Wednesday 9 December 2015

Head To Head - Crunchie V Violet Crumble


My local Tesco have broadened their horizons and added one Australlian chocolate to its World Food aisle. Sadly it's not one of the crazy Cadbury (although I should be boycotting them for tax evasion and crimes against flavour) bars but Nestles version of the Cadbury Crunchie - Violet Crumble. 
It was expensive but I suppose it has travelled halfway round the world and it does weigh 10g more than a Crunchie.

Top Violet Crumble, Bottom Crunchie 

The bars look very similar from the outside with the rippled effect in the chocolate but the Violet Crumble is quite a bit darker. Even though I'm not really a Cadbury fan anymore, I only really eat it through habit or nostalgia, I still usually prefer it to most Nestle chocolates. I was very suprised to find (though thinking about it, I shouldn't have been) the Violet Crumble smelt a lot more like real chocolate than the Crunchie which just had a sugary sweet scent. 

Crunchie 

While the bars looked similar from the outside, the insides looked nothing alike, the Violet Crumble being a lighter, more compacted honeycomb. There would be no chance of mixing these up at all. 

Violet Crumble 

I started the head to head with the Crunchie, I needed to refresh my memory! It soon came flooding back - super sweet, super crunchy with the distinct Cadbury chocolate aftertaste. Eating the Violet Crumble afterwards was a massive disappointment. The centre has a completely different feel, the texture was just wrong, it started off hard and crisp but kind of ended up softer, not soft soft it is still honeycomb after all, but it doesn't stay as consistently crunchy. Honestly, it felt like a stale version of the Crunchie. 
Shock horror, the chocolate was nicer in the Crunchie too! I could clearly taste the chocolate, OK it was after the honeycomb had almost melted away but it was definitely chocolate. I barely noticed it at all in the Violet Crumble. There was one thing to be said about the Violet Crumble which was an improvement on the Crunchie, and that was that it is nowhere near as sweet. Back in the day when Cadbury chocolate was actually chocolate not fatty chocolate flavoured sugar, the super sweet centre probably didn't impact too much on the overall bar but it seemed a total sugar overload against the quite plain tastes of the Violet Crumble. 
Even so, I couldn't help but compare the Violet Crumble to a supermarket own brand/cheap shop rip off of the Crunchie. The texture isn't quite how it supposed to be, there's not much in terms of actual flavour and even forgetting the Crunchie exists, it's just bland and boring. The one small silver lining is that less sweetness is an improvement, though I think I'd take the sugar just for some flavour.

Sorry Australia it's 
5/10  


A word of warning - don't try this at home! Wow my teeth ached afterwards and not because of the crunch! Although I couldn't taste the 33g of sugar in the Violet Crumble alone my teeth sure noticed it - they stung afterwards! 

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