Battle of the Buttons.. Nestle V Cadbury

I like white chocolate buttons, I like milk chocolate buttons. I like Milkybar buttons, I like Cadbury buttons. 

But which is better? There's only one way to find out...

You wait forever for a bag of mixed buttons and two come along at once! First up -

 Nestle Milkybar Giant Buttons Milkshake Mix Up. 

A mix of giant white chocolate buttons and giant chocolate milkshake flavour buttons. 

I was pleased to find a fair mix of both flavours in the bag and wasn't too surprised at the overwhelming sweetness that I could smell, after all they might not be exclusively Milkybar buttons but there's still enough of them in there. 

The white chocolate buttons are standard Milkybar; creamy, very sweet with the typical and familiar Milkybar flavour. Not really what I'd want to eat all the time but I have a soft spot for it all the same. 

The "chocolate milkshake" buttons are a little weird. Note that they aren't actually chocolate but rather chocolate milkshake flavoured... Visibly they aren't milk chocolate with a lighter almost creamier colour. They don't taste like milk chocolate and they don't taste like white chocolate but they don't really taste like a milkshake either! I don't know, but they aren't something I think I'd want to eat a whole bag of. 

A mouthful of both doesn't improve on the milkshake aspect, both can be tasted but the strong Milkybar buttons are the greater flavour and just stopped short of being all I could taste. 

Rating:

They're O.K. The chocolate milkshake was a bit of a fail, I'd have preferred Nestle to have just used an actual chocolate button - it probably would have created more of a milkshake flavour paired with the Milkybar. That said, there's something about Milkybar buttons, I never particularly crave them and sure, they burn my throat but they're super nostalgic and they make me happy while I'm eating them! 

6/10

Next in the ring -

Cadbury Dairy Milk Mixed Buttons

I know I've been swearing off Cadbury and going back on that a lot lately but I can say I've never properly slagged off my beloved Cadbury Buttons. They might not be up to much in the flavour stakes as of late but that's my childhood right there! 

Thanks to the new Dairy Milk Mixed Buttons bag, never again will I have to buy individual bags of each and mix them together. Lazy me is very pleased! 

Normally Cadbury Buttons in a sharing sized bag are the Giant Buttons but as there doesn't seem to be such thing as a Cadbury White Chocolate Giant Button, they've used the baby ones in the mixed bag. On the one hand you have to shove more in at once to get the same chocolate hit, but on the other judging by Dairy Milk lately you might be better off with not as much chocolate flavour! 

I didn't realise until I'd opened the Cadbury bag just how light coloured the chocolate milkshake buttons are - they make Cadbury Dairy Milk look like a dark chocolate! 

There too was a decent, near enough perfectly even mix of the two buttons but unlike the Milkybar bag this smelt mainly of milk chocolate with just a touch of something sweeter coming from the white buttons. 

The Dairy Milk buttons are far superior (even with the new recipe!) to the Nestle Chocolate Milkshake buttons. For starters it has a lot more of a chocolate flavour but even then its still kind of... blander or weaker than a standard Dairy Milk bar. As I said, I think this is due to the size of the buttons and while you might assume less chocolate is a bad thing, that's not necessarily the case. 

The Dairy Milk buttons don't compare to old school Dairy Milk buttons but they're much nicer than the sorry excuse we're sold today - yes there is a milder chocolate flavour than the bars and less of a milky flavour than before but this also means there's much less of the sickly sweetness the new bars seem to have. I think if I had a bar of 90's buttons and this bag side by side, I'd be disappointed but as it stands they're not bad and I'd eat them over any other Cadbury product right now. 

The white chocolate buttons are more of the same. I mean very, very few white chocolates have a proper chocolatey cocoa flavour but the Cadbury buttons are milder than the Milkybar with less of a creamy taste. Again this means less of the overwhelming sweetness too so it's swings and roundabouts - it all evens out. 

Together they're pretty good actually, a much better blend of the two buttons than previously where it was mainly about the white chocolate. 

Rating:

The Cadbury mixed buttons have positives and negatives, a milder flavour isn't great but the lack of throat tingling sugar burn is a huge positive. 

