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!) 

Cadbury Big Taste - Triple Choc Sensation

Blah blah blah, Cadbury boycott, yadda yadda yadda.... I was tempted, I'm sorry!

Cadbury have released 6 "new" chocolates, 5 of which are Milka clones and the last is just a bag of mixed milk and white chocolate Buttons (yeah, I bought those too - I've been waiting 20 years for them!)

Three of the new bars are Big Taste Bars: one had Oreo inside - why when there's already a Dairy Milk bar with Oreo, I don't know - one with toffee and hazelnut - don't hold your breath for a review on that one, I reviewed the Milka version and there is no way this is much different or nicer - and finally the bar I have today, Triple Choc Sensation. 

A big bar with a big taste - 26cm long! Three chunky layers of Cadbury Dairy Milk, white chocolate and dark chocolate. 

The bars really are huge, three times the size of a standard bar and is sectioned into 7 x 2 blocks of 2 triangles. This was slightly annoying for my OCD as it made it a lot harder to separate into 3 (fair) portions - 2 for me and 1 for him! 

The wrapper and the name meant I was under the impression this would be a predominantly Dairy Milk chocolate bar if not at least an even amount of Dairy Milk compared to everything else. However the ingredients say each bar has 42% white chocolate, 25% dark chocolate and so the maximum amount of Dairy Milk can only be 33% and thats discounting any sugar, fat and who knows what else they want to stick in. 

Regardless it was only the white chocolate that I could smell once I'd peeled open the wrapper. 

The way the blocks are meant I could nibble the dark chocolate triangle off from the top. It's definitely not Bournville, I could tell from taste alone but Google informs me Cadbury Bournville has a minimum of 36% cocoa solids whereas the dark chocolate used here has a more respectable minimum of 45%. It's actually a lot less sweet than I expected, tasting far more like a plain chocolate yet considering it had more cocoa it was somehow blander. It's as if Cadbury haven't tried to make a dark chocolate but a plain chocolate - literally - it had barely any flavour at all. 

The bottom 2 layers proved impossible to separate, this could be a good thing going by Dairy Milks track record recently but what I did taste was unexpected. The milk chocolate is noticeable but the white chocolate is stronger, its not bad white chocolate - sugary and not really chocolate tasting at all - but its nostalgic in a way I suppose. I personally wouldn't want to eat a whole bar of it but Mr.1T would happily! 

Taking a bite of the three chocolates together completely changed the flavour. It no longer had the tastes of the bland dark chocolate, fake Dairy Milk or even the slightly overpowering white chocolate. The plain chocolate finally found its place, kind of dulling some of the sugariness from the milk and white and it began to taste just like an old school original Cadbury Easter Egg!!! 

Rating:

Now I'm not going to pretend it's good chocolate, if you want a mix of all 3 in a bar using good quality chocolate M&S have got you covered, this though, this is what I've been searching for in my Cadbury replacement hunt. 

It's cheap and sweet chocolate but it kind of tastes like my childhood and I really liked it... Woops!

7/10 

For an unbiased, level headed opinion check out Lucy's review of all three new Big Taste bars 

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 

Prazska Cokolada - White Chocolate

Last weeks Cinnamon Dark Chocolate wasn't the only sweet treat my parents bought home from Prague. I think this was meant for Mr.1T but they realised they'd already bought him enough (he's the favourite but they're my parents!) and so gave it to me instead. I assume they were for him as this is a sweet little box containing fifteen white chocolate squares, all foil wrapped and then a paper wrapper showing a different landmark  on top. 

The chocolates are smaller than say an After Eight, but they have a decent thickness to them meaning one would be just enough to hit the spot. That's not snacking works around here though! 

The chocolate had a delicious scent, I thought (no offence mum and dad!) these would be what I call - and actively seek out on my own holidays - tourist tat. You know, cheap stuff little local shops push as delicacies that the locals love, and charge an absolute fortune for but is really a bit naff. I was pleased though that it actually smelt like good chocolate and didn't waste much time getting stuck in. 

