Waitrose Jelly Mini Eggs

Mini Eggs come in a many different shapes, sizes and fillings, you have your standard sugar candy shell with chocolate centre, chocolate shelled with various fillings - Creme Egg style fondant or various flavoured creams and the slightly more luxurious truffle filled centres.

 I can't say I've seen a Jelly Mini Egg, sure there are plenty of Easter themed jelly beans but these aren't exactly jelly beans.. 

Soft jelly eggs in a crisp sugar shell. 

The Jelly Mini Eggs are one of a few non-traditional mini eggs Waitrose are selling, I'll be going back for the others (Marzipan/Ginger Truffle/Marc De Champagne & Amaretto/Cream Truffle) but at £3.50 for 100g/125g depending, they'll have to wait a while! 

The eggs look delightful, they're all egg shaped (a bug bear of mine after a certain other brand of Mini Egg but that's another review!) and all had the speckled egg markings. There aren't a huge variety of colours - only four, but the smaller variety meant I had a sufficient amount of each. There is no way they could get more than a minimum of three of each flavour in each packet if there were any more due to the sheer size of the eggs - they are humongous!!

I had a Candy King jelly bean left over from my Pick'n'Mix (I know, leftover Pick'n'Mix - I must be getting ill!!) and to be fair they were actually rather large for an ordinary jelly bean but just for comparison.. 

And that was a large standard bean and one of the smaller jelly eggs! 

Anyway..

The eggs are just plain weird. They have a hard shell, harder than the outside of a normal jelly bean and I had to give it a good solid bite to get in - and yes they're that big that I could eat each one in two bits. The inside of the egg was nothing like I expected, it's not like a jelly bean at all. It's not really firm but nowhere near as soft as a jelly bean and has a gritty kind of chew, but it's not chewy either. Am I confusing you yet? Because these sure confused me while I was eating them, I think you'd need to try them to truly understand how they feel, they're nothing like anything I've eaten before! That's definitely not a bad thing though.

On to the flavours, I'm going to guess the flavours are the actual flavourings used as they seemed to match up. 

The orange eggs were undoubtedly Orange flavoured, nothing new or exciting but very nice nonetheless. The white eggs threw me, I'm not going to lie, I'm so used to white jelly beans being marshmallow or coconut flavoured I initially convinced myself that white tasted a bit like marshmallow. Working through the other flavours and the ingredients list has left me to believe its actually Apricot flavoured though. Truth be told its not a flavour I'm very familiar with but either way marshmallow/apricot it was pretty damn tasty! 

Pink is usually some kind of berry in any sweet and here was no different. I tried one before I read the ingredients and I thought maybe strawberry, the ingredients say otherwise with Raspberry and once I'd read it, I could taste it. Very juicy and a definite fail safe. I'd kind of given up by the yellow, my brain and my tastebuds weren't connecting and I had to cheat and refer to the ingredients which inform me its probably Pineapple. I'm going to plead ignorance in that it's not a flavour used to often but I wish it was, it was very nice!  

Last but not least was green, usually the apple flavoured sweet but Waitrose have bucked the trend and gone for Pear. I think I've mentioned before I like the flavour of pear just not the texture and this sweet has just reinforced that. My god, sweet makers of Britain - forget about apple, its all about pear! Absolutely delicious and much to my surprise the best in the box. 

Rating:

I might be a bit vague on the flavours and unable to properly describe the texture, but trust me these are a must-try! They can't be compared to a jelly bean, they're a whole different kettle of fish. I'm very glad I chose these other the other more traditional style mini eggs. 

8/10 

Waitrose All Butter Mince Pies

I'm afraid this is going to be a pretty short review, I'm going purely by memory here - these didn't last long enough for me to remember I'd planned on reviewing them! 

I'd read a guide online to the best mass made mince pies and while the Waitrose version didn't win (I think Harrods actually managed it this year) they came either 2nd or 3rd and were the highest ranked that I'd be able to buy. 

I'm lucky I managed to take photos before I dug in, they smelt so good! Sweet, fruity mincemeat with the unmistakable festive spices. 

The insides are packed full of the good stuff but to get to it, I had to first get through the thick pastry. I need to buy sheets of this pastry ready made. It's delicious, sweet and so buttery it reminded me of all butter shortbread. It's thick enough that it held firm and I didn't lose any mincemeat when I took a bite but crumbly enough that it seemed to melt away in my mouth. 

