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 

Cadbury Minis Mix

I know I've been very anti-Cadbury lately, but for me, chocolate at Easter has to be a Cadbury Buttons Egg. I'm going to be buying myself a few nice eggs but if my mum doesn't get me my buttons there'll be words had...

We're all aware of the controversy surrounding Creme Eggs and I remember finding them quite sickly last year, so I swore I wouldn't buy any this year. I did buy some mini Daim Eggs and wasn't impressed but I'd heard good things about the Dairy Milk and Oreo Eggs. Asda are selling bags with a mix of all 4 inside and my promises went out the window. The bag is "Great for egg hunts!" but that's not going to happen - 1) they're all going in my mouth so I'm not going to the trouble of hiding them and 2) there's not really that many and they're on the small side. 

My first compliment to Cadbury in a very long time is that there was an even mix. Hopefully this is the case in every bag and I didn't just get lucky but I had 4 of each egg except for the Oreo, of which I had 5. 

Creme Egg 

This just makes me sad, it was actually my least favourite of the four. I might associate Easter chocolate with Buttons but I bet for most people it'd be Creme Eggs. These are just an insult to the proper Creme Eggs and in fact I find them offensive. A thin, soft chocolate shell with too much fondant centre. I've moaned Cadbury milk chocolate has gone down the pan but I couldn't taste it over the sickly centre. I've still not had a full sized Creme Egg to compare but I wouldn't eat these sugar bombs if you paid me. My ever present sugar fiend helper Mr.1T declared these the best out of the bag but anyone who reads my blog will know his opinion means diddly squat as he has the taste buds of a diabetic four year old. A little side note, these are the only mini egg not made with Dairy Milk.. Surely if they can use it with the other three eggs they can here, I think it'd benefit from a milkiness rather than a sugary chocolate as well as the sugary centre. Yuck. 

Dairy Milk 

Hmmm.. These have thrown me. Cadbury have always been adamant that the Dairy Milk hasn't changed, only the shape of the bars but the actual taste of the bars have suggested otherwise. These little eggs just might prove they are (half) telling the truth. They are sweeter than I ever remember Dairy Milk being, although that could be a case of 'grown up' taste buds, but they are also nicer than any recent Cadbury Dairy Milk I've eaten. Thick feeling, rich and with a milky flavour. A huge improvement on Dairy Milk in bar form. 

Dairy Milk Daim 

I had a bag of Dairy Milk Daim eggs a couple of weeks ago and I said they had too much chocolate, not enough Daim. They're solid Dairy Milk eggs with only 4% crunchy almond caramel pieces and as you can see, although there is a big difference visibly to the pure Dairy Milk eggs, there aren't any real noticeable almond caramel pieces. One of the reasons I love a Daim is the texture, and it's not really present in the mini eggs with barely any crunch. The flavour is spot on though, it tastes exactly like a Daim and if it had had the texture too, would have been my clear favourite in the bag. 

Dairy Milk Oreo 

These were the eggs that I'd been waiting to try. I wasn't sure how the Oreo would be represented in the egg - either biscuit pieces in solid chocolate filling or how it actually ended up being, a vanilla flavoured filling with biscuit pieces inside that. These ended up being my favourite, they taste like Oreos basically, vanilla cream with cocoa biscuit pieces. A tiny difference on a real Oreo as the ratios are the opposite way round, there's a lot more cream filling than biscuit but the general flavour is the same. The texture is what just pipped these over the Daim though, it doesn't say what the vanilla filling actually is but its thicker than the Creme Egg fondant but not quite as thick as the solid chocolate eggs with lots of deliciously crunchy biscuit pieces inside. 

All 4 flavours are rather sweet and with the exception of the Creme Eggs, I wouldn't say no to them again, but to be honest I probably won't buy any of the individual flavours - none are as delicious as the Lindt Eggs I had last week. 

Cadbury take note - people really will pay more for better quality, don't just knock 10p off and add a boat load of sugar in! 

6/10

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 

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

Head To Head - Crunchie V Violet Crumble

My local Tesco have broadened their horizons and added one Australlian chocolate to its World Food aisle. Sadly it's not one of the crazy Cadbury (although I should be boycotting them for tax evasion and crimes against flavour) bars but Nestles version of the Cadbury Crunchie - Violet Crumble. 

It was expensive but I suppose it has travelled halfway round the world and it does weigh 10g more than a Crunchie.

Top Violet Crumble, Bottom Crunchie 

The bars look very similar from the outside with the rippled effect in the chocolate but the Violet Crumble is quite a bit darker. Even though I'm not really a Cadbury fan anymore, I only really eat it through habit or nostalgia, I still usually prefer it to most Nestle chocolates. I was very suprised to find (though thinking about it, I shouldn't have been) the Violet Crumble smelt a lot more like real chocolate than the Crunchie which just had a sugary sweet scent. 