7/10 

Overall

Well done if you read all of that! If you skimmed over the pictures and ended up down here I don't blame you at all.. 

Anyway, if I had my way I'd take the Milkybar buttons (in moderation) and the Cadbury Dairy Milk buttons please. Failing that, as an all round bag the winner is shockingly Cadbury! 

(But Mr.1T still claims Asda own brand are the King of the chocolate button!) 

Marks & Spencer Soft Caramels

These were one of the many goodies I picked up in M&S recently. Caramels are a perfect Saturday night treat, they're so easy to mindlessly shove in my mouth in front the telly and that is exactly how this Saturday night went down - which explains my fabulous Liquorice Allsort spare duvet cover providing the backdrop. As I've preached to everyone, don't bother with throws and blankets just get a cheap duvet and use it just for on the sofa, it is so cosy and comfortable! 

The M&S Soft Caramels aren't new but they do have a new recipe. Not that I'd tried the old recipe, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times - I'd spend a hell of a lot more money in Markses if they put their products on the website, I can never be bothered to wander round on the off chance there might be something I want to buy.

Underneath the bright pink wrappers the chocolates are up to Marks & Spencer's usual standards. I barely looked at the actual chocolate after I'd unwrapped them and it would have been easy to just stick a lump of chocolate with some caramel inside but they looked as nice as they would have had they been displayed in a box of chocolates rather than hidden inside some foil. 

Initially I could only smell chocolate. Again M&S high standards play a role, in other bags of wrapped caramels it's not unusual to find a couple of broken chocolates where the caramel has oozed out but as always these were in perfect condition and the thick chocolate shells had sealed the caramel and any scents away. 

The caramels only contain 30% caramel centres to a decent 70% milk chocolate shell and with those sorts of ratios I'd expect to taste even a hint of chocolate but that was not the case at all. It might not take up even a third of the overall product but 99% of the taste was the caramel. 

It's thick, runny and gooey - I went to brush my teeth after eating these and my chin was covered in caramel - I'm not usually that messy of an eater! A perfect consistency for soft caramel in my opinion but the flavour let it down somewhat. It's a very tasty caramel flavour but it's soon overpowered by a burning, sickly sweetness. I hadn't even finished one mouthful when I said to Mr.1T "wow these are sweet aren't they?" and in fact the word sickly came from him, not me - and that's saying something! 

The caramel was thick enough to be scooped out, Creme Egg style, so I got a good taste of the unadulterated chocolate too. I've had a few M&S milk chocolates recently and continue to be surprised at the quality. Even when used in flavoured bars or bags where the chocolate isn't a predominant flavour they don't fob you off with the cheap stuff. It's milky yet still has a proper chocolate flavour and is really quite good quality stuff. There was still a lingering sugary sweetness though and due to the overpowering nature of the caramel I'm unsure if this was a left over from that or the chocolate was on the sweet side too. I think I'll give M&S the benefit of the doubt, none of the other milk chocolates have had that problem, and blame it on the caramel. 

Rating:

Overall I think I'd give them a 6/10 but if we pretend I wasn't a greedy guts and only had 1 or 2 it'll be 

7/10 

Ambrosia Frozen Custard - Vanilla with Chunky Fudge

Lady Luck is firmly on my side recently! Not only did I finally find the Covent Garden Mulitgrain Risotto I've been after completely by accident, but on Saturday the lovely Nibs tweeted that Ambrosia were releasing a frozen custard, initially in Morrisons and on Ocado. My interest was certainly piqued but my Morrisons may as well be Hell on Earth and I wasn't planning on an Ocado order any time soon. I was rummaging the freezer in Sainsbury's for the Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough 'Wich when what should I find but the frozen custards! Funny how things work out.. 

I got to Googling, as from what I remember the recipe for ice cream is basically a custard but it seems there are a few differences. According to U.S FDA Guidelines (I'm assuming a similar sort of standard goes for the U.K), for a frozen dessert to be considered a frozen custard it has to have a higher (1.4%) percentage of egg yolk solids - a smaller percentage means it's ice cream. Wikipedia informs me "true" frozen custard is a lot denser than ice cream, up to 100% overrun - half of the finished product can be air in soft serve ice cream but in frozen custard it is around 15-30%, similar to gelato. 

