Lindt Éclats De Bretzel

In keeping with yesterdays post, my review today, again, comes from Lindt but is a French import this time.

They are more well known for the quality of their chocolate and melting middle truffles, but the shelves have been filled with flavoured Lindt recently. From the HELLO line and the Creations and Excellence bars, Lindt are getting a little more imaginative with their chocolate. 

So it shouldn't come as much of a suprise that today's bar is Éclats De Bretzel, a milk chocolate with crunchy pretzel pieces. Lindt chocolate is always packaged nicely, and had a paper wrapper with a sealed silver foil inside. I wish all companies used this, not only does it look and feel more luxurious but I'm sure it keeps the chocolate fresher too. 

It smelt deliciously chocolatey, and I was impressed looking at the bar. There was tonnes of pretzel pieces including one piece that missed being chopped up and was half a whole large pretzel - I'm not complaining! 

Although the point of this chocolate bar is that pretzel is added, they've not fobbed us off with cheap, sugary chocolate. Its not overly sweet or milky but has a real creamy, thick and quite rich taste. The pretzels are indeed nice and crunchy and I enjoyed that the pieces weren't uniform in size, it added another level to the textures. The salt pairs wonderfully with the sweet chocolate and while they aren't overly salty it's noticable and more than enough to give that addictive 'bar snack effect' - you just can't resist going back for more! 

A moreish mix of sweet and salty! 

7/10 

Lindt Lindor Irresistibly Smooth

Its been a couple of days since I reviewed a Christmas treat, so naturally it's time to put an Easter review up! Well, these have to be the Easter products considering the spring theme - the daisys at the bottom of the packet - but I'm sure I saw these at Christmas too! 

Milk, white & dark chocolate eggs with a smooth melting middle 

The bag doesn't weigh much, only 100g but there are a lot of tiny chocolate eggs inside. My packet had more of the white eggs, much to the disappointment of Mr.1T who had mainly milk in his pack, so its luck of the draw as to however many of each you get. They really are diddy little things, half the size even of the mini Cadbury Creme Eggs but Lindt chocolate has the reputation of good, rich quality chocolate so in theory, you shouldn't want larger eggs - they'd be too much. 

All three flavours had a thick chocolate shell, with a lovely snap when taking a bite and the quality of all were good enough that I was perfectly happy to let melt away on my tongue too. The fillings match whatever the shell is, so white shell = white filling etc. Its very rich, very thick and very smooth. However I ate the eggs, the filling and shell had notable differences, although the flavours might have been the same the textures were very different and I could tell there were "melting middles". That said, it was even tastier and more fun to bite the tops off and lick the thick cream from the insides! 

The milk chocolate eggs went first, they're the standard for Easter Eggs and I expected them to be tasty but nothing out of the ordinary. I was wrong. A minimum of 30% cocoa solids and 14% milk solids in the ingredients showed in the taste. The chocolate was milky with a real chocolate flavour and balanced beautifully with the creamy textured but same flavoured filling. It's hard to explain how the two have the same flavour yet I could still taste the difference but that's just how it was! 

I had more white eggs than the others in my bag so I had a good few to judge. They're sweet as is to be expected but have, rather than an overwhelming sugariness, a lovely mix of a chocolate and vanilla flavour. This is more than likely due to a minimum of 20% cocoa solids but the vanilla has the edge just slightly. I'm very glad I grabbed the bag with more of the white eggs! 

I was most looking forward to the dark eggs and in both of our bags this was the flavour there was least of. I think this is intentional though. Although they are rather low on the cocoa for a dark chocolate - 42% minimum, tasted against the milk and white they taste a lot more intense than they would alone. There is still a slight sweetness to them but they have a stronger, chocolate flavour and are quite rich, another lovely little egg but I can't help but think they were more enjoyable played against the sweeter, milkier flavours - I think if I'd had just a bag of these they would have seemed a lot more like a milk than a dark chocolate. 

Over on Twitter, I was having a discussion with Kev of Kev's Snack Reviews and Lucy at Reaching For Refreshment about the disgustingness of Cadbury in general this year. Creme Eggs aren't the same (and you only get 1 Creme Egg in the Easter Eggs this year!) and I'd just tried the mini Daim eggs which were all crap Cadbury chocolate and no Daim. Kev claimed we wouldn't be able to find an adequate replacement for the Creme Eggs but Lucy and I were hopeful. 

In my (humble) opinion, these aren't just a replacement for the new Creme Eggs.. They might even blow the original away!! 

8/10

Lindt Hello My Name Is... Cookies And Cream

I know these have been around for a while, but I'm really falling victim to supermarket offers at the moment and at half price in Tesco I couldn't resist!

Having reviewed Cadbury Oreo and Cadbury Chips Ahoy I had high expectations for this and it didn't let me down.

I love the packaging, first you open a little envelope style box and the bar is inside in gold foil. You do have to rip the foil to get it open, so it's all fresh inside but the foil and box just give the bar a more luxurious touch and you really feel like you're having a treat.

The bar is split into 10 squares and has 5 different pictures printed on them which is nice. It's a thick bar, I could only smell the chocolate once I'd opened it rather than the overwhelming cookie smell in the Chips Ahoy bar but I am a smoker (tut tut I know!) so others with a better sense of smell than me may have a different experience.

 I then broke two squares off, had a look and thought I'd got the wrong bar inside! It was just nice clean milk chocolate, Lindt have kept the filling to the inside of each square instead of just filling the whole bar out like Cadbury. This would actually be better if you were going to portion yourself squares off, I didn't.

Once I broke a square open you can't miss the cookies and cream filling, it takes up the majority of it, and I could definitely smell it now. It really is good filling too, lovely thick and creamy with some large cookie chunks in it. Lindt are more known I suppose for their good quality chocolate with different flavours, but going by this bar they know what they're doing on the filling front too.

The winner for me on the biscuit inside chocolate bandwagon!

Rating 9/10