Müller Pud Corners

The two new Müller pud corners came out a while ago but I've waited until I saw single tubs for sale before buying which is why my review is a little late. 

They're quite small for Müller corners at only 85g but they do for a quick snack and for the health conscious are made with over 75% skimmed milk - something I wish I'd noticed before buying these. 

First up I tried Toffee with milk chocolate coated digestives. 

I tried the chocolate digestive balls first and they were pretty tasty. They did actually taste like tiny little balls of chocolate digestives so that's that. 

Next I tried the dairy dessert (not yoghurt), and it threw me straight away. Firstly, the dessert was so watery. Some Müller yoghurts, especially the light ones, do develop a bit of a watery film on the top so I saved my judgement on the texture for once I'd stirred it all up. But the flavour was what really confused me with that first mouthful. I double checked I'd picked the right one, as my first impression on the flavour was coffee!? Toffee and coffee might sound alike but they aren't really two flavours that taste alike, strange. 

Once I'd mixed it all in the coffee flavour disappeared,maybe I just picked the one weirdly flavoured part out of the whole part but more likely the whole concentration of flavour was on that one spoon. To put it nicely (honestly) the dairy dessert was kind of crap. It was far too watery and that has to be because skimmed milk is used. Does anyone even drink skimmed milk? It's just barely milk flavoured water and if it's used here to keep the calories down its pointless, maybe next time they should just put a few less biscuits in. The rest of the tub the dessert had no flavour - coffee/toffee or anything it was plain and the only redeeming feature was the small crunchy chocolate digestives. Thankfully I had a lot of them. Next time though I'll just buy a packet of chocolate digestives though. 

Rating 5/10 

I put off the chocolate with milk & white coated cereal balls for as long as I could but it's only got a couple of days left in date and I was hungry so I gave in and ate it. 

Once again I tried the milk and white chocolate coated cereal balls first, to pay extreme attention to detail I noticed the white were slightly sweeter and the milk chocolate a little milkier but to be perfectly honest I couldn't tell the difference mixed in the dessert. 

I didn't bother trying the dessert separately beforehand, judging by previous experience I wasn't missing out on much. 

As I said at the start, these corners are slightly smaller and normally I wouldn't moan but while they've reduced the amount of dessert you get, you still get the same amount of pieces to mix in. While that's good because the mix ins are the tasty part it makes it ridiculously hard to actually mix them in. 

This is actually after I'd stirred them in and so I was left with two options the first I tried - carry on mixing - and ended up with small cereal balls all over the table and floor. The second I was reluctantly left with, the top layer an extremely sweet 90% cereal pieces mixed with a little dessert and the bottom layer a watery, flavourless cereal-less dessert. As I expected, the dessert was just as disappointing as the toffee corner. 

Another 5/10. And only because of the amount of mix ins

Ülker - Albeni

For today's foreign snack I've left Wawel of Poland and headed to Turky for the Albeni bar from Ülker. Ülker are a company I'm already quite familiar with, other people might recognise their pistachio block of chocolate which is sold in quite a few supermarkets. 

The Albeni bar is a milk chocolate coated bar with caramel and biscuit - kind of one big Twix and what dya know, I had a Twix yesterday so this is the perfect time to compare. 

It's a 40g bar so a little heavier than Cadbury and the like and I struggled removing this from the end of the wrapper as it's quite wide and bulky but strangely it didn't feel like 40 grams worth of chocolate, it felt a lot lighter. 

I took the obligatory cross section photo and the bar just crumbled. It doesn't look it but I actually cut this with a knife, I might have had better results had I just snapped it in half with my bare hands!

Ignoring the mess of broken biscuit everywhere I took a bite. The biscuit tasted, felt and looked stale. There was no crunch at all, it was chewy - the exact same chewiness you get when you leave an open packet of biscuits out and try to eat the first few. 

I tried to get past this and look for the flavour but all I could taste was the sweet, slightly buttery biscuit. There was a mild caramel flavour but the chocolate might aswell have not been there. The chocolate coating is very thin and the caramel lacked the gooey 'ooziness' I've come to expect from caramel bars, it might well be but compared to other caramel biscuit chocolates there just wasn't enough of it. If anything rather than 'milk chocolate coated bar with caramel and biscuit' this should be a biscuit topped with caramel and chocolate - if that makes sense. 

