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
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