Milka Toffee Ganznuss

Milka are a strange bunch, this bar is called the Toffee Gaznuss, but there's no toffee in it! Even in German it's described as "Karamelgeschmack" there's no toffee to be found anywhere. 

Alpine milk chocolate filled with milk cream filling with caramel, filling with caramel cream and whole hazelnuts. 

This truly is a beast of a bar. Weighing in at 300g, it's 3 times the size of a standard block nowadays and as well as being so long it barely fit on the shelf, it's nice and thick too - just how I like my chocolate. 

I was pleased to smell the deliciously milky sweet chocolate I expected with Milka that was missing from the Caramel Bubbly and there was a slight hint of a caramel scent tempting me to just eat it rather than review. 

I snapped a couple of squares in half to get a photo and made a nice big mess of my hands and the table. There are two different types of caramel; a flavoured cream and actual caramel and the proper stuff is thick, runny and very, very sticky. The slight caramel smell that I noticed when the bar was whole became all I could smell and it smelt amazing. 

There is a layer of caramel flavoured cream running throughout the bar that gets thicker in the centre of each square and it was this that I could initially taste. It's sweet, rich and creamy with a nice caramel blended in. The runny caramel pipes up next, it's thick, sticky and again quite rich. I'm sure it's the same caramel as in the Milka Bubbly Caramel so imagine Cadbury Caramel but not quite as sweet. 

Not every single square contains a hazelnut but the majority do. I could taste the nuts but I think they were probably included mainly for the texture. They're big - taking up most of each square, and nice and crunchy; perfectly complimenting both caramels and the smooth milky chocolate. 

Thankfully I could taste the chocolate this time round, Milka have been my last two world food reviews so I won't repeat what I've already written twice. It's Milka; sweet, milky, creamy chocolate. To be truthful where I loved the taste first time round and missed it last week, I could have taken or left it here! It takes a back seat to the delicious caramel flavours inside. I'm sure an inferior chocolate would have ruined the overall bar and the milkiness mellowed out the sweetness but I was so focused on the fillings I barely registered it! 

This is one bar I'm quite glad Cadbury haven't tried a version of, I imagine they'd ruin it. It runs the risk of being too sweet but manages to stop just short. The caramel flavour is delicious, the nuts provide my ideal texture, the cream adds a rich, almost luxurious taste and the good chocolate rounds it all off nicely. 

8/10 

Milka Bubbles Caramel

Remember how I always say I go through slightly addictive phases; Bonbons, Jelly Beans, Nuts.. Well I'm in the middle of a Milka one right now after how well last weeks Milka with Daim went down. 

Seeing as both Cadbury and Milka are now owned by Mondelēz, there's a lot of crossover between products - Dairy Milk/Milka Oreo, Dairy Milk/Milka Daim, Dairy Milk/Milka puddles, the same type of mixed bags (although Milkas are better!), and Bubbly Bars.  

The Bubbly is an aerated bar; a lighter, less dense version of the Wispa and a poor mans Aero in my opinion. So it might seem strange that I got the Milka Bubbly. I had two reasons. 1.Milka chocolate is better than Dairy Milk and 2. It's got a caramel layer inside! 

The last new Aero bar I tried was the Aero Mousse so I was looking forward to seeing how the Milka Caramel Bubbly stood up against that too. 

It looks identical to the small Dairy Milk Bubbly bars and smelt like the Milka chocolate from last week. 

The bars snap along the thinner parts and I was a bit disappointed at the amount of caramel filling. 

I realised after I'd had my first bite though that all the caramel is pooled in the actual bubbles and they're pretty full. 

Surprisingly despite the amount of caramel the most prominent part of each bite was the Aero like texture. Bubbly by name, bubbly by nature and as with the Cadbury version it does what it says on the packet. In fact the chocolate itself is very similar to the Cadbury. Suspiciously similar considering they're even shaped the same where all the other identically flavoured bars look different. It could well be because the chocolate flavour isn't as intense in an aerated bar but I was expecting the familiar Milka taste, it could have been any (nice, don't get me wrong) generic chocolate to be honest.

The caramel was better, it did remind me of the caramel that Cadbury use but a less sweet, richer version with a slight burnt (for want of a better word) flavour. Not a bad burnt but more along the lines of a burnt toffee. 

The light airy chocolate and rich thick caramel rounded each other off nicely and I did like the Milka Caramel Bubbly - it was a lot better than the Aero Mousse. I just couldn't help being disappointed that it lacked that distinct Milka flavour, if I hadn't seen the wrapper it could have passed for Cadbury quite easily. 

All that said and done, I did notice my bar was a month past its best before date. I'm not sure a month makes much difference in chocolate so I'm not going to let Milka off that easily.

7/10 

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!)