I couldn't really care about the minor specifics as long as it tastes good and I love me some Ambrosia custard! 

Things had started well even buying the things - 

- look at the size of these bad boys! 850ml compared to a standard 500ml Ben & Jerry's and quite a bit cheaper at £3.25. Though if you're still paying full price for B&J more fool you, seeing as they're always on offer somewhere! 

I got carried away and bought myself both flavours, Vanilla and Vanilla with Chunky Fudge but I decided to kick things off with the latter. 

Vanilla flavour custard ice cream with fudge flavour sauce and fudge chunks. 

So, after all that its not even technically a pure frozen custard and it shows in the consistency. It couldn't have been any softer straight from the freezer without being a melted mess! It was a lot closer to soft scoop ice cream than any other big brand ice cream being sold in the supermarkets with the exception of Walls Big Bite - if you've tried that, this is how soft it is, although to be fair it does have a much thicker and fuller mouth feel. 

 The flavour is vanilla, still I expected some kind of similarity to custard but the yellow was about as far as that went. There was no distinctive custard taste and not too much vanilla if I'm honest. There tend to be two types of vanilla: proper, delicious vanilla bean style flavour and the vanilla which is more of a plain base flavour, which sadly this is. It's OK but a bit boring. 

Confession time, the tubs are huge but I was hungry. I ate the lot, good job really as the top section only had the fudge chunks you can see and a tiny sauce swirl. The fudge pieces were interesting, some were soft and more caramel-y in nature and seemed to melt away and some were a lot firmer and stickier with a chewy fudge like texture. I wouldn't have been happy if I'd bought a bag of fudge and they tasted like these, quite bland and sticking along the plain and boring theme but the texture at least gave me some satisfaction. 

And this is where my greediness comes into play. 

The bottom two thirds had a lot less fudge chunks but a whole lot more sauce and thankfully, its delicious. The flavour alternates between fudge and caramel though I find them to be quite similar anyway, and it's lovely and strong. It's sweet and rich yet was perfectly manageable amongst the duller vanilla and fudge chunks. 

It wasn't just mine, Mr.1T had exactly the same problem with his (yes, we're both pigs but we're doing you a favour) in that all the sauce was mainly in the middle and bottom of the tub. 

The sauce has a thick gooey consistency and the texture of that combined with the creamy soft custard/ice cream hybrid and the chewy sticky fudge was a winner. It's an easy eat, lighter than a heavier ice cream and reasonably priced but there are a few issues with the distribution of the fudge and sauce (not quite as bad as the Cadbury ice cream mind you) but if you want my advice, find some way to eat from the bottom up! 

Rating:

A disappointing start, I'd have liked a lot more sauce and a better base flavour. 

6/10 

Birds Eye Choc Chip Pancakes

Yes you read that correctly and no it's not fish fingers or chicken dippers. 

Birds Eye are venturing into frozen breakfast convenience food. It's about time we got some new breakfast options, although pancakes and waffles are an American creation and I'd take a filthy greasy fry up over stodgy sweet desserts I'm open to experimenting. 

Come to think of it apart from going to the hassle of cooking a fry up, breakfast in the U.K is usually pretty boring. Cereal, toast, Mr.1T is partial to a Pop Tart (of which we have a very limited number of U.K standard flavours, why hasn't anybody made an own brand version?) or my everyday choice eggs. 

Birds Eye have come to save the day with a range of microwave frozen products which include the aforementioned Choc Chip Pancakes, Plain Waffles and Cinnamon Waffles. I'm having a slight freezer storage issue at the moment or the waffles would have been straight in too. As I said I do love eggs in the morning so I'm eating my Choc Chip Pancakes now, in my mid afternoon slump. But that's the beauty with these, no faffing around mixing flour and eggs and flipping. Just pop in the toaster (or microwave - ew) for 2 and 1/2 - 3 minutes on the lowest setting and voila! 

Hmm. I don't know what I expected my toaster pancake to look like, and it might look O.K to you but I promise you this looked exactly the same before I toasted it! 