Still it was quite hard to notice any of that as I couldn't get past the chewy stale taste of the biscuit. 

And for lesson number three hundred and who knows for me... Check the dates on your snacks too! 

Turns out (after if eaten the lot) this went out of date at the start of June, thanks for that Tesco! I know I'm not going to get ill from out of date chocolate but that's not really the point. 

I'll rate my particular bar 1/10 

And giving the benefit of the doubt up it to a 5/10, even if the biscuit had been fresh there's not enough chocolate and caramel in comparison for me. 

Valor chocolates - Crocan chocolate con leche + American Brownie

This has to be the most reviews I've done in a week! I sent my husband shopping and he came home with 5 new chocolate bars, 3 new bags of chocolate, some white chocolate raisins, 7 Galaxy ripples, 2 pints of lemon sorbet, some Müller corners and a couple of sad looking ready meals. I think I'll send him food shopping more often!

Because he chose (and paid for) all this weeks treats I couldn't stop him from eating his fair share before I had a chance to review any, which is why half of this gigantic 200g bar of Valor Crocan chocolate con leche + American Brownie is missing in the picture above. 

We spent some time in Spain a few years ago and I can only remember a few phrases here and there, one (the most important when you're spending all day every day in Spanish waiting rooms) being "té/café con leche"- tea/coffee with milk. Being the genius I am I gather chocolate con leche is milk chocolate. 

This is supposed to contain 10% brownie pieces and 3% cereal but I think that's another underestimation, this is the back of my bar and not only did it seem there were more cereal bits than brownie but there seemed to be more than the chocolate too!

He bought this from B&M who are more well known for their bargains than good quality chocolate, the one near me tends to stock novelty chocolate and a few imports so I didn't have high hopes for this, expecting a combination of the two. As I said before this is a huge bar, double the size of most sharing bars and I was pleased to find that it was nice and thick, I hate it when companies make a bar look big by stretching it out and the chocolate ends up matchstick thin. The chocolate itself was surprisingly tasty, it has a minimum of 30% cocoa solids and although sugar comes before the cocoa butter, milk and cream powder in the ingredients it wasn't overly sugary but a nice mixture of creamy, milky and sweet. It went down nicely and for the price I'd buy another block of this size of just the plain chocolate quite happily. It's not high quality great stuff but it does the job. 

The texture is the winning factor for me here. The cereal pieces are very crispy and crunchy, they didn't have a flavour I could pick out but they're certainly noticable in the overall bar. The brownie pieces are huge. The photo I have doesn't do them justice, they are soft and chewy and have an actual brownie texture. Not only do they feel and chew like a real brownie but they were big enough to get whole chunks to eat alone and they tasted authentic too, the flavour was strong enough that it overpowered the chocolate for most of the bar. 

All in all I liked this, it does what it says on the packet - a milky, creamy chocolate bar with a lovely crunchy, chewy texture that actually tasted like I was eating a brownie. 

Rating 7/10 

Cadbury Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Rocky Mallow Road

Another day another new product for Cadbury, the new bar is from the Marvellous Creations line and is replacing the banana bar and the cookie bar (I believe). The Marvellous Creations range seem to be Cadburys take on Willy Wonka and feature all kinds of strange mash ups in chocolate bars, bags and ice creams - please please please Cadbury bring the entire Australlian Marvellous Creations to the UK especially Rainbow Rockin' Bears!! 

This chocolate bar is Rocky Mallow Road, each country apparently has its own take on Rocky Road according to Wikipedia, the U.K ingredients are chocolate, marshmallow, biscuit, raisins and sultanas. Australia's are chocolate, marshmallow, desiccated coconut, glacé cherries, nuts, and Turkish delight(?). Finally the USA's are chocolate, marshmallows and walnuts or almonds. Cadburys Rocky Mallow Road has milk chocolate with marshmallow, strawberry flavour jellies and shortcake biscuit. Where the strawberry jellies came from who knows, but there you have it.

The bar looks identical from the outside to the previous Marvellous Creations bars, oddly shaped blocks and lumps and bumps where it's full of extra ingredients. The chocolate used is Dairy Milk and I think most people have tried that before so I'll skip describing that part. 

I fully expected the usual smell of Dairy Milk when I opened the wrapper so I was a bit surprised to first and foremostly smell strawberry and the sweet sugary smell of marshmallow. 

