter at once, these are well worth your time.

My final Ritter Sport bar review. Ritter Sport Cocos mit Cocosflocker aus Sumatra. So a coconut Ritter Sport here according to the picture, which shows a chunk of Ritter Sport with a thick white filling, and a picture of half a coconut.

I’m a huge coconut lover so I can only hope this tastes good. The wrapper is a grey colour, bit odd considering most coconut wrappers go for a more exotic theme but there we go. Let’s open this baby up.

Opening it up and you’re hit with a whiff of sweet coconut. Break off a piece and you find that the bar is extremely soft and melty. The coconut breaks off all too easily, as soft and yielding as the chocolate. The chocolate feels incredibly greasy, I guess the coconut is to blame for that. The coconut looks a lot more solid and compact than other coconut bars, it’s not too moist but is moist enough to mix well with the chocolate.

Overall, it’s absolutely delicious. A really nice, soft coconut bar, the only downside is how greasy it feels, but it’s a fairly minor complaint. Coconut fans should really check this one out.

The Olympics may have been and gone but with my package of Japanese Kit Kats and Pocky taking a little while to arrive, I’ve only just been able to review this. Here we have an Olympic themed Kit Kat to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, also in gold theme of course because the Japanese are such world renowned athletes.

Basically this is just an ordinary milk chocolate Kit Kat but with a palette swap, Kit Kat means “good luck” or something similar in Japan so I guess this all kinda plays off that. In the end though this is just more awesome limited edition stuff that the Japanese get and that us boring British people never do. ;_;

And so inside our lovely little cardboard box are two of these shiny, gold plastic wrappers. Each wrapper is filled with two Kit Kat sticks which are regular size. And just to confirm, they are indeed milk chocolate.

The taste is a little bit different from a British Kit Kat. It’s less creamy and the wafer seems to have a bit of a stronger flavour. It’s nothing THAT noticeable but it’s quite interesting to see how it’s ever so slightly different in Japan. I prefer it to the American version at any rate.

Per 2 fingers this has 109 calories, 1.3g Protein, 12.6g Carbohydrates and 5.9g Fat. If you’re looking to import this for whatever reason, you’ll be wanting to get on with it sharpish, as these are no longer being made what with the Olympics being over.

The woman who I spoke to with regards to getting these Dairy Milk samples told me that the Apricot bar was her pick of the two. I wasn’t sure I would agree with her as I’m not the biggest fan of apricots and quite frankly the Cranberry bar sounded nicer. After eating that though, I’ve got to say I’m hoping the apricot bar is better otherwise disappointment will loom its ugly head.

So this is again a 200g milk chocolate bar except now we have big pieces of apricot as well as “crunchy crumble pieces”, I’m not really sure what they are but they’re made up of wheat flour, wholemeal flour and other random things. Either way it gives the whole fruit and nut experience, with soft and crunchy. The packaging again is quite nice, orange and yellow theme is pretty, I like it.

And there’s our bar. Once again it doesn’t look huge, but because of how thick it is…well, it is 200g. One thing I really like about this bar is that you can actually taste the fruit! It surprised me that when I bit into an apricot I could taste it. A shocking development, and the crunchy crumble pieces can be tasted too…kinda. They don’t carry the same taste as nuts but register about the same as the granola. The apricots are tangy and sweet, and just give the bar the fruity taste that I’ve always wanted it to have.

Overall, I’m impressed. It’s a nice bar, I enjoyed it. It’s still not fantastic but that’s just fruit and nut in general, but I’d definitely recommend this over the slightly unimpressive cranberry bar. If you’re a fruit and nut fan then you should check this out, if not then there’s nothing really here for you.

I figured I should put my advance release of these two bars to good use by actually reviewing them before you, the general public, got to taste these, also it makes me sound like a VIP or something which doesn’t happen often. This and the Apricot Crunch bar are being released in order to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Fruit & Nut bar, and hence we have “fancy” bars “designed to tickle a new generation of taste buds.” A choxology team (best job title ever) with the help of ’super’ tasters (people with the special ability to detect very small differences between tastes) worked to create these bars. How about that for some awesome sounding PR?

So I covered the release of these two bars (apricot crumble crunch review coming tomorrow) and Cadbury’s PR team emailed me and then sent me out the two 200g BEASTS that these are. This particular bar uses the standard Dairy Milk chocolate only they threw in sweetened dried cranberries and granola in. One thing I like is the lack of buzzwords on this bar, expecting words such as “JUICY“, “RIPE” and “CRUNCHY“, they just let the bar speak for itself.

The wrapper feels different to normal, it’s plastic but feels almost holographic or something, hard to describe but it’s pretty cool. I guess we may as well open this up and there’s not too much else to comment on.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t look like a 200g bar, but the chunks are so thick that it really is. The bar is filled with big, red cranberries and little pieces of crunchy granola. As expected, the cranberries don’t have much of a taste but provide the soft, chewy texture that fruit always provides in these kind of bars. The granola sometimes has a flavour, whilst nothing like the usual nuts in this bar, crunching down on a piece does sometimes produce a granola-like flavour which is really nice, though it’s rare.

So how is it? Well, it’s ok. I’ve never been the biggest fruit and nut fan as I find it to be a little boring, and to be quite honest that’s what this bar is. Not unpleasant by any means, but just not particularly exciting, I can’t see myself being tempted by this if I were to see it in the shops. I assume these two bars will be limited editions because this one, at least, doesn’t really add a lot to the fruit and nut market.