They come in two plastic packets of three which keep the pancakes free from freezer burn and I was slightly unnerved to find they not only looked and smelt the same both pre and post toasting but they felt it too. O.K they were slightly crisper afterwards but they felt soft and squidgy before, nothing like I'd expect something of this type to feel frozen. 

I worked my way inwards to the chocolate chips and wasn't impressed by the pancake itself. I don't normally eat pancakes as such, much preferring a thinner crepe and the thickness just exaggerates how boring and plain pancakes themselves taste. In the interest of reviewing I kept mine plain but Mr.1T added maple syrup to his and hasn't stopped raving about it since - I've lost the rest of the box I think. 

Its obvious and common sense, but the pancakes are clearly all machine made. I know that sounds stupid but it was a bit strange that all 6 of the pancakes had the same chocolate chip pattern throughout - I don't think I've ever had that in a product before.

The chocolate vastly improved things. Because they were inside the pancakes rather than sprinkled on top as I'm used to I was disappointed at first at the lack of melted chocolate. Cutting the pancake open soon changed things and the sweet scent of milky chocolate and runny gooey goodness appeared. 

Considering Birds Eye mainly make "real food" I was pleasantly surprised at the chocolate used.It melted beautifully and added a sweet, quite rich chocolate flavour to the thick kind of stodgy pancake. 

Rating: 

Honestly. and I'm not just saying this, mine are better, though as I said, I do prefer a thinner pancake with more chocolate. However, when I make pancakes I end up having enough batter to make about 10 when I only want 1 and they certainly don't take me 2 and 1/2 minutes from craving to munching. 

For flavour I'll stick to my own but for pure convenience these are pretty damn good! 

6/10 

Marks & Spencer Spicy Chorizo Flavour Sweet Potato Snacks

We got married last year and got given a shed load of vouchers for various shops, however we've been together for 11 years and lived together officially for the last five of those and there is literally nothing we need! We've also decided we're sick of saving things - whether its "clothes for best" that never get to see the outsides of wardrobes or bottles of champagnes for celebrations that ain't happening - we were determined not to hold on to the vouchers for something special before realising they'd reached the use by date.

We'd very kindly received a decent amount in vouchers for Marks & Spencer, not enough for say a new bed, but too much to waste on overpriced photo frames or candlesticks! We've walked round and round in circles for the last 7 months and I've trawled through the website before we thought sod it - good food is better than things bought for the sake of spending money! A few sushi platters later, we had roughly £10 left on a gift card and went down the snack aisle, so expect a few M&S reviews in the near future.

Don't worry I didn't spend all the money on 'healthy' snacks, 90% was chocolate but as chorizo and sweet potato fans these seemed rather interesting. 

The ingredients list is suprisingly healthy, literally nothing on there that can't be found on a spice rack with the exception of the actual sweet potatoes. Not only are there no hidden nasties, they are baked not fried, contain 30% less saturated fats than standard crisps but they're suitable for both vegetarians and vegans, Although I don't know too many vegans that would want to eat a meat flavoured snack..

Looks: 

A lot fancier than a normal crisp! On the thin side but to be fair despite only weighing 23g, there were quite a few more than you'd find in an average 30g sized bag of crisps.

Smell:

The snacks/crisps/you know what I mean, had a distinct chorizo scent. Sometimes I find with meat flavoured crisps that there is just a general meaty smell but these were clearly chorizo.

Taste:

The texture was a little strange, they are very hard and a weird kind of crunchy. I've not actually had a sweet potato crisp before so I'm unsure if its the actual potato itself or the fact they're baked not fried that causes the slightly off feel but it was obvious I wasn't eating an ordinary crisp. It's not that I didn't like them, they were just different.  

The flavour was extremely mild, nowhere near as strong as the scent would lead you to believe. I could taste a small amount of the chorizo to begin with, what I could taste was very nice actually - again no mistaking it was chorizo but it wasn't spicy at all.  The chorizo didn't last for very long at all before a delicious sweet potato flavour overtook. Considering chorizo is a strong flavour I expected it to overpower any sweet potato but it was completely the opposite and it was the sweet potato I could taste on my tongue long after I'd finished. 

