Asda Whirly Bites

Blah blah blah.. Asda..blue signs.. You know by now! I've previously reviewed a few new bags of chocolates from Asda; Caramel Bites, Giant Pinwheel Buttons and Nutty Bites. There are also two bags of Milk and White Chocolate Buttons but I went for the more interesting choice - Whirly Bites.  Asda's version of the Milky Way.

Bite sized pieces of whipped nougat covered in thick milk chocolate. 

The nougat was what I (thought) could smell before I tucked in. A sweet vanilla scent that was very tempting. They were smaller than the Nutty Bites, roughly the same size as the Caramel Bites, big enough to take two bites if you want but small enough to eat them in one go. 

The nougat was thicker feeling than I expected considering it's a whipped nougat. It's lighter than a marshmallow but still has a slightly squidgy feel rather than a creamy whipped texture. I'm really enjoying these bags of chocolate from Asda, the emphasis is more on the flavour of the ingredients and these were no exception. In my opinion, although the official line is that Milky Way is small because it's marketed to kids, they are the size they are because any bigger would make them sickening sweet. Asda's Whirly Bites are a lot less sugary tasting than a Milky Way, there is a stronger chocolate flavour although I did notice a vanilla flavour coming through too. It was this vanilla I could smell initially and I thought the nougat would be vanilla flavoured but looking at the ingredients it actually seems to be the chocolate. Whichever one it is its a nice light flavour and was the same as the Nutty Bites - I ate the whole bag easily and was left reaching for more rather than tiring of the sweetness. 

Another solid 7/10 from Asda! 

Asda Nutty Bites

Today's review is an Asda own brand product, so this should be the part where I go on about the usually trustworthy blue 'New!' signs. Well they failed. Again. I nearly let two new bags of chocolates slip by me, thank God I could probably navigate most supermarket confectionary aisles with my eyes closed and spotted a couple of sneaky new additions. 

I previously reviewed Asda's bag of mini Mars bars - Caramel Bites and they got the thumbs up. I hoped this Snickers version - Nutty Bites would too. 

There weren't as many in this bag as I remembered before but I think they're slightly larger, I imagine it would be harder to fit all the different parts to a Snickers (or Nutty Bite) into a truly bitesized piece. As expected this is a filled milk chocolate with peanuts, nougat and caramel. 

The main thing I noticed was the nougat and the caramel. There was a slight peanut flavour, nothing too strong and thankfully just the taste - no claggy feeling at all! 

While I could taste the peanuts and 22% of the total ingredients are actual peanuts, I couldn't feel them too much in the bites. If I let the chocolate, nougat and caramel melt away in each mouthful, I was left with small peanut pieces on my toungue so they were definitely in there but to eat each bite properly, any crunchy texture was lost amongst the chewy nougat and thick sticky caramel. I actually think I prefer these bites to proper Snickers because of this. I like peanuts alone but I'm not too keen on them in chocolate weirdly - any other nut is fine! The peanut flavour is kind of diluted here, enough to set it apart from other chocolates but not overwhelm and make it exclusively peanutty, if that makes sense!   

I also liked that this wasn't very sweet at all unlike the caramel bites, of course there was a sweetness - it wasn't bitter or anything - but the empahasis was on the actual flavour of the nougat, chocolate, caramel and peanuts. 

Another 

7/10 

Keep your eyes peeled for my review on the Whirly Bites bag squeezed in between the coming Christmas posts! 

Sour Patch Kids & Big Hunk - Taffy Mail

Sour Patch Kids 

My Taffy Mail box also included a box of Sour Patch Kids. 

As you probably well know we have Sour Patch Kids here in the UK but they're made and sold by Maynards. These are the original Mondelēz sweets made for the US and Canada by the looks of it. Maynards are a decent company and I usually enjoy their sweets so I thought they'd surely be on par with these. 

One way to tell if you're eating American sweets - there's always a bright neon blue one! I think that the colouring and flavouring (Blue 1 apparently) is banned in the UK. I can't think of many sweets over here that are this bright blue - or as bright as any of the colours for that matter! Not only were they super bright but they smelt super strong too. They felt softer than I remember our Sour Patch Kids being but still firm enough to have a little chew. 