Crunchie 

While the bars looked similar from the outside, the insides looked nothing alike, the Violet Crumble being a lighter, more compacted honeycomb. There would be no chance of mixing these up at all. 

Violet Crumble 

I started the head to head with the Crunchie, I needed to refresh my memory! It soon came flooding back - super sweet, super crunchy with the distinct Cadbury chocolate aftertaste. Eating the Violet Crumble afterwards was a massive disappointment. The centre has a completely different feel, the texture was just wrong, it started off hard and crisp but kind of ended up softer, not soft soft it is still honeycomb after all, but it doesn't stay as consistently crunchy. Honestly, it felt like a stale version of the Crunchie. 

Shock horror, the chocolate was nicer in the Crunchie too! I could clearly taste the chocolate, OK it was after the honeycomb had almost melted away but it was definitely chocolate. I barely noticed it at all in the Violet Crumble. There was one thing to be said about the Violet Crumble which was an improvement on the Crunchie, and that was that it is nowhere near as sweet. Back in the day when Cadbury chocolate was actually chocolate not fatty chocolate flavoured sugar, the super sweet centre probably didn't impact too much on the overall bar but it seemed a total sugar overload against the quite plain tastes of the Violet Crumble. 

Even so, I couldn't help but compare the Violet Crumble to a supermarket own brand/cheap shop rip off of the Crunchie. The texture isn't quite how it supposed to be, there's not much in terms of actual flavour and even forgetting the Crunchie exists, it's just bland and boring. The one small silver lining is that less sweetness is an improvement, though I think I'd take the sugar just for some flavour.

Sorry Australia it's 

5/10  

A word of warning - don't try this at home! Wow my teeth ached afterwards and not because of the crunch! Although I couldn't taste the 33g of sugar in the Violet Crumble alone my teeth sure noticed it - they stung afterwards! 

Cadbury Fruit & Nut Chopped

I'm onto you Cadbury. You might have fooled some people with the new Fruit & Nut Chopped bar, but I had my suspicions so I bought myself a normal Fruit & Nut too..

Looks are deceiving, the Chopped bar might look longer in the wrapper - 

Left: Fruit & Nut Right: Chopped 

- and even unwrapped, but the new bar weighs in a whopping 25g smaller than its sister bar. Fruit & Nut in a medium sized sharing bar weighs 120g and Chopped weighs 95g. Interestingly the original has 495 kcal per 100g and Chopped has 505 kcal per 100g. I say interestingly because I wondered where the extra 10 calories were coming from if they are supposed to be essentially the same bar. 

Left: Fruit & Nut Right: Chopped 

Fruit & Nut Chopped is basically a Fruit & Nut bar with the nuts chopped up, instead of whole. 

Turning the bars over I was quite impressed, it looked like there were more fillings in the new bar. I'm sure that's what Cadburys want you to think, but you cant lie on an ingredients list! 

Fruit & Nut - Milk chocolate with dried grapes (17%) and almonds (7%)

Fruit & Nut Chopped - Milk chocolate with dried grapes (13%) and chopped nuts (6%)

Other than that the ingredients are identical. So my suspicions were confirmed - I'm not sure if Cadbury are still releasing Fruit & Nut with sultanas after all that hoo ha, but if they backtracked this seems to be their new sneaky way of cutting costs on ingredients and jazzing it up with a funky new concept. 

To be fair, to look at the bar you'd be forgiven for not realising this has less of each in, it certainly looked a lot more packed out than its predecessor but you should never judge a book by its cover - the taste is what matters. 

The raisins (dried grapes, whatever) haven't changed, the decrease in 4% made no difference, they have the same flavour and texture as before and were immediately noticeable. 

I waited to taste or feel some chopped nuts, I understand a whole nut in a small square of chocolate is going to stand out a lot more but I barely noticed the nuts in the Chopped bar. I had to wait for most of the chocolate squares to melt away leaving me with a mouthful of small nut slices. Some squares did have a lot more chopped nuts and they were a little better. The only way I can think of describing the texture would be a crunchier, less chewy version of the Cadbury Daim bar but with the obvious differences in flavour. These squares were quite enjoyable but they were few and far between, the small amount and small sized nuts may not have shown up in looks but flavour and texture were seriously lacking. 

Honestly, this might as well have been a Cadbury Fruit bar. The nuts are an unnecessary waste of money if you're not going to put enough in, or make them too small to taste or feel then take the money you'd save from the insignificant amount of nuts and give us a decent amount of chocolate - or better yet, use it to bring back the old Dairy Milk! 