M&S should do themselves a favour and save some money - lose all the extra 'spicy chorizo' flavours - the sweet potato is delicious alone and the chorizo barely registered. These would have got a higher rating if that is what they were supposed to be, but Spicy Chorizo is what I was promised and Spicy Chorizo is what I expected dammit!

6/10

  

Banana Flavour Mini Animal Biscuits

Today's review is a bit of a strange one, I bought this box of Shires Bakery Banana Flavour Mini Animal Biscuits months ago on a whim, once I'd had a proper look they were shoved in a cupboard and put off until I truly had nothing else sweet to eat. 

It's a big old box packed out with small biscuits, they're bigger than Cadbury Mini Animals but smaller than say nice biscuits or custard creams. 

Ive got an elephant and a rhino, your guess is as good as mine for the rest. I wasn't about to go digging around for different ones and I got a couple of different animals in my first handful. I still don't know what some are supposed to be but at least they look as confusing in real life as they do on the packaging! 

There was a faint whiff of banana when I opened the plastic bag inside the box, but nothing too strong. 

First impressions were weird full stop. I thought the biscuit would be sweet but in reality they're dry with a weird crunch. These aren't a biscuit to eat one at a time (unless you're a baby or small child..) as they're so small so I ended up eating 2 or 3 each time and the first few had the strangest banana flavour ever. 

Initially it's a plain biscuit, not like a digestive - these are basically just tiny Rich Teas both in texture  and taste. I've since compared ingredients and they are virtually the same; both using wheat flour, Rich Teas have vegetable oil and Barley Malt extract, whereas these don't and these also have wholemeal oat flour and powdered whey. Rich Teas are a little sweeter and these slightly drier but they are very similar. Each plain biscuit had a banana aftertaste though that reminded me exactly of the Mr Kipling Banana Milkshake cakes! I liked those little milkshake slices but while it worked in a cake it wasn't quite right in a Rich Tea biscuit. 

I'm such a mindless eater and I ended up eating these like crisps. Big mistake. I did find the more I ate, the less I noticed the banana flavour and they eventually just ended up tasting like I'd eaten three packets of Rich Teas. 

 I had a mouth drier than Ghandi's flip flop, Rich Teas are a dunking biscuit but these are much too small for that. 

I got these in either B and M or Home Bargains, I can't remember and so they were cheap enough for me not to care and cheaper than McVities Rich Teas. If you only want a couple, don't mind a strange banana flavour or have a teething toddler go ahead and try them. They certainly won't be replacing any of the biscuits in my tin but I do like a Rich Tea every now and then so I quite enjoyed them. Once that banana flavour had gone away! 

6/10 

Flipz White Fudge Covered Pretzels

 Flipz White Fudge Covered Pretzels have been reviewed to death but Christmas caused my foreign food hunts to be a bit forgotten about.. 

These used to be sold in the UK normally but I had the imported

version. 

Truth be told, they didn't smell that great - sugar, sugar and a bit more sugar. I'm unsure if it's the US version or just my bag but I expected a bit more of a white fudge coating on my pretzels.

I wondered beforehand what the difference with white fudge and white chocolate is but maybe it's one of those weird rules again about what can and can't be labelled as chocolate. It tasted like white chocolate to me anyway, albeit a lot less sweet than it smelt and I expected. I've tried American white chocolate a few times and although white chocolate is always very sweet, American stuff manages to reach another level of sickly sweetness. The white fudge here was pleasantly surprising, I noticed mainly the flavour - of course it is sweet but it does have a creamy, richer than expected taste too. 

I enjoyed the pretzels themselves, they had a nice crunchy consistency but I found they weren't salty enough for me. They were slightly salty while I was eating them but the sweet fudge would have benefited from a super salty pretzel to really get that addictive contrast. 

Interstingly even though the flavour was mainly the fudge/chocolate at the time, while I'm here writing my review up an hour later, all I can taste is salty pretzel! I'd have liked that saltiness all throughout rather than an aftertaste. 

Flipz White Fudge Covered Pretzels are ok, a bit moreish and tasty enough but not worth the price they want for them. I'll save my money in future and carry on making my own.

6/10 

Cadbury Minis Mix

I know I've been very anti-Cadbury lately, but for me, chocolate at Easter has to be a Cadbury Buttons Egg. I'm going to be buying myself a few nice eggs but if my mum doesn't get me my buttons there'll be words had...