Basically these are our Sour Patch Kids on steroids. Stronger smelling and tasting, more sour and then even sweeter. I don't know what the US version flavours are supposed to be and to be truthful I didn't give it a second thought while I was eating them (hence the lack of my usual long winded descriptions!) as they were that good. 

These have ruined our version for me. Britain might have the US beat on chocolate and biscuits (#teambourbon) but American sweets, sour ones especially are far superior. 

8/10 

Big Hunk 

I was winding Mr.1T up with this bar, telling him I couldn't wait to get home for my big hunk as I'd never had one before.. I love the name! 

In my hastiness to get my Taffy Mail box open the brown wrapper led me to believe this was chocolate but a commenter on that post informed me that this is a nougat with peanuts. 

It was HUGE! The packaging says " place bar firmly in one hand, then SMACK! your BIG HUNK on a hard surface, happily eat your bite-sized pieces!" Or " for a softer chew - place your BIG HUNK in the microwave, heat for approximately 5-10 seconds, carefully eat your SUPER SOFT CHEWY SNACK!" Well I like a harder chew and I wanted to use my tiny toffee hammer again so I SMACKED! it with that.. 

I shouldn't have done that. It's a lot more brittle than you'd think and so peanuts and nougat went flying everywhere. I found some in the blinds and behind the microwave. At least this gave me a chance to try the peanuts alone, they were fine; quite large and crunchy but they were unsalted which isn't how I like my peanuts but probably suits the nougat better. 

The bar smelt lovely and sweet, not sugary sweet but more like honey and is mega sticky. I wasn't about to microwave my nougat like some kind of wimp so I dove straight in! 

I have never had anything as chewy as the Big Hunk in my life before. I was, and still am undecided on the flavour, some parts had quite a sweet honey taste but a good three quarters of the bar tasted plain. If the honey was more consistent it would have been much better but as it was I have to say I prefer Barratt Nougat! 

Surprisingly, especially considering how many there were, I couldn't really feel or taste the peanuts. They just seemed to disappear behind the thick chewy nougat. 

If you have read my blog you'll know the chewier something is usually the higher I rate it, I love a good chew. So when I say this is ridiculous please don't underestimate how chewy it really is! 15 minutes of solid chewing later and I was debating giving in and chucking it in the microwave. I stuck it out though and I'm sure I burnt more calories chewing this than I got from eating it. 

Lacking in flavour, serious jaw ache and it became a bit of a chore eating it. 

5/10 

Asda Caramel Bites

Cadbury have sharing pouches of mini versions of near enough all of their chocolate bars, there's a bag of mini Daim bars and once upon a time there was a sharing pouch of mini Mars bars. I, for one haven't seen them in any shops but Google is showing me photos so they must have existed. 

Asda have new packaging for a lot of their own brand sweets and chocolates so I'm not sure if this is a new product, it doesn't say new anywhere on the bag but it doesn't seem to exist on their website yet - it's new to me either way! 

Filled milk chocolate with nougat and caramel. 

I was impressed that although the bag only weighs 130g I had loads of nuggets and they were a fair size too, small enough that I could eat a piece in one go but just big enough to get two bites out of each. Even though there's more nougat than anything else in each, they have a lovely chocolatey caramel smell. 

They're just tiny Mars Bars basically. Soft, quite thick rich caramel with a slightly chewy, sweet nougat. The caramel and nougat have a lovely flavour and the chocolate is of a pretty good standard - what you'd expect from an own brand chocolate anyway. 

These were very addictive, they aren't quite as nice as a real Mars Bar, Mars have a better balance between the nougat, caramel and chocolate and this was the case to start with here but towards the end of the bag they were starting to get a little sweet. It's not that they were too sweet - they're perfectly tasty, especially as they are in mini bitesize pieces and as a chocolate in its own right but I couldn't help comparing them to a real Mars Bar. All that said though, I bet if I ate 130g of Mars Bar, that would end up on the sugary sweet side too.

Now to buy another bag and freeze them! 

7/10

Klik Party Mix

Today's world food Wednesday review is a strange one. It's a Kosher product made by Unilever Isreal in Isreal but distributed by an American company from Brooklyn, New York. All the packaging and labels are in English with no other languages at all so make of that what you will. 

Klik are a brand I've noticed before in Asda, I'd seen a couple of bags mainly a Malteaser like chocolate and I think a fudge too. This is party mix 'a mix of Klik vanilla & fudge, cookie and Kariot ("pillows"). 