Taking a bite was the same case, sure I had the texture of chocolate in my mouth but even though visibly they seem the least in the bar, all I could taste was the strawberry jelly. It's very strong! I assumed the jelly pieces would be similar to jelly beans but they're actually little squares of jelly!! While this gives a stronger flavour it makes for a strange texture as once the chocolate has melted away you're left with a very sticky, chewy jelly that ended up stuck in my teeth. The marshmallows are also very chewy, the strawberry tended to drown it out a little but as there are more of the marshmallows in each bar, they did make themselves known soon enough. I didn't have that much biscuit in mine and while it didn't have too much of a noticable flavour they provided a very welcome texture change to smooth chocolate and chewy jellies and marshmallows.

The wrapper claims 7% marshmallows, 5% strawberry jelly and 5% biscuits but I found that hard to believe, it must be a low estimate because the bar I got was absolutely jam packed full of pieces, so much so I struggled to taste the chocolate at times! The strawberry jelly was by far the most dominant flavour and texture, it tastes nothing like other strawberry filled chocolate bars I've tried - it legitimately tastes like strawberry jelly. The flavours all went well with the Dairy Milk - I know there's a lot going on here and for some it might be a bit much but I really did like it, it's fun if that makes sense, I said on Twitter it's like a fairground in a chocolate bar! 

If you don't like strawberry, or you don't like chewy in a chocolate bar you won't like this. If you're into darker, more grown up chocolate you won't like this. But if you take it for what it is, a bit of fun, probably a bit too sweet and a bit weird all round you should enjoy it! 

Rating 7/10 

Mr Kipling limited edition Cocktail Fancies

I've said before I don't really like cakes, I'd normally walk straight past these Mr Kipling Fancies but a Daiquiri is my absolute favourite cocktail so I had to try the Cocktail fancies. 

There are eight to a box, a strange number if you ask me considering that gets you three of the cream coloured Piña Colada flavour, three of the orange Peach Bellini flavour and only two pink Raspberry Daiquiri. 

All three are your normal sponge Fancie with a vanilla flavoured topping but the cocktail flavours lie in the fondant icing. There is no alcohol in any of the cakes. Sadly. 

I don't like fondant. That is what it is with these type of cakes, I'll happily eat as many Fairy Cakes as you can put in front of me but that horrible icing you can keep thank you very much! 

The cakes were fluffy and moist, tasty for a mass produced cake, the vanilla cream was fine too - not too much and not too strong tasting, in fact it got lost a little but the texture was good with the sponge cake and the thick icing. 

I started with Peach Bellini, as I don't really care for peach so though I'd get the one I was least looking forward to eaten first. I'd read on other blogs (linked in the side bar >>) that people were quite disappointed as it wasn't very peachy. That wasn't the case with the one I picked out of the box at all! When I had all three cakes infront of me all I could smell was peach! The flavour was much the same, a sweet strong Peach, I couldn't taste any champagne though but the Peach could have overpowered it. Really tasty flavour, despite my usual dislike of peach! 8/10 

I then tried the Piña Colada flavour. While it had a nice summery taste to it I couldn't have picked out Pineapple or coconut at all. I even looked on the box to double check what this was supposed to be and I definitely couldn't taste either in my cake. It was nice but coming after the Peach Bellini it has to get a 6/10 

Last but not least (hopefully) was Raspberry Daiquiri. My Daiquiri of choice is banana if fresh ones are available, closely followed by strawberry but raspberry will do just fine. The raspberry was quite a mild flavour and left more of a lingering aftertaste rather than the flavour jolt the peach gave me. The flavour is described as raspberry Daiquiri rather than raspberry but I couldn't taste any rum flavour at all. Another light, tasty cake but not as strong as the flavour in the peach. rating 7/10 

Overall I really enjoyed these little Fancies, they tasted very summery and would go perfect with a glass of something sweet and fizzy on a warm evening in the garden! Hopefully they'll still be on sale by the time an evening like that rolls round in this country! 