We're all aware of the controversy surrounding Creme Eggs and I remember finding them quite sickly last year, so I swore I wouldn't buy any this year. I did buy some mini Daim Eggs and wasn't impressed but I'd heard good things about the Dairy Milk and Oreo Eggs. Asda are selling bags with a mix of all 4 inside and my promises went out the window. The bag is "Great for egg hunts!" but that's not going to happen - 1) they're all going in my mouth so I'm not going to the trouble of hiding them and 2) there's not really that many and they're on the small side. 

My first compliment to Cadbury in a very long time is that there was an even mix. Hopefully this is the case in every bag and I didn't just get lucky but I had 4 of each egg except for the Oreo, of which I had 5. 

Creme Egg 

This just makes me sad, it was actually my least favourite of the four. I might associate Easter chocolate with Buttons but I bet for most people it'd be Creme Eggs. These are just an insult to the proper Creme Eggs and in fact I find them offensive. A thin, soft chocolate shell with too much fondant centre. I've moaned Cadbury milk chocolate has gone down the pan but I couldn't taste it over the sickly centre. I've still not had a full sized Creme Egg to compare but I wouldn't eat these sugar bombs if you paid me. My ever present sugar fiend helper Mr.1T declared these the best out of the bag but anyone who reads my blog will know his opinion means diddly squat as he has the taste buds of a diabetic four year old. A little side note, these are the only mini egg not made with Dairy Milk.. Surely if they can use it with the other three eggs they can here, I think it'd benefit from a milkiness rather than a sugary chocolate as well as the sugary centre. Yuck. 

Dairy Milk 

Hmmm.. These have thrown me. Cadbury have always been adamant that the Dairy Milk hasn't changed, only the shape of the bars but the actual taste of the bars have suggested otherwise. These little eggs just might prove they are (half) telling the truth. They are sweeter than I ever remember Dairy Milk being, although that could be a case of 'grown up' taste buds, but they are also nicer than any recent Cadbury Dairy Milk I've eaten. Thick feeling, rich and with a milky flavour. A huge improvement on Dairy Milk in bar form. 

Dairy Milk Daim 

I had a bag of Dairy Milk Daim eggs a couple of weeks ago and I said they had too much chocolate, not enough Daim. They're solid Dairy Milk eggs with only 4% crunchy almond caramel pieces and as you can see, although there is a big difference visibly to the pure Dairy Milk eggs, there aren't any real noticeable almond caramel pieces. One of the reasons I love a Daim is the texture, and it's not really present in the mini eggs with barely any crunch. The flavour is spot on though, it tastes exactly like a Daim and if it had had the texture too, would have been my clear favourite in the bag. 

Dairy Milk Oreo 

These were the eggs that I'd been waiting to try. I wasn't sure how the Oreo would be represented in the egg - either biscuit pieces in solid chocolate filling or how it actually ended up being, a vanilla flavoured filling with biscuit pieces inside that. These ended up being my favourite, they taste like Oreos basically, vanilla cream with cocoa biscuit pieces. A tiny difference on a real Oreo as the ratios are the opposite way round, there's a lot more cream filling than biscuit but the general flavour is the same. The texture is what just pipped these over the Daim though, it doesn't say what the vanilla filling actually is but its thicker than the Creme Egg fondant but not quite as thick as the solid chocolate eggs with lots of deliciously crunchy biscuit pieces inside. 

All 4 flavours are rather sweet and with the exception of the Creme Eggs, I wouldn't say no to them again, but to be honest I probably won't buy any of the individual flavours - none are as delicious as the Lindt Eggs I had last week. 

Cadbury take note - people really will pay more for better quality, don't just knock 10p off and add a boat load of sugar in! 

6/10

New Covent Garden Soup Co Soup of the month - January

I've made no secret of my love of New Covent Garden Soup Co soups and I have a love/hate relationship with their soup of the months. If it's good, I'm gutted it will be gone in a couple of weeks time but it runs the risk of not being good enough to be a standard flavour but one they wanted to try out anyway. 

