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

Milka & Daim

For today's Wednesday world food review I'm leaving the USA and coming back to Europe - albeit to an American owned brand - Milka with Daim. 

I love Daim bars, they're a mix of two of my favourite things - crunchy chocolate and caramel, what's not to like! 

Milka are now owned by Mondelēz, the international branch of the snack food company formerly (and more well) known as Kraft Foods, who along with Unilever might as well own everything and anything in the world. While the Cadbury line have come under fire for changing the recipes and shapes of near enough every product, I haven't heard all that much complaining about Milka and it's nice to see the bar was still square! 

I was very pleased to find that it actually smelt of chocolate - proper chocolate not what legally has to be known as candy in America, where it's more sugar and vegetable fats than anything else.

The Milka had a lovely flavour, it's been a while but is this how our everyday chocolate used to taste? It really shows how crap the stuff they're passing off as Cadbury nowadays is! Not only is the actual chocolate pretty damn tasty but the little Daim chunks generously dotted about just improved an already impressive bar. The texture is ideal for me, a mix of creamy, sweet chocolate and buttery caramel in crunchy chewy pieces.

Come on Mondelēz. if you can make good, run of the mill chocolate on the continent (and Dairy Milk in Ireland for that matter) why does ours taste so different?? 

8/10 

Sure, I've had a lot better quality chocolate but this was impressive for a mass produced bar. 

Milka Choco-Mix Jelly

Milka are Cadburys European cousins, once upon a time you might have been hard pressed to find two identical products from the Cadbury and Milka lines but since Mondelez took over its harder to find anything that's not the same! 

Milka don't seem to have the Marvellous range but they do have to Choco-Mix bags which look suspiciously familiar, one is with Mini Oreos, milk and white chocolate buttons and what look like Pebbles and the other is the Jelly. I didn't bother with the Oreo bag as we have literally the same over here. 

We also have the Maynard bag but the Choco-Mix Jelly seems to have more my kind of chocolates inside. 

Each bag has Milka Toffees, Peach gummies, a hazelnut chocolate and mini Daim bars inside and is quite a bit heavier and bigger than our pouches at 140g. 

Pleasingly I got a decent mix and a good amount for a 'sharing' pouch. 

Toffee 

Quite a thick chocolate coating with a runny, gooey centre. Very chewy with a good flavour that went well with the others. Lovely texture alongside the crunch of the rest of the bag. 

Peach 

For the first few seconds after I took a bite I couldn't taste any peach, the flavour soon develops though and wow it's strong! A beautifully juicy, fruity peach with a good chew to it. It's a shame Milka haven't listed who makes these gummies (Haribo or whoever) like Cadbury do with Maynards as I need to buy a bag of just these! 

 

Hazelnut 

These looked a little like a rolo from the outside but a nice big crunchy hazelnut was hiding in each. The hazelnuts didn't leave much room for the chocolate but I couldn't miss the sweet, milky taste. The nuts were nice and crunchy and these were extremely addictive, I'd like a bag of these too! 

Daim 

Finally each bag has a good amount of mini Daim bars in it too. The almonds add a different nutty flavour to the bag and a different kind of crunch. 

Overall I really enjoyed this, it's so much better than the Maynards bag we get. There were no fillers, just chucked in to get the bag to a decent enough weight to justify the prices - each separate chocolate or sweet was as good as the rest. The bag has quite a nutty, caramel flavour to it as a whole but the peach really refreshes things up. My one complaint is that I'm lazy and I was getting impatient unwrapping the Daim bars. I wonder why they're still wrapped? 

Rating 8/10 (would be a 9 if not for the wrappers!)