Rating 7/10 

Wawel Maciek Adwokat

It's Wednesday so another foreign treat and another Wawel bar! This is Maciek Adwokat. I thought Maciek meant milk, as in milk chocolate but according to Google translate it means POTBELLY?!? So thanks Wawel, that's a bit offensive... This is a milk chocolate bar though with Advocaat filling, if you don't know what Advocaat is, here is the wiki on it "Advocaat or Advocaatenborrel is a traditional Dutch alcoholic beverage made from eggs, sugar and brandy.^[] The rich and creamy drink has a smooth, custard-like flavor and is similar to eggnog. The typical alcohol content is generally somewhere between 14% and 20% ABV. Its contents may be a blend of egg yolks, aromatic spirits, sugar or honey, brandy, vanilla and sometimes cream (or evaporated milk)" Advocaat is the alcoholic ingredient in a Snowball, which I know I've tried but it's been a while! 

If you've read my previous Wednesday posts you'll know Wawel don't muck about when it comes to the filling and Adwokat is no different, the filling takes up 45.5% of the bar and actually contains 2% alcohol and 1.8% egg yolks so quite authentic on ingredients. I purchased this on a Tesco self service till and even got I.D'd for it! 

Opening it up the chocolate was the main smell but there was a faint alcoholic-y scent to it, I haven't had Advocaat for years so I couldn't tell you if it was true to the drink but there was a hint of booze there. The filling was once again very thick and I actually managed to separate the centre from the chocolate with this bar and eating it alone it could be quite gritty. It has a creamy flavour to it, is quite sweet and rich and very enjoyable actually. I wouldn't compare the taste to a custard though but that is me going by the Wikipedia here, Advocaat itself might taste nothing like custard to me! 

I also got to taste the chocolate alone, it has 30% cocoa solids so isn't too sweet and is quite creamy. I found my favourite way to eat this bar was like a Creme egg - bite a bit off, eat the filling then the outside - but the 'normal' way was just as tasty too. 

Even though this only contains 2% alcohol it wasn't very evenly distributed in my bar, for the first few squares I found the centre very tasty but lacking any real alcohol flavours despite the scent. I then got to the last two squares which is where all the booze had settled apparently! Those last two little blocks were like eating a square of solidified pure alcohol!! Those parts weren't as nice as the rest of the bar but I wish some other alcoholic chocolates were as strong as them! 

Of the three Wawel bars I've previously reviewed this is my favourite, and I think they also sell it in a massive 200g bar too. 

Rating 7/10 

Nakd Fruit Salad Fruit & nut nibbles

Just a small post for now and it's an extra to the Nakd Fruit & nut nibbles post, found here. 

Before I start I can't praise Nakd enough. Recently I've had a family member become quite ill and as a result we've had to find low salt and sodium foods for her. Real food is pretty easy but her sweet tooth matches mine so snacks have been a nightmare. Proper dark chocolate has no salt but Cadbury Bournville is as dark as she'll go and so it's been hard. I've preached about the healthy side of Nakd before but I was delighted to realise that, with the exception of salted caramel, the nibbles and bites have no salt! We gave her some and she absolutely loved them so nice one Nakd!! 

On to the review, I finally found the Fruit Salad packet, all the shops near me only stock the toffee, salted caramel and strawberry packs so that's why this is a bit late. 

Texture and looks wise they're identical to the previous bags aswell as in ingredients so I'll stick to the flavour.

I'm unsure as to what each individual fruit flavour is as its not listed and none seemed to stand out above the rest but these were delicious. It's a lovely fruity jumble that's lovely and sweet and seems almost summery in taste. As usual a tasty, healthy product from Nakd and one I'll buy again.

Rating 7/10 

Cadbury Boost Bites

While on the hunt for the new Cadbury Marvellous Creations rocky road bar - which I still haven't found - I stumbled across this 'sharing sized' bag of Cadbury Boost Bites. They snuck these out quietly, I had no clue they even existed! I like a Cadbury Boost, especially when I need an afternoon pick me up but I find they can be very very sweet, to the point of feeling like I need to brush my teeth immediately after eating one, so I was hoping these smaller bites would be the same flavour without the sticky mouth feeling! 

It's one of the smaller sized sharing bags, weighing in at 108g but you do get a fair amount of the bites. They're quite small at about an inch long each but as with a standard sized boost each little piece is deceptively heavy. 

Opening the bag I was greeted with the same scent as I am when I open the wrapper of a Boost - sugar, sugar and more sugar! You can smell the chocolate, if you're not familiar with Boost its not Dairy Milk but just the ordinary chocolate Cadbury use, but it's clearly a very sweet chocolate. 

