Marks & Spencer Chocolates

Marks & Spencer have released a number of new chocolates, they've been out for a while but I've been so distracted by the amazing looking Christmas products I missed them until now. There are a few new small, one portion bars and three 100g bars; A caramel filled milk chocolate, a bar made up of milk, dark and white chocolate and a milk 'bubbly' bar. 

I skipped the Bubbly, aerated bars don't give me enough of a chocolate hit to enjoy them and got myself one of each of the other two. 

Caramel Filled Milk Chocolate 

I find sometimes when caramel is included with chocolate, that all I can smell is the caramel but the sweet milky chocolate was all I noticed to begin with.

It looked good, still sectioned into easily snappable small squares but more interesting than a normal block. 

I managed to drop mine before I'd even opened it and this led to the discovery that the chocolate shell is quite thin - one of the corner squares completely shattered. 

Hidden inside each square is a thick pocket of caramel. The top half of the chocolate as I mentioned, is quite thin so although percentage wise there's a lot more chocolate than caramel, it didn't feel or taste like it. The caramel is delicious - smooth and sticky with a lovely rich caramel flavour. 

The chocolate was a bit of a pain to eat as it melted very quickly and combined with the thin, easily breakable texture, I made a total mess of my hands, face and clothes! Still, it's of a good quality - creamy with a strong chocolate flavour that combines with the sweet rich caramel and rounds it all off nicely. 

It's quite a sweet bar but the sugary sweetness is countered by the richness of the caramel and the creaminess of the chocolate. Good all round! 

7/10 

Milk, Dark & White Chocolate 

This was the bar that caught my eye initially. It's such a good idea and I'm not sure why it's not more popular, I know I've been stuck deciding between the three types of chocolate before! 

I like how it looks, if three differently coloured chocolates didn't grab your attention straight away then the weird way it's all sectioned out will. It made it hard to snap blocks off but I never planned on this lasting more than one sitting anyway. The bar didn't have a predominant scent - just a general chocolatey one, nothing too sweet and pretty tempting. 

The way it's sectioned meant it was near enough impossible to break a clean square of just one type of chocolate but I suppose that is the whole point of this bar. I managed to nibble corners off to try each flavour individually and was pleased with what I found. I managed to split my wrapper right through the ingredients but I'm 99% sure the dark chocolate says 50%. That's not quite dark enough for me normally but I appreciate lots of people don't like dark chocolate, still it has a decent dark chocolate flavour that actually seems a little richer and deeper than it probably should do against the white and milk. The white was quite sweet alone as I expected but it had a good flavour too, like a better quality Milky Bar. The milk chocolate was fine too, quite creamy and smooth - another nice quality chocolate. 

All three flavours blended well, even though they are in blocks it tasted as though they were all swirled together and all combinations of the three were delicious. I liked the idea of the bar but I thought that Marks & Spencers might have cut corners - essentially it's a bit of a novelty bar and most companies would just shove any old chocolate in there. I was very pleased to find this wasn't the case with M&S though and I was impressed with the quality of the chocolates they used. I'd be perfectly happy with any of the three alone but the mix of all three is one I think I'll go out of my way to buy again in the future. 

8/10