If I was surprised at the scent, the flavour blew me away. Us Brits play quite a large part in the Czech tourist trade and it shows in that all the products contain an English translation. I checked the ingredients after I'd eaten the first square and it confirmed what I could tell by taste. The chocolate contains a minimum 27% cocoa solids - impressive for a white chocolate, in comparison the Chokablok Christmas Pudding reviewed earlier in the week contained just 12% cocoa solids and Wikipedia's description of white chocolate is: a confection based on sugar, milk and butter without the cocoa solids. It even contains more cocoa butter than sugar which is nearly unheard of for a white chocolate and it really shows in the taste. Creamy and rich, still with a sweetness you have to expect but with a stronger vanilla flavour, a proper grown up white chocolate. 

I'm sure they are supposed to be a box you pick at or pass around but there's no way that was going to happen when they tasted this good! 

I've taken a look at the website for the shop and I'm seriously contemplating ordering a few bars! I don't care for white chocolate usually, its quite sickly, but the next person who goes to Prague is going to have a large order of these from me for sure! 

8/10

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

Cadbury Dairy Milk Winter Edition

This isn't a new bar of chocolate from Cadbury, it's been about for a few years now but it's a seasonal Christmas bar and it's so close to Christmas - my blog isn't anywhere near festive or chocolatey enough lately so why not! 

 The Winter Edition Dairy Milk is Dairy Milk chocolate shaped into Christmas trees with half of the little trees layered with white chocolate.

I have yet another bone to pick with Cadbury, and I bring it up in near enough every post I've written about them. It used to be when you opened a bar of Dairy Milk or a chocolate using Dairy Milk rather than their generic milk, you'd be hit with that wonderful milky instantly recognisable scent. So why now instead of that delicious smell, do I open any Dairy Milk product and my mind jumps to Cadbury Easter Eggs. Specifically the Buttons Easter eggs before the Mondelēz takeover. I was a Buttons Easter egg addict and so I'm confident I could pick it out of a line up and I'm sure this is the same stuff. I like gorging myself once a year on sickly sweet cheap crappy chocolate because I know that's what it is, it's never pretended to be Dairy Milk, so I really don't know why this should smell like it! 

Anyhow, the first few bites tasted like the old school Easter eggs too, although that might have been the power of persuasion convincing me otherwise. After a while I wasn't too dissapointed with the chocolate, it wasn't as bad as I anticipated but it still fell short of my Dairy Milk memories - not milky enough and a little too sweet. The white chocolate layers don't help on the sweetness, to be honest they don't bring much to the table in the way of flavour. They just have a sweeter more sugary taste which doesn't pop out too much against the already sweet milk, I think to really notice the difference the entire square would have to be a white chocolate rather than just a cap. Cadbury would probably cite production costs as the reason it's not, but if Marks & Spencer can do it on a mass scale with 3 different chocolates, I'm sure your empire can manage 2 Cadbury! 

I'll stick with the Marks & Sparks version, I think! 

6/10

Marks & Spencer Chocolates

Marks & Spencer have released a number of new chocolates, they've been out for a while but I've been so distracted by the amazing looking Christmas products I missed them until now. There are a few new small, one portion bars and three 100g bars; A caramel filled milk chocolate, a bar made up of milk, dark and white chocolate and a milk 'bubbly' bar. 

I skipped the Bubbly, aerated bars don't give me enough of a chocolate hit to enjoy them and got myself one of each of the other two. 

Caramel Filled Milk Chocolate 

I find sometimes when caramel is included with chocolate, that all I can smell is the caramel but the sweet milky chocolate was all I noticed to begin with.

It looked good, still sectioned into easily snappable small squares but more interesting than a normal block. 

I managed to drop mine before I'd even opened it and this led to the discovery that the chocolate shell is quite thin - one of the corner squares completely shattered. 

Hidden inside each square is a thick pocket of caramel. The top half of the chocolate as I mentioned, is quite thin so although percentage wise there's a lot more chocolate than caramel, it didn't feel or taste like it. The caramel is delicious - smooth and sticky with a lovely rich caramel flavour. 

The chocolate was a bit of a pain to eat as it melted very quickly and combined with the thin, easily breakable texture, I made a total mess of my hands, face and clothes! Still, it's of a good quality - creamy with a strong chocolate flavour that combines with the sweet rich caramel and rounds it all off nicely. 

It's quite a sweet bar but the sugary sweetness is countered by the richness of the caramel and the creaminess of the chocolate. Good all round! 

7/10 

Milk, Dark & White Chocolate 

This was the bar that caught my eye initially. It's such a good idea and I'm not sure why it's not more popular, I know I've been stuck deciding between the three types of chocolate before! 