I was pleased to find that these really are just tiny little Boosts, with one small exception. I normally write a little bit about the ingredients when I write up my reviews, but I noticed something when I ate them that's made me look up the ingredients of a Boost bar to compare the two. While eating them they seemed to have more of a caramel flavour and the chocolate shell seemed to be less noticable. I don't have a normal bar to hand but according to the Sainsburys website (the only place with full ingredient info) your standard boost has 26% caramel and 3% biscuits whereas the Boost Bites have 28% caramel and 1% biscuit. So I wasn't imagining the increased caramel, though maybe that explains why the chocolate flavour isn't as strong. 

Anyway these are lovely little bites, good gooey, chewy caramel mixed with milk chocolate and crunchy biscuit pieces, which are my favourite textures in chocolate and they were easier to eat than one bigger block. The smaller bites make it easier for portion control but to be honest I found these so moreish I ate the lot so that might not work! 

Well done Cadbury for not messing with a tried and tested old favourite. 

Rating 7/10 

Swizzels Drumstick Bon Bons

Today's review is of one of my favourite sweets - the good old Bon Bon. This particular bag comes from the company Swizzels Matlow, you might recognise them from some of their other products; Squashies, Refreshers, Parma Violets, Rainbow Drops, Love Hearts and the lolly that these Bon Bons are flavoured on - Drumsticks. 

There has been some questions on what type of Bon Bon these are so to clear that up now, these are the round, hard, chewy type. The kind that sometimes have a liquid centre although these don't. 

The Drumstick Bon Bons come in a sharing sized bag and there are a lot packed in there. Drumsticks are raspberry and milk flavoured apparently - it's been such a long time since I ate one I would have been stumped before to tell you that, but when I opened these the smell was very familiar and one I'd definitely associate with the Drumstick lolly. 

Biting into one I was pleased with the texture. I think these types of Bon Bon should be hard to the bite leading into a nice chewy mouthful and should take a while to eat and these were just that. As you can see in the photo some were more raspberry flavoured, others milk and the rest had a pretty even mixture. I found the ones where the raspberry flavouring took up half of the sweet or more might aswell have not had any milk flavour at all as the raspberry was quite overpowering. The milk ones were more of a milky/creamy taste rather than an outright milk, some tasted quite plain to be truthful and all of them led to an eventual raspberry aftertaste. 

The flavours were nice, they weren't dull but not very strong like a lot of Bon Bons I've become accustomed to! I enjoyed these but they don't come close to my top two Bon Bon flavours - strawberry and toffee! 

Rating 6/10 

Edited to add - the more I think about it the more I realised Drumsticks aren't really a sweet/lolly known for a very strong or vibrant flavour so in that respect they've actually got the taste pretty spot on. If you enjoy the Drumsticks you'll enjoy these - there is also a Refreshers version available that I'd like to try even more now as I think they are flavours that would lend to a Bon Bon very well! 

7/10 

Wawel Krówkowy mleczny

It's a Wednesday! Also known as hump day to many, pizza night in our house and the day I'll hopefully be continuing my weekly review of a foreign food. Now it just needs a catchy name - suggestions welcome! 

Carrying on with the Wawel brand from Poland, I chose Krówkowy mleczny 'milk chocolate bar with caramel filling (50%)'. It's quite a big bar, weighing in at 48g and as you can see, taking up a fair part of a side plate. 

Unlike last weeks bar the chocolate shell of the bar felt quite thin and if you look carefully at the top right of the photo you can see where it had snapped before I'd even removed it from the wrapper. This can probably be explained by the fact the caramel and the chocolate unusually have an exactly equivalent percentage here, it's not often there is literally just as much filling as there is chocolate! 

I didn't get to try unadulterated chocolate as the caramel was so thick and sticky, try as I might I just couldn't get a piece without any on and as the chocolate was quite thin when I tried to scrape the caramel away it just crumbled! 

I was slightly worried looking at a cross section as it looked just like last weeks not so impressive Toffi bar. To taste, it was better though. Despite appearances it was a lot less gritty than the previous filling, a lot smoother and creamier yet just as thick. It was still super sweet and very rich - the Polish must have very sweet teeth!! The sweetness meant I'd liked to have eaten this slowly a square at a time but the fragile chocolate didn't allow for that and I ended up with shards of chocolate and blobs of caramel all over the plate. 

