Cadbury Fruit & Nut

Today's review is another Fruit & Nut head to head. Both Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut, but one from Mondelēz Ireland, Dublin and one from Mondelēz UK, Birmingham. 

I, like most people who have tried Irish Cadbury, swear it's superior to the UK version. I had a chance to fairly compare the two when the lovely Lucy, @R4Rreviews sent me a bar of the Irish.

The best way to see if there is truely a difference between the two, is to look at the ingredients and nutritional info. As always, the order of the ingredients goes from most to least. 

Irish: Milk chocolate with raisins (14%) and almonds (7%): Milk, sugar, raisins, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, almonds, vegetable fats (Palm, Shea) emulsifiers, flavourings. 

UK: Milk chocolate with dried grapes (13%) and almonds (7%): Milk, sugar, cocoa butter, dried grapes, almonds, cocoa mass, vegetable fats (Palm, Shea) emulsifiers, cocoa, flavourings.

So there is a difference in the recipe - there's more sugar and raisins for instance in the Irish and the U.K. version uses more cocoa butter than dried grapes (ay!? Cadbury have you made that sneaky change yet or are you being pedantic) more almonds than cocoa mass and has straight up cocoa which isn't in the Irish. 

 U.K. Top, Irish Bottom 

The Irish weighs in 6g heavier than ours and is still in the square block format. Both smelt strongly of milk chocolate but the Irish had more of a familiar nostalgic Dairy Milk scent whereas the UK smelt like the smaller cheap Cadbury Easter eggs if I'm honest. 

The Irish Fruit & Nut was a thick feeling, milky chocolate which left a chocolatey coating inside my mouth - like when I was a kid (ahem, obviously not still now..) and ate far too much Dairy Milk in one go and it's all I could taste for ages afterwards, leaving you wanting more. It had an almost gritty feel to it, which wasn't unpleasant - I'm not a fan of too fatty, greasy, silky smooth chocolate. The nuts were good, quite large and crunchy and the raisins were just as fine - nice and juicy and chewy. 

It was still quite sugary sweet though which wasn't unexpected as raisins are on the sweeter side anyway. Sweeter than I might prefer in my chocolate but nothing too much. 

In the version from the UK the biggest difference comes from the shape. Cadbury have sworn since they made the change from square blocks to rounded, it improves the taste and gives it a better melt. There is no such improvement in the Fruit & Nut. For some reason the nuts are twice the size of the ones in the Irish bar, and because of this, whenever I tried to snap a square off from the block I ended up with one squoval (my beauty therapy teacher insisted this was a real word- a combination of square and oval, the perfect nail shape apparently!) with all the almonds and one with none as Cadbury have so helpfully put the nuts along the indentations! I wanted a Fruit and Nut bar not Fruit or Nut. 

Anyway this bar seemed sweeter, it shouldn't because it actually has less sugar per 100g (54g) than the Irish (55g). I think the Irish has more due to the larger amount of raisins but it was the actual chocolate that tasted sugary - maybe because of the recipe? 

The size of the nuts and dried grapes affected the flavour too, they were larger and the nuts seemed crunchier and the 'dried grapes' chewier and sweeter - like an exaggerated version of the previous bar.

The chocolate felt thinner in the mouth, there was no addictive and thick long lasting aftertaste and it really did start tasting throat burning sugary sweet. I have no explanation for this - I ate them one square at a time Irish then UK, Irish then UK and so on, but it was only on our version my throat was itching! 

The combination of gigantic nuts and thinner, fatty chocolate (and it really does have more fat, including saturated fat, than the Irish) meant this was more like almonds, or raisins - not together the stupid shape saw to that - coated in a generic cheap chocolate. Whereas the Irish, while still not great quality, seemed more like Dairy Milk with nuts and raisins added. If that makes sense! 

The Irish is more like my nostalgic, happy memories of Dairy Milk but it does still seem sweeter than I remember. I'd still happily eat it though! 

7/10 

The UK is a sickly sweet rip off of what used to be, where the point of the bar seems to be "how many ingredients can we cram together and cover in substandard chocolate". Poor show Cadbury/Mondelēz UK! 

5/10