I like how it looks, if three differently coloured chocolates didn't grab your attention straight away then the weird way it's all sectioned out will. It made it hard to snap blocks off but I never planned on this lasting more than one sitting anyway. The bar didn't have a predominant scent - just a general chocolatey one, nothing too sweet and pretty tempting. 

The way it's sectioned meant it was near enough impossible to break a clean square of just one type of chocolate but I suppose that is the whole point of this bar. I managed to nibble corners off to try each flavour individually and was pleased with what I found. I managed to split my wrapper right through the ingredients but I'm 99% sure the dark chocolate says 50%. That's not quite dark enough for me normally but I appreciate lots of people don't like dark chocolate, still it has a decent dark chocolate flavour that actually seems a little richer and deeper than it probably should do against the white and milk. The white was quite sweet alone as I expected but it had a good flavour too, like a better quality Milky Bar. The milk chocolate was fine too, quite creamy and smooth - another nice quality chocolate. 

All three flavours blended well, even though they are in blocks it tasted as though they were all swirled together and all combinations of the three were delicious. I liked the idea of the bar but I thought that Marks & Spencers might have cut corners - essentially it's a bit of a novelty bar and most companies would just shove any old chocolate in there. I was very pleased to find this wasn't the case with M&S though and I was impressed with the quality of the chocolates they used. I'd be perfectly happy with any of the three alone but the mix of all three is one I think I'll go out of my way to buy again in the future. 

8/10 

Asda Giant Pinwheel Buttons

Milk chocolate and white chocolate buttons with a sticky caramel suprise

Asda's blue 'New!' signs failed me this week. I know these Giant Pinwheel Buttons are new, I went out of my way to find them but there were no signs or displays pointing them out so I actually had to use my eyes for once! 

For the sake of the review I'll pretend I didn't know what the suprise was going to be.. 

The buttons smelt unexpectedly caramelly and quite sweet. 

I was impressed with the size and amount of buttons in the bag. They aren't as big in diameter as Cadbury Giant Buttons but they're twice the thickness, they're also about double the size of Cadbury Caramel Nibbles too. 

The sticky suprise hidden inside is a thick pool of runny, gooey caramel. It's very sweet but does have a nice caramel flavour to it too. 

Of the two chocolates, although there are exactly the same amounts of both, the white chocolate has the stronger flavour. Both chocolates take a backseat to the caramel but aren't overwhelmed by it, the buttons have a nice blend of all three. I was worried that these would go the same way as the Caramac Buttons - a few in and the sugar starts burning my throat - but it never happened. Although the milk chocolate is the least noticable flavour it plays an important part in adding a milkiness and kind of 'diluting' the overload of sugary sweetness found in both white chocolate and caramel. 

As it stands there are two kind of similar products about; Cadbury Caramel Nibbles and Caramac Giant Buttons. I would take a bag of these over either of those any day. The milk and white chocolate mix improve on the Cadbury format of buttons with a real caramel filling and are a mainly caramel flavoured button, like Caramac Buttons, but my thoughts were focused on the flavour rather than how sweet they were.

7/10 

Asda Extra Special Nuts

I reviewed KP Frosted Honey Roast nut selection last week and I wrote at the start of that review I always forget about nuts, however my next shopping trip was to Asda. They make it so easy for me to find new stuff as they literally have giant blue arrows pointing to the new stuff on the shelves. Those giant blue arrows cost me a fortune but they found me two new bags of chocolate covered nuts this week.

Extra Special Sea Salted Chocolate Almonds 

Sea salted almonds with a white chocolate and caramel coating and dark chocolate couverture marbling. 

They looked beautiful, it almost felt a shame to eat them. Almost! Each almond was fairly large and all were pretty evenly sized, I hate openening a packet of say, chocolate raisins and getting 5 or 6 large ones and the rest being pathetically tiny. 

White chocolate with caramel makes up 70% of the final product, almonds 27% and the dark chocolate couverture a measly 1.5% so I was expecting a much lighter covering but they looked milky rather than anything. They couldn't have tasted further from milk chocolate if they tried. The caramel was outright the main flavour and a delicious caramel at that. I had no clue on earth what couverture was so wiki explained for me again: 

Couverture chocolate is a very high-quality chocolate that contains extra cocoa butter (32–39%). The higher percentage of cocoa butter, combined with proper tempering gives the chocolate more sheen, firmer "snap" when broken, and a creamy mellow flavor.