The caramel flavour is pretty overwhelming, I did get a touch of milky, creamy chocolate but not enough to review. I did enjoy this bar more than the Toffi and it is quite nice but again I found it exceedingly sweet and I couldn't have eaten a bigger sized bar than this. 

Rating 6/10 

Galaxy Duet - Cookies & Cream

This is the second of the Galaxy Duet bars, the first you can find here. The Cookies & Cream flavour is the same format, one side with the cookie element, the other with the cream. 

As the two sides are only separated by a thin section of chocolate when I snapped a small part of the top off, they came apart so as before I tried each portion alone before tasting them as they are intended. 

The first side I tried was the cookie, compared to the shortcake before it seemed like there was a lot more of the cookie but the packet lists it at only 3.2%. Even so the cookie flavour was clear and went well with the chocolate. Besides the taste of the cookie the pieces bought some welcome crunchy texture to the smooth chocolate and I'd be quite happy if I'd picked up a bar with just this inside it. 

I then tried the cream side, it's described as a lightly whipped filling and in mouthfeel did bring a bit of creaminess to the already silky chocolate. I'm not sure if there was a proper cream flavour as I find Galaxy chocolate already quite 'creamy' and it was hard to distinguish between the filling and the chocolate. Although to be fair the packet only says lightly whipped filling - not a flavoured whipped filling so maybe it is only supposed to be the texture but either way the chocolate was the stand out flavour in this side. 

Both sides eaten together were OK. Neither flavour was dominant - that was left to the chocolate - but of the two, the cookie was stronger. It is a tasty bar of chocolate but really it tasted to me of a Galaxy bar with some cookies mixed in, it was kind of missing the cream part. I've had some really delicious cookies and cream bars in the past and this just fell a bit short, a bit disappointing really! 

Hopefully my version was just a dud so if you try one and find the cream to be different please let me know as I had high hopes for this! 

Of the two I definitely preferred the Caramel & Shortcake 

Rating 6/10 

Maryland Mix'ems - toffee popcorn, caramel & candy shells

Today's review is of the awfully familiar looking Maryland Mix'ems, there are two different versions one being a double chocolate chip cookie with raspberry jellies and candy shells and the packet I've got which are chocolate chip cookies with toffee popcorn pieces, caramel and candy shells. 

These have been about for a while, and to be blunt I avoided them as they seemed a bit of a Chips Ahoy copy but we ran out of biscuits and these were on special offer in Morrisons (£1 at the moment) and so I found myself trying one Friday night. 

They're fairly large cookies with nine in a pack and even though they're chock full of other flavours the distinctive Maryland cookie scent is all I could smell opening them up. 

The biscuit itself feels quite hard to touch but it gives an easy chew and is actually quite soft. It's sweet and buttery as normal Maryland cookies are - not an 'artisan', pretentious cookie but a nice enough, tasty choice for your biscuit tin! 

The first flavour that I noticed was the caramel, it's not a flavoured biscuit base there are actual pieces of caramel dotted about. The cookies aren't uniform in additions at all, some have far more popcorn others candy etc, and this particular cookie didn't seem to have many caramel pieces but the ones it did have had a strong flavour that managed to be dominant without drowning out the others. 

The chocolate chips are massive, and tasted to me the same as the ones used in the original cookie - just larger and as always chocolate and caramel are a delicious combination. The crunchy candy pieces are sugar coated chocolate shells - so basically smarties and don't add too much flavour wise alongside the big chocolate chips but do give a lovely crunch when combined with the soft(ish) cookie, chewy caramel and popcorn pieces. 

I can't say I noticed the popcorn pieces being toffee flavoured too much, caramel and toffe are quite similar, so while they do go together well and taste good, maybe they could have used a completely different popcorn flavour if they really wanted to go the crazy/strange mix route. The pieces of popcorn were very chewy and quite strange added in, it wasn't necessarily bad just different. I was picking pieces out of my teeth for a while after though! 

I think I judged these too harshly based on the comparisons to Chips Ahoy, alone they are a perfectly nice, tasty, fairly priced cookie. So for the rating I'll pretend the two Chips Ahoy I reviewed a while ago don't exist and rate it 

7/10 

But I would like to see completely different ingredients than the ones Chips Ahoy are using too. 