NCG (I really can't be bothered to keep writing their name out!) have a range of 'Skinny Soups' ironically most have more calories than the normal line but are all "delicious and satisfying, yet less than 2% fat, all green traffic lights and (per half carton) 2 of your 5 a day". 

This months soup is Chunky Root Vegetable,

Looks:

It was a bit on the thin side for a chunky soup before I warmed it up but it thickened nicely. It doesn't look the most appealing, a bit sickly in colour but there seemed to be plenty of veg and black turtle beans.

Taste:

For the amount of veg present, I expected my first taste to be one of the many different used. Unfortunately the first, and most, of my spoonfuls tasted heavily of black pepper. It's the very last ingredient in the ingredients list so I have to assume the machine went a bit haywire on the batch mine came from but it was massively over-seasoned. The only times I couldn't taste the black pepper was when I could taste the garlic and thyme so I really do think I ended up with a dodgy lot - either that or NCG have got their seasoning ratios way off. 

Fighting my taste buds to taste the veg, I was otherwise pleased. The vegetables do have a good fresh flavour it's just covered in pepper. The carrots especially tasted extremely vibrant and fresh and all the veg held on to a decent texture, no mushiness whatsoever. I also enjoyed the black turtle beans, mainly again for the texture as they hold a little more bite than the rest of the vegetables. 

It had thickened up while heating, but the actual soup was still on the watery side especially for a chunky soup. I'd have liked a thicker 'base' so to speak.

Rating:

6/10 It's not one of my favourites, purely because of the pepper - the vegetables were very nice and it was satisfying and extremely filling. If anybody else has tried this I'd appreciate it if you could let me know whether they're all massively peppery or if its just mine!

Chokablok Orange Bonanza

Seriously. I should not be allowed in supermarkets in January. It's the time to go and fill your cupboards if you're after either diet foods or discounted chocolate. A bit of a contradiction but there ya go! 

My Tesco switched the seasonal aisle to Easter on Boxing Day but squished down the end are shelves full of chocolates and there are plenty of bargains to be had. A Tesco Finest 1Kg Christmas Tree was £15 is now £3, Cadbury Selection Boxes for 25p(!!) but my eyes were on the Chokablok Orange Bonanza and when I realised it was just 50p it went straight into my basket.

A hollow milk chocolate sphere flavoured with orange oil, decorated with dark chocolate (22%), Orange flavour confection pieces and gold dusted shortcake biscuits. 

As I'd eaten the Chokablok Christmas Pudding I wasn't surprised to find a much thicker section of the chocolate underneath all the biscuit and confection pieces, however the Orange Bonanza wasn't just thicker there - some parts were thin like you'd find in standard Easter Eggs and some were nearly an inch thick and I really enjoyed this. It made the experience of actually eating it a lot more interesting, some parts were thin enough to melt on my tounge and others needed a good bite - the best of both worlds. 

The chocolate was OK, a decent enough milk chocolate taste but with a subtle orange flavour running throughout. It's on the mild side, there is enough to taste but not too much that someone like me, who leaves the chocolate orange till last in the chocolate box, can still enjoy it. 

The dark chocolate isn't so much a completely separate chocolate rather a very thin coating on top of the milk. It has a minimum 50% cocoa solids but isn't dark tasting enough to really pop out. Again the top is slightly different, most of that is chocolate and it's quite a nice flavour but doesn't have a particularly dark taste, it's still rather sweet. 

The top is where the party's at. A little pocket filled with biscuit and sweet pieces, it's a lot more interesting to eat than the majority with a blend of smooth chocolate, crunchy biscuits and fizzy sweet pieces. The bright orange balls were pretty strange, they weren't really chewy or crunchy but quite soft and seemed to melt away into a fizzy, tangy ball of flavour. Obviously you want a strong flavour but these are ridiculous. Vibrant and overpowering to the point that I couldn't actually taste the chocolate anymore.

The biscuits were good, crunchy and no real flavour to note but they detracted from the fizzy sweets so they're A-OK in my book! 

The individual pieces weren't particularly outstanding on their own but all mixed together they weren't too bad. The Orange Bonanza suffered from the same fate as the Christmas Pudding though, other than that one small section at the top, the rest is really just a ball of milk chocolate, that's fine when you're only paying 50p for it but a bit of a rip off at the original R.R.P. 