That certainly explains the delicious creamy, rich flavour each bite had. I couldn't fully taste any dark chocolate but it plays a very important part here, probably the most important. As this is a white chocolate with caramel I expected sweetness and lots of it. Throat burning sweetness. It wasn't bitter at all but instead of tasting like sugar (Caramac giant buttons come to mind) the actual flavour was all I noticed. Mainly caramel with the white and dark chocolate playing off each other for a balanced creamy, addictive taste. 

The almonds were good, crunchy and with a flavour that's subtle against the coating but still noticable. They weren't overly salty as they easily could have been, but just enough to add to the addictiveness of the bag. 

Asda say they're Extra Special and wonderfully moreish and I agree 100%. I'm not buying any to put out at Christmas, I'm keeping them all for me!!  

8/10 

Maple Chocolate Pecans 

Maple flavoured pecans with a white chocolate coating and Belgian milk chocolate marbling 

This bag had more of an overall nutty scent to it but what chocolate I could smell, smelt milky rather than an outright white chocolate. 

Although I tried these after the Almond bag and should have known better, I expected that as they were white chocolate they'd be sugary sweet. They were sweet, but had more of a delicious creamy flavour. The pecans themselves were softer than the almonds had been, they were still crunchy but a lot easier on the teeth to chew! 

The chocolate coating is delicious, it's mainly a white chocolate but uses a good quality white chocolate - it even has 22% cocoa solids - and so it actually tastes of chocolate, not sugar. There is a very small amount of milk chocolate added to create the marbling effect, small enough that the amount in percent isn't listed but again it's good chocolate. Although 65% of the whole bag is white chocolate and the milk is anywhere under 10%, there were a few times I could taste the milk more than the white. 

I was waiting for the maple flavouring to appear, it's a minuscule amount - 1% of the bag and although I couldn't taste it at all in the smaller nuts where the emphasis was on the coating, in the larger nuts I could and they had a delicious maple flavour that is quite strong and really went well with the chocolates. 

These again were really good but not quite as addictive as the caramel almonds.

7/10 

Blood 'N' Bones Ice Scream

Happy Halloween! 

When I think of Halloween, I think of chocolate, sweets, pumpkins etc - Vanilla ice cream with a raspberry ripple, marshmallows and white chocolate curls don't scream that it's the spooky season but you know me, I'll never turn down ice cream. 

I thought this was a Co-Op own brand ice cream but that doesn't seem to be the case looking at the tub.

As I thought it was own brand I wasn't suprised to find the ice cream, to put it nicely, was a bit crap. I find there are two types of vanilla ice cream in the world; the first actual vanilla flavoured and the second more of a plain, neutral flavour that doesn't taste of much at all. The vanilla base here was annoyingly the latter. Texturally it wasn't too bad, nothing like your thick luxurious Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry's, a bit thicker and creamier than I expected but there was no real vanilla flavour. 

I came to the marshmallow pieces first, they were nice - soft and squidgy but again lacking any outright marshmallow flavour, though I did notice each mouthful got slightly sweeter if there were marshmallows included. 

They don't stand out too much in the photo and they didn't in person either, but the slightly yellower parts of the pint are the tiny white chocolate curls. They followed suit and added nothing in terms of taste. One small bonus of the ice cream being of a lower quality was that it melted quite quickly, the chocolate curls were still frozen so while I didn't notice the flavour, I could at least feel the crunch against the smoother ice cream. 

The saviour of the pint was the raspberry ripple. Strong and sweet, it had a lovely raspberry flavour. It wasn't very thick but still managed to be syrup-y and was the most enjoyable element of the pint. I can't help but think though that the reason I liked the ripple was because the rest of the tub was so plain tasting, in any other ice cream I have a feeling I'd be moaning it was too thin and sugary rather than pure raspberry. It didn't seem that way at the time but the rest was so boring. 

I'm not too annoyed about Blood'N'Bones. Sure it had no flavour whatsoever but the texture was pretty nice - quite creamy with soft squidgy marshmallows, crunchy chocolate and slightly thicker sauce - it just didn't taste of much. Still, I bought it for the novelty factor, although I am wondering what any of it has to do with Halloween... 