Galaxy Duet Bars - Caramel & Shortcake

I reckon it's pretty hard working for a confectionary company at the moment, its probably quite hard finding a flavour or ingredient that hasn't been used and that includes caramel which has, to be fair, been added to every product imaginable. So galaxy seem to have gone a different route and rather than find new flavours they've gone for a different format with two new bars; two flavours in each, the first Caramel & Shortcake and the second Cookies & Cream and rather than combine them, they've filled half of the bar with each so you can have just one flavour at a time or both together - your choice. 

The Duets are your standard sized chocolate bar at 37g and are split into two long thin rectangles and the chocolate is the usual smooth milk. I'm not a huge fan of the Galaxy milk chocolate on its own, it's a bit too smooth for me, I prefer the original Cadbury Dairy Milk but there's no denying that it's a decent everyday chocolate bar. 

I snapped a section off to take a photo and so I had a chance to try each side separately before eating it how it was intended. 

Even though the bar only has 3.4% of them, the shortcake pieces add a lovely buttery flavour to the chocolate and although they're small pieces they bring a good crunch to the silky smooth chocolate. To tell you the truth I'd be happy eating a full bar with just the shortcake. 

There is a much higher amount of caramel in the bar at 18% and as you can see from the photo, even though I had to refrigerate it (after just two hours in my kitchen cupboard the bar had turned worryingly soft!) it's a gooey, runny caramel. This isn't the same caramel as the salted caramel bar sadly and it's quite mild compared but it does have a nice flavour which suits the Galaxy chocolate well. 

I wasn't sure how the two sides would work, my OCD likes me to eat things 'properly' - I could never just bite into a KitKat, the fingers have to be broken off one at a time obviously! Big bars of chocolate are eaten by the square and so this bar I would usually snap down the centre and eat one section at a time.

 The Duets are going to have to be my exception the rule though, both sides eaten together compliment each other and improve on what were already perfectly acceptable alone. The shortcake provides a nice texture change to the rich smoothness of the caramel side which for some reason seemed to taste stronger against the buttery biscuit. I like these, both flavours are nice enough and better than some other options about but together they make this a very enjoyable chocolate bar. 

Rating 8/10 

Haribo Favoritos - (Europe)

I've come to the last of stuff I squeezed into my suitcase on my travels and it's not an exotic sweet, just a mixed bag of Haribo I haven't seen on sale in the UK - Favoritos. 

There were five different sweets in my bag, slightly brighter than the picture shows but nowhere near as neon coloured as are usual in the sweets I've been eating! 

On the official Haribo site there are a few Favoritos bags available, original which seem to be these but not with the fizzy sugar coating, and bags of each sweet individually. I've got the 'con zumo de frutas' bag, literal translation from the site "delicious combination of the best cover sugar references. With fruit juice" - I'm guessing the best ones covered with sugar, made with fruit juice! 

Banana - I had the most of these which I was very happy about! Why can't we have these in England, I could gladly eat bags and bags of this marshmallow - very soft and squishy and they taste beautiful. A very natural tasting banana flavour with no artificial tang at all. One of the best banana sweets I've tried - ever! 

Melocotón (Peaches) - These are the red and yellow discs, they are more of a jelly sweet and to be fair without looking the bag up it didn't scream out peaches to me - although now I know what they are I can kind of make the connection. They were nice and chewy and despite being unsure on the flavour they were enjoyable and not too sweet or sour. 

Strawberries - I was a bit suprised at these as unlike the fizzy strawberries and cherries we get they weren't a pure jelly they had a solid bottom - kind of like a hard marshmallow. There was no hint of sourness anywhere in the bag so that can't be as big in Europe as it is over here and these had a lovely sweet flavour that I prefer to the version we get. 

Cream Kiss - I've never known the pink and white marshmallow at the top as a cream kiss, I've always called it a fizzy mushroom so it's nice to have a name! I found it quite plain but I can actually see how they're cream now I know (again!). Even though they had a milder flavour they were nice and sweet with a good texture so another good addition to the bag. 

Gummy Bear - Finally one we have over here! Tastes just the same as ours and is actually the most boring of the bunch so I'll spare the details. 

I'd like to see this bag in the UK please Haribo! A nice, sweet change to the bags we get. 

Rating 7/10