A downgrade on the original. 

6/10 

Cadbury Biscuit Assortment

It's the 8th of October and I have my first Christmas related review! The worst part about it is all the Christmas sweets and chocolates have been in the shops for a good month now as well.

Normally I wait until it's actually Christmas to start on the big boxes of chocolates and biscuits as I think the prices in relation to number of pieces is a complete rip off and I'll wait for someone else to buy them. This box however is a good portion size for one person with one of each biscuit rather than three or four and was a bit of a bargain (for Cadbury Christmas biccies) in Poundland.

I did read online that Cadbury have released some new biscuits into their assortment boxes, I'm unsure if any of these are new as by the time I get my turn with the biscuit barrel at Christmas, the plain ones are the only ones left!!

An assortment of biscuits covered in Cadbury milk chocolate and dark chocolate. 

Before I get any further into the post, let me just say the only dark chocolate in the box are the thin squiggles across three of the biscuits - I think - I didn't taste any dark chocolate so there won't be any mention. As is usual for a box of biscuits, they were in a plastic tray sealed inside a plastic bag and ripping it open revealed the deceptive Cadbury smell. It smells like the good stuff, but wether it still tastes like it is debatable! 

The assortment includes one of each biscuit, except for the Crunchy Ring, bottom left and top centre. The chocolate coating is nice and thick and tastes like Cadbury (not Dairy Milk). These are actually made by Burtons Biscuits rather than Cadbury and I think it shows as the actual biscuits are good quality rather than just an afterthought to the chocolate. The Crunchy Ring has a shortcake/shortbread like biscuit inside, it has a lovely, very buttery flavour but is crunchier and crisper than an ordinary shortcake or bread. It's a round, crunchier version of one of my favourite old school Cadbury bars, the Cadbury Snack. 

The biscuit inside probably stood out the least in the Lemon Crisp, bottom centre. It had a nice enough taste and texture but the thick, stronger flavoured chocolate was what I noticed most. The lemon is nice and quite sweet but I found it a little weird. It was like the opposite of a mint chocolate if that makes sense and I wasn't that keen on it paired with the milk. Like a lot of mint chocolates it would probably have suited a dark chocolate better. 

The chocolate that I was kind of dissapointed in was the Chocolate Pillow, top right. I thought pillow = soft, maybe creamy but it was just a plain milk chocolate coating a biscuit. The chocolate seemed slightly thicker, and the biscuit was softer than the two previously but it didn't have much flavour to it. Certainly not the lovely buttery flavour like in the first. A little boring really. 

Milk Triangle, middle right, was one that surprised me. I expected what I got with the Chocolate Pillow, a plain boring biscuit and while it was plainer it wasn't boring. The biscuit used here was my favourite amongst them all, it had the lovely buttery flavour of the Crunchy Ring but was nice and soft (without feeling stale) too. It's very sweet, especially with the sweet Cadbury chocolate on top but as there was only one it was no problem. Very nice. 

The Raspberry Oat Crunch, top left, was intriguing. The biscuit was very, very crunchy and crisp and at first all I could taste were the oats. The raspberry flavour was soon noticable though and was good, concentrated raspberry pieces made from purée are used so it has quite a strong, realer (than some chocolate bars) flavour too. This biscuit was a bit like a harder, crisper Flapjack. 

I didn't know (and still don't) what the Hazelnut Flavour Crispette, bottom right, was. What is a Crispette? It wasn't that much crisper than the Lemon Crisp or Raspberry Oat Crunch, whatever it was. It had a slight hazelnut flavour but it was pretty overwhelmed by the Cadbury milk chocolate. 

I left the Simply Shortcake, centre, for last as I thought it would be most like a Cadbury Snack bar. It fell short though, it had a soft shortcake biscuit which wasn't as buttery as the first but still did have a little flavour. It was tasty but another slightly boring biscuit. 

This assortment box was OK, as I've always been recently I was slightly dissapointed with the Cadbury chocolate. I know it's the typical Christmas chocolate they use and not Dairy Milk but it was very sweet and had a waxy, sticky feel. The biscuits used are nice and the redeeming feature. I think if I came across these at Christmas and hadn't tried them before I'd have been happy with just one - they aren't a box you can't help yourself from keep dipping into but they're tasty enough. 

7/10 

Cadbury Desserts

Back in July I reviewed the Cadbury toffee and fudge desserts, its safe to say I wasn't impressed and its partly for that reason it's taken me so long to try the plain version. I was also interested to see if this would be the same after another two months (!!) in my kitchen cupboard. 

The plain is a little smaller than the toffee and fudge and if the previous two were anything to go by then that's for a good reason!  