I've learnt my lesson and will stick with the Chokablok Slabs in the future - the chocolate is good and imagaginative, the circular format just doesn't work. 

6/10 

Chokablok Cracking Christmas Pud

I know. It's the 11th of January and I'm putting up another Christmas chocolate. But come February you'll all have forgotten about your New Year resolutions and be back cracking on with the chocolate. And it was only a pound! 

And it was even better value for my hard earned £1 at twice the size of the Tesco Finest dark chocolate bauble, this baby weighs in at 300g. 

Smooth milk chocolate with a topping of snowy-white chocolate, studded with milk chocolate caramel cups, crunchy butterscotch pieces and gold dusted honeycomb with a final dusting of edible gold glitter.

Its quite impressive, a very decent size and the decoration is done well - it actually looks like a Christmas pudding, albeit a chocolate one whereas the Tesco bauble could easily be an Easter egg repackaged and renamed for Christmas. 

It had a sweet, milk chocolate scent which isn't surprising considering it takes up by far the largest percentage of the overall product. While the idea of a chocolate Christmas pudding with white chocolate and all the other tasty little bits as the trimmings is a good one, the execution left a lot to be desired.

I'm never one to complain when I'm getting more chocolate but even I couldn't manage this beast in one go, Mr.1T and I decided to share it, and this was where we ran into a pretty big problem. It's sealed fully but is made using two halves so there is a sort of seam around the middle where it is naturally easiest to split, which then left us with one half purely milk chocolate and one half with all the good pieces. Surely it would have made more sense to put the seam running through horizontally but hey, I'm not the one paid to actually think about these things! 

I ended up smashing it into small pieces so we could both try some of the white chocolate, honeycomb, caramel and butterscotch pieces - you know, the whole point of it!

Anyway, the milk chocolate is fine, both milky and creamy, quite sweet and slightly greasy feeling but for a novelty chocolate its perfectly acceptable. It's certainly better than the Cadbury chocolate of late and actually reminded me of Cadbury Easter Eggs when I was a kid, its not high end chocolate by any means but I can't stop shoving it in! 

The butterscotch pieces were good, again rather sweet but they had an interesting mix of crunchy and chewy textures and had a nice butterscotch flavour. The quality of the white chocolate itself surprised me, I didn't expect much from it as it's mainly there for decoration rather than taste but it was decent; less sweet than Milky Bar white chocolate and with more of an actual cocoa flavour - bear in mind this is based on an equal sharing but a bit more on that later. 

The honeycomb pieces were small but packed a punch, sweet (again) but with a real noticeable crunch, they didn't add much flavour but I appreciated the difference in texture between that and the smooth chocolate. The caramel cups were very nice, basically a mini Rolo with a good amount of runny caramel inside, enough to actually taste it and the only criticism here is that I'd have liked a few more. 

This is a novelty chocolate, I don't know if Chokablok expected people to take it out and put it on display somewhere over Christmas but it has a solid square block at the bottom of the pudding to stand it upright. What you can't see, in photos or real life, is the top of the pudding has an extremely thick (we're talking couple of inches) block of chocolate too, which is all well and good. Except its white chocolate, and its where all the honeycomb, butterscotch and caramel cups are. Due to the sheer thickness it was (yet again) impossible to break these two sections apart so I took the top white block and Mr.1T took the bottom milk. He complained he physically couldn't bite a chunk off so, like me previously, resorted to kind of sucking on it. My teeth have manned up apparently and so I got a good bite on that top white, goodie filled white block. I might have said before that the white chocolate isn't too sweet but it is when there's a good two inches of it studded with extra sweet pieces! It was a texture and flavour explosion in my mouth but my God I've never felt throat burn like it. It was like chewing on a lump of pure sugar and although all the parts were tasty alone, I literally couldn't taste them over the overwhelmingly sickly sweetness. 

I ended up really disappointed. I know I said before that its a novelty but there is no way you can break this and get a mouthful of everything. Its basically milk chocolate alone, or white chocolate with the pieces. It's a shame, making all the pieces more even throughout would spoil the way it looks but the way it looks spoils the flavour. 

6/10