4/10 

Hershey's Candy Cane

Last weeks Wednesday review was a dissapointing chocolate from Duty Free in the good old U.S.A, I thought I'd stick with America and seeing as all my reviews lately have had a seasonal theme to them, go with one of theirs. 

This is Hershey's Candy Cane.

I incorrectly assumed, as the packaging is very similar, that this would be Hershey's cookie & cream bar with some candy cane pieces but it's actually a mint candy with candy bits. 

The bar is in the same long, wide, very thin shape as all the single serving Hershey's I've tried are and it looks like a white chocolate bar with chicken pox, yum! I'll try to not be too biased in this review but it's going to be hard - I don't particularly like Hershey's and I don't really like mint chocolate. In fact I don't even know why I let my husband talk me into buying these.. 

If there was any confusion before as to what the candy (not chocolate) was, the smell of mint smacked me in the face before I'd even properly opened the wrapper. It smelt nice and fresh but it was all I could smell, no hint of the sickly sweet base Hershey's use. 

My first few squares were awful. There's no other way to put it. Ridiculously minty which once I'd finally swallowed each mouthful was followed by a strange sweet creamy flavour. It didn't have the weird flavour I remember some Hershey's to have but it could well have been there, the mint would have overpowered it though. The best way to describe it would be like brushing your teeth then having a big bite of a Milky Bar chocolate before you've rinsed or spat. 

Thankfully the mint dulled down a little in the rest of the bar but then I had the opposite problem - taking a bite of Milky Bar and starting to brush your teeth before you've eaten it. 

The candy pieces added some nice crunch to the bar but no flavour, they are sugar sprinkles basically so probably were what caused this to be overly sweet (I ended up with the dreaded throat burn afterwards) but again the mint was so powerful. 

It got better the further into the bar I ate, purely because it wasn't as minty and the creamy candy became the first flavour but really its only because the first bites were so bad.   

Overly sweet, far too minty and not great quality chocolate (candy). 

I've got a feeling Mr.1T will like it because he loves sickly sweet white chocolate and likes mint chocolate, but there's a good chance it will be too much even for him. 

3/10 

Thorntons Candyfloss

Thorntons have three new chocolates out, Candyfloss, Toffee Apple Caramel and Toasted Marshmallow. All three are included in a selection box as well as in individual bags and they're being sold in the place I hate most at the moment - W.H.Smiths in a 2 for £1.60 offer. I got myself one of each and Mr.1T a bag of the Candyfloss too as white chocolate is his favourite. 

The Candyfloss chocolates are Candyfloss flavour parfait in white chocolate with pink sugar crystals. 

 I bought these at the weekend and before I had a chance to try them Kev over at Kevs Snack Reviews posted his review of the Candyfloss - read it here. Now I normally trust Kevs judgment but if you follow him on Twitter or his blog you'll know he has been sugar free, so I decided to give these a fair try as that may have influenced his opinion. 

There were eight large chocolates in the bag and they smelt incredibly sweet. The pink sugar crystal coating covered everything and they were quite sticky to touch, though that may be as I'd stored them in a quite warm cupboard. 

The parfait centre has a thick mousse like consistency and is Candyfloss and raspberry flavoured. It's extremely thick, super sweet and did actually taste like Candyfloss.

One difference I did notice between myself and Kev was that I could taste the white chocolate, this might be because my chocolates were all quite different in how thick the chocolate shell was or it could be because of Kevs sugar ban - the mega sweet centre might have overwhelmed the chocolate! Most of mine had a thick chocolate coating and it was also very sweet, every mouthful I had started with the taste of the Candyfloss filling, a short sweet white chocolate flavour then straight back to the Candyfloss/raspberry. 

The texture was a big bonus, crunchy sugar pieces, a thick chocolate shell with a decent bite and a thick creamy middle. An ideal mixture of a mouthfeel for me. 

To be honest these were nice and I enjoyed the first couple but they got too sweet too quickly. Even Mr.1T, who's motto is the sweeter the better, found them to be too sweet. I'd like these in the mixed box as one or two would be just right, especially eaten amongst some darker, richer chocolates but a whole bag - even though it's a small one and only has eight - was just too much. I'd be interested to try this filling with a milk or dark chocolate though. 

Rating

This bag as a whole - 6/10 

As part of mixed box - 7/10