Tesco Finest Dark Chocolate Bauble

For lots of people, Christmas is their favourite time of year. For me, its the week after where everything the supermarkets were charging upwards of £5 for, are now £1 and under! 

I spied this Tesco Finest dark chocolate bauble the week before Christmas but I remember thinking it seemed quite expensive for the size. However, once all the Christmas treats had been reduced and it was only a pound, I picked it up to have a closer look - small it might look but it actually weighed 150g, It went from being a rip off to more than a bargain! 

Rich, intense Belgian chocolate, elegantly hand decorated by our master chocolatiers with festive shimmer.

The chocolate is stunning. The photo doesn't do it justice - shimmery gold flecks and a luxurious look. Like an expensive speckled egg - I can see why people paid the price it was originally on sale for. And a job well done to whoever personally hand decorated mine! 

Mr.1T isn't too keen on dark chocolate so he bought himself a Chocablock white chocolate slab, it weighed the same but was about five times the size of the chocolate bauble. We were speculating, based on the weight, how thick the bauble shell would be - unlike Easter eggs this wasn't two halves of a shell held in a mould it was fully sealed all the way round so I had to break it open before we'd know. He'd eaten his whole slab by the time I finally found out! I hadn't refrigerated the chocolate so it should have been easy to break open but it was nearly impossible. I punched it, hit it with the remote control, put it back in the box and threw it at the wall, bashed it on the table, nothing worked. Eventually and embarrassingly, I resorted to kind of holding it to my mouth and sucking until I melted away a hole, through which I could snap it into bite sized pieces. If I had got this for Christmas, nobody would have wanted to steal a bit after seeing that shameful display at least. 

It was bloody annoying to get in to but it was worth it. Its lovely and thick, nothing like the thin Easter Eggs that are further along the shelf in the seasonal aisle and had a very satisfying bite.

It didn't have a particularly dark taste - which I would have known before had the ingredients not been on the bottom of the packet - due to the fact it only has a minimum of 53% cocoa solids. So it's on the lower end of the scale but it is distinguishable from milk chocolate and is lacking the almost bitter, deep dark chocolate flavour. Regardless of the actual cocoa content, the main ingredient is sugar so it's rather sweet too, not quite as sweet as milk but more than you'd expect to find in a dark chocolate too. 

The fact it isn't as rich and intense meant this went down the hatch in one go! It was very tasty and on pure flavour alone I'd have rated it an eight out of ten, however there was a milk chocolate bauble too and if I'd fancied a sweeter chocolate I'd have bought that.. (Well I did, so really I'd have opened that). But it was a dark chocolate I wanted so it loses a point for false advertising! 

7/10