I was a bit confused by the description as to wether one was vanilla and fudge or if there were seperate vanilla balls and fudge balls. There were four different types in my bag. 

I started with the small round milk chocolate balls. Although the description says vanilla and fudge, cookies and Kariot the ingredients have only two different types listed: Kariot and biscuit snacks. I'm not sure if these were supposed to have a fudge flavour but there wasn't any. The milk chocolate was Ok - not bad, nothing great but I didn't really enjoy the biscuit centre. The texture was crunchy but it had more of a stale crunch feel rather than a crispy biscuit. 

The little white balls were noticeably sweeter than the milk chocolate ones. I'm guessing these were supposed to be the vanilla but again I didn't really notice any. The chocolate coating was quite thin so as before the stale feeling biscuit was the main thing I noticed with these. 

With both the milk and the white  balls the centres seemed a lot more like cereal or wafer than biscuit, I can see cereal listed but they seem to be for the other one. I think this may be a case of lost in translation! Both eaten together are an improvement on individually, there is more of a chocolate flavour which is very sweet but still quite milky and ended up being very enjoyable. 

The larger rounder chocolates had the biscuit centre I was waiting for, so I'm guessing these are cookie. It's quite soft more like a shortbread and I think it must be as it has a lovely buttery flavour too. I think I tasted a hint of vanilla but it wasn't strong enough to notice too much. 

The biggest square ones were definitely the Kariot or nougat filled pillows. They had the same stale wafer/cereal texture (but cereal is listed as an ingredient for these) but instead of making up the whole centre there was a quite thick layer just underneath the chocolate surrounding the nougat. The nougat tastes mainly of chocolate but does have a slight nutty aftertaste. 

Overall (despite how it sounds) I quite liked these. For a bag that only weighed 75g, it had loads in it -  easily over 50 pieces. Eaten individually none are that great but they do make a decent mix all together. The two larger chocolates are the tastiest by far with the shortbread slightly beating the nougat but I would like to see a more varied mix of flavours in a 'Party Mix' 

Still they were tasty enough! 

7/10 

Charleston Chew - Vanilla flavour

I'm ending my American review week (apart from my mega M&M post to come next week!) with a not quite chocolate, not quite a sweet bar - the Charleston Chew. Before I tried the Charleston Chew I assumed it was marshmallow covered in milk chocolate but it's actually a 'chewy flavoured nougat with a delicious chocolatey coating'. I think I was mistaken as this comes in a few flavours, vanilla (which I had), strawberry, chocolate and an actual marshmallow. 

The vanilla is actually quite powerful, the bar says to try frozen so I opened it a few hours before I wanted to eat it so I could freeze half and the vanilla and chocolate were very strong, in fact I'm writing this review the day after I ate it with the packet for reference and the wrapper still has a very strong vanilla scent! 

Anyway I wanted to try half normally and half frozen so I tried to snap the bar in half, the nougat would not budge so please excuse the photo! The day I ate it was very warm, especially in my kitchen and I didn't want the chocolate on the unfrozen half to melt so I popped it in the fridge. 

The bar is absolutey enormous - that's just one bar snapped in half. 

I tried the frozen half first and where I'd had issues getting the nougat in half earlier at room temperature I had the opposite problem now. It was very, very crisp and extremely brittle now. I even had to check I hadn't broken a tooth taking a bite of this side and whole chunks were just snapping off. The texture wasn't very pleasant so I tried the refrigerated side next. 

I thought I'd made a big mistake refrigerating it when I took it out, as it felt and looked the same as the frozen half but to eat it was completely different. The chocolate was crisp but melted straight away in my mouth and the nougat was wonderfully chewy and thick. I couldn't really taste anything in the frozen half but here the nougat flavour was sweet and quite a tasty vanilla. The texture is thicker than the nougat in our chocolate bars but not as thick as our actual Nougat bars and as the chew warmed to room temperature thinned out and got a bit creamier. 

The chocolate itself isn't bad, it's not great quality chocolate but it's better than Hershey's and fine on top of the nougat. 

Overall I enjoyed this, I wouldn't recommend freezing it as it took away the best part of the bar, the chewy texture. Freezing dulled the flavours they were best at room temperature but refrigeration gave the best texture by far. If your teeth are in bad shape though, give this bar a miss - a total jaw workout! 

Rating 7/10