The chocolate dessert smelt ridiculously sweet as before, imagine the sweetest Cadbury chocolate you can and add some more sugar. That's how this dessert smells and tastes. 

Again it was very thick and rich and felt like I'd melted down a big block of chocolate (added some sugar) and ate it with a spoon. I don't remember the other two being as sweet as this but they did have  the clusters and pieces to break it up a bit whereas here is just the thick, rich, sickly chocolate. 

I'm still freaked out and maybe even more so now, that this is still edible (kind of) roughly three months after I bought it and with another four or five months left before the best before date. 

The redeeming feature of the plain Cadbury Dessert is that it's small, a two or three spoonful job and its gone thankfully.

5/10 

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 

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 

Cadbury Desserts

I'm back reviewing snacks available in England, I still have one foreign goody to try but I'll get to that later in the week. For today I have two new desserts out of a range of three from Cadbury. Don't look for these in the chilled aisle if you want to buy them though, they're in with the custards, jellies and Angel Delights strangely! 

The desserts are made with Cadbury milk chocolate (note the lack of the word Dairy before the milk!) and are in a split pot/corner yoghurt style. 

The first of the two I tried was toffee clusters. "A milk chocolate dessert with a side of toffee crunch clusters". I tried both sides separately before mixing them together and going by the chocolate I'm even more confused! It's not Dairy Milk that's for sure, either the older recipe or the new but it tastes exactly how I'd imagine the generic milk chocolate Cadbury use, melted down and eaten with a spoon would taste. I took one look at the ingredients and put it down again pretty sharpish as the more I think about it the more I don't really want to know how they keep it that consistency!! 

I tried the toffee cluster next, at first they were very crunchy but gave way to a nice chewy texture which I did enjoy. The taste was exactly the same (to me) as a sugar free Werthers original (never ever eat a whole bag of those!!) they were slightly mild to begin but did get stronger as I chewed. 

Once I'd given them a stir together I was suprised to find the toffee flavour actually got stronger once it was mixed in with the chocolate, probably due to more per mouthful but it did stand out against the chocolate and the crunchy, chewy pieces really went well with the super smooth dessert. Coming to the end of the pot though, I ran out of toffee clusters and this dessert became too rich and sweet even for a sugar fiend like me. There is a plain version of this available that I have in a cupboard (why not the fridge? I don't like it!) that I'm pretty put off of trying due to how quickly this became sickly. 

Next up was Fudge pieces, the chocolate is identical so I'll save going through all that again! 

The side of fudge pieces are tiny little squares that reminded me of the type Dr Oetker and the likes make for cake decorating. They are a very soft, more traditional style type of fudge but the similarities ended there sadly. The fudge I tried alone was pretty much flavourless, the texture was there - lovely and chewy and I did get a faint fudge taste but to be completely honest I think it's because I was looking for it. 

Once mixed in with the dessert, any fudge flavour that may have existed disappeared. It was completely overpowered by that sickly sweet taste and where I originally liked the texture it let it down here. Long after the chocolate slid down (that's the only way to describe it - it's that smooth) I was left, with every spoonful, chewing a mouthful of bland fudge. I really love fudge but I did not like it at all here. 

The toffee clusters bump the first up to a 6/10 but the fudge is given a generous 5/10 - that chocolate is just too much for me and they creep me out that they aren't refrigerated but are still in date for another 6 months... 

Cadbury Roses pots of joy - Coffee escape

Today I tried Cadbury Roses pots of joy - coffee escape, it's a "Smooth and creamy dessert made with melted Cadbury milk chocolate with a layer of coffee fondant". 

From the top it looks the same as every other pots of joy I've tried, I didn't notice a coffee scent before I'd tried it but there is a very thick layer of melted chocolate to get through. 

I tried the top layer first and my immediate thoughts were of how sweet this was! The chocolate flavour was there but that first mouthful was like eating pure sugar. I don't remember thinking this on any of the other pots I've tried so maybe the recipe has been slightly tweaked, it could well be just me though. Once the sweetness had dulled down slightly I was sure I could taste the coffee -the chocolate itself isn't coffee flavoured, it's just in a fondant on the bottom, I thought maybe I was imagining it but the taste was identical once I'd got to the fondant just stronger so the coffee did seem to have seeped through. The chocolate layer feels exactly how you'd imagine a melted chocolate to feel, it's thick, creamy and rich. 

The coffee soon appeared and it's actually really nice, it's not too strong and mellows out the sweet chocolate. Together they made a lovely combination.

The pots are only little but for me it was the perfect size, I don't think I could manage much more of the chocolate in one sitting but I'd gladly eat a tub of the coffee alone! 

Rating 7/10