The mincemeat is wonderfully thick too, it's just sweet enough with big juicy raisins but the traditional Christmas spices hold their own too. 

Really, really tasty. I just wish they were a bit cheaper, I've got to buy more and I really shouldn't be spending this sort of money on mince pies! 

8/10

The start of my Christmas Chocolates (and a few I forgot about!)

Wow I was supposed to blog about these weeks ago, I've noticed a lot of blogs slowing down recently so I suppose the madness that's Christmas has taken over everyone!

First up was Maynards Sour Tricks.

Apologies for the slightly blurry stolen from Google images picture but I completely forgot I had said I would blog about these and by the time I remembered, they were gone. Oops.

This is a seasonal Halloween bag from Maynards so unless any shops have some leftover I don't think you'll be able to get this again until next year. I'll probably buy these again it was nice to have a fizzy sour version, normally I buy the plain jellies but these were good. There's no point going into too much detail as they're off the shelves now… Must try harder!

Rating 6/10

Rowntree's Randoms sweet n sour.

The packet says new, are they new? I don't know how new by my late standards but I do know I haven't tried them before.

The packet has some nice pastel coloured, sugar coated squishy sweets. I can work out a snowman, a rocket, an icecream, milk shakes, a lock and possibly a tortoise? So far so random.

It also contains some typical fizzy jelly sweets. I can't lie I didn't really try too hard to work out what these are, I think there are some crowns, roller skates, a car and chess pieces in there though.

There isn't too much to say on this bag, it's an enjoyable bag of Rowntrees who usually manage to do sweets well and this is no different. I had a feeling I wouldn't get round to blogging about these straight away and so I usually make notes on my phone about something I plan to review. All these say is good - yellow ones not sour but too tart for me. I do remember that being the only sweet I wasn't keen on but the rest of the bag gets a thumbs up from me.

Rating 6/10

 Lidl Deluxe Butter Fudge

I loooove fudge. Any kind of fudge - chocolate covered fudge, harder chewy fudge, soft smooth fudge and the crumbly grainy fudge.

I think you can tell from the photo this is a lovely crumbly, melt in the mouth, grainy fudge. It's very buttery without being too rich. The texture and flavour are spot on and being from Lidl is a bargain too. I will be buying this again.

Rating 8/10

Waitrose Christmas Cracker Selection

I'm a sucker for gimmicks and when I saw this miniature 100g box of chocolates I wouldn't normally bother, however give me the same miniature chocolates in a box that looks and opens like a cracker and I'll buy it in a heartbeat!

The box was supposed to contain 9 chocolates - I got lucky and had 10 and my extra was milk chocolate fudge, not that I got to eat it as someone else in this house is rather partial or fudge too!

Dark chocolate orange crème

Milk chocolate strawberry crème

Milk chocolate coffee truffle

Milk chocolate caramel barrel

Milk chocolate biscuit in caramel

Milk chocolate Hazlenut in caramel

I didn't bother with pictures of the plain chocolate, or the toffee or fudge, they look the same in all boxes (I did notice the toffee is the same as the big 200g bags of toffee they sell) but as you can see from the pictures they are all nicely packed out chocolates with a good ratio of filling to shell. The flavours are good and I did enjoy this little box, the caramel is deliciously gooey and unlike the next product the coffee chocolate was the one that really stood out. It has a lovely strong coffee taste and smell and is easily my favourite in this box, however once Id noticed that the toffee included is the same as the cheaper,larger bags they sell in store (and that I already have sitting in my cupboard!) I was a little disappointed. I thought they'd at least put some special christmas chocolates in. Anyway they still tasted good.

Rating  7/10

Rittersport Kaffee + Nuss

My bar came back with a friend from Germany so I don't have any English info available but I think the name is pretty easy to work out.

I love rittersport bars. The milk chocolate is always of a good quality, they're nice and thick and the fillings are normally tasty and substantial.

I enjoyed the chewiness the nuts bring to the bar, but the coffee flavour was just underwhelming for me. I do however drink my coffee black and always put an extra scoop in the machine when it's just for me so other people may well find the coffee perfectly strong enough. It was just more of an aftertaste to me and being that it's the first word in the name of the bar I thought it would have more of a presence. I'm really dissapointed as I was so looking forward to this. It is another nice bar from rittersport though, it just didn't meet my coffee expectations sadly.

Rating 6/10