M&S Chicky Choccy Speckled Eggs

So this was another gift card purchase from the M&S Easter aisle, I'm still on the hunt for Cadbury replacements and I convinced myself that was reason enough to buy them - I'm sure I would have anyway, I always give in and buy things when I can see them through those damn clear packets! 

The Chicky Choccy Speckled Eggs are supposedly 

Milk chocolate Mini Eggs with a speckled candy shell 

but they're hardly mini eggs, more of a medium I'd say - you can fit about three Cadbury Mini Eggs in one of these bad boys! 

My bag contained three different colours and they mostly had an egg shape, some were a bit squashed but they were eggy enough. The speckles finish it off nicely and they really do look like tiny coloured real eggs, I reckon if they were a bluey colour you could pass them off as Quails eggs but there is never any question to Marks & Spencer's attention to detail. 

I find whenever I've had Cadbury Mini Eggs (recently anyway) that they do smell of chocolate but it's more of a sugary 'candy' chocolate but the Chicky Choccy Speckled Eggs smelt as if I'd just opened a bar of proper chocolate. 

The scent seems to be partly due to the fact the candy shell used is very thin, it's more than enough to give the crunchy crack like quality that makes Mini Eggs of any kind so addictive but overall it has a much more intense chocolate flavour. 

My favourite thing about this M&S product, and any I've tried actually is that they never scrimp on the quality. Say you go into Tesco and buy a packet of own brand Mini Eggs, the chocolate they use isn't the standard own brand stuff sold on the shelves, it's the everyday value stuff or at least a poorer/cheaper version. M&S have used the exact same 30% cocoa solids chocolate inside the Chicky Choccy Mini Eggs that they're selling in the milk chocolate bars and boy, does it make a difference! They are delicious, very milky with a proper chocolate flavour - no sugary crap and certainly no throat burn. Of course the shell is pretty sweet but the thickness of it and the pure amount of chocolate compared means its a pleasant sweetness that compliments, not overwhelms, the chocolate. 

Rating:

I need more right now. They are a grown up tasting Mini Egg, far too tasty to be given to kids who won't appreciate them. They aren't a replacement for the Cadbury Mini Egg, they just can't be compared. This will be the first of many bags of these I get through this Easter! 

8/10 

Waitrose Jelly Mini Eggs

Mini Eggs come in a many different shapes, sizes and fillings, you have your standard sugar candy shell with chocolate centre, chocolate shelled with various fillings - Creme Egg style fondant or various flavoured creams and the slightly more luxurious truffle filled centres.

 I can't say I've seen a Jelly Mini Egg, sure there are plenty of Easter themed jelly beans but these aren't exactly jelly beans.. 

Soft jelly eggs in a crisp sugar shell. 

The Jelly Mini Eggs are one of a few non-traditional mini eggs Waitrose are selling, I'll be going back for the others (Marzipan/Ginger Truffle/Marc De Champagne & Amaretto/Cream Truffle) but at £3.50 for 100g/125g depending, they'll have to wait a while! 

The eggs look delightful, they're all egg shaped (a bug bear of mine after a certain other brand of Mini Egg but that's another review!) and all had the speckled egg markings. There aren't a huge variety of colours - only four, but the smaller variety meant I had a sufficient amount of each. There is no way they could get more than a minimum of three of each flavour in each packet if there were any more due to the sheer size of the eggs - they are humongous!!

I had a Candy King jelly bean left over from my Pick'n'Mix (I know, leftover Pick'n'Mix - I must be getting ill!!) and to be fair they were actually rather large for an ordinary jelly bean but just for comparison.. 

And that was a large standard bean and one of the smaller jelly eggs! 

Anyway..

The eggs are just plain weird. They have a hard shell, harder than the outside of a normal jelly bean and I had to give it a good solid bite to get in - and yes they're that big that I could eat each one in two bits. The inside of the egg was nothing like I expected, it's not like a jelly bean at all. It's not really firm but nowhere near as soft as a jelly bean and has a gritty kind of chew, but it's not chewy either. Am I confusing you yet? Because these sure confused me while I was eating them, I think you'd need to try them to truly understand how they feel, they're nothing like anything I've eaten before! That's definitely not a bad thing though.

On to the flavours, I'm going to guess the flavours are the actual flavourings used as they seemed to match up. 

The orange eggs were undoubtedly Orange flavoured, nothing new or exciting but very nice nonetheless. The white eggs threw me, I'm not going to lie, I'm so used to white jelly beans being marshmallow or coconut flavoured I initially convinced myself that white tasted a bit like marshmallow. Working through the other flavours and the ingredients list has left me to believe its actually Apricot flavoured though. Truth be told its not a flavour I'm very familiar with but either way marshmallow/apricot it was pretty damn tasty! 

Pink is usually some kind of berry in any sweet and here was no different. I tried one before I read the ingredients and I thought maybe strawberry, the ingredients say otherwise with Raspberry and once I'd read it, I could taste it. Very juicy and a definite fail safe. I'd kind of given up by the yellow, my brain and my tastebuds weren't connecting and I had to cheat and refer to the ingredients which inform me its probably Pineapple. I'm going to plead ignorance in that it's not a flavour used to often but I wish it was, it was very nice!  

Last but not least was green, usually the apple flavoured sweet but Waitrose have bucked the trend and gone for Pear. I think I've mentioned before I like the flavour of pear just not the texture and this sweet has just reinforced that. My god, sweet makers of Britain - forget about apple, its all about pear! Absolutely delicious and much to my surprise the best in the box. 

Rating:

I might be a bit vague on the flavours and unable to properly describe the texture, but trust me these are a must-try! They can't be compared to a jelly bean, they're a whole different kettle of fish. I'm very glad I chose these other the other more traditional style mini eggs. 

8/10 

Black Magic Mini Eggs

You might've read that I'm looking for Cadbury replacements this Easter, now Nestlé aren't much better but it's a start! 

Today's review are Creme Egg style mini eggs but made using Black Magic chocolate with a truffle centre. 

Can you believe I've never had a box of Black Magic - they're my mums favourites, her special chocolates when we were growing up - and I'm not having much luck finding out the exact cocoa % online, numbers range from about 48-50%. So it's not a particularly dark chocolate, more of a medium but never mind, if it's good chocolate that's still a respectable amount. 

The eggs are really little. For perspective, in a bag of Cadbury mini Creme Eggs you get 8 and there are 10 in the Black Magic but I suppose with a dark chocolate shell and a dark chocolate truffle centre a larger egg could prove too much. 

They didn't smell too dark, nothing like the strong almost bitter chocolates I've been munching on lately but they had more of an overall chocolate scent than the sugary milkiness in other chocolate eggs. 

The photo actually makes them look a lot lighter than they are, as with other Black Magic chocolates (that I've seen but not tried, sob, thanks mum!) they near enough actually are black in colour. 

The shell of the egg is rather thick in comparison to the overall size and the filling is thick and creamy feeling. Dissapointingly there is no difference in flavour between the two, obviously due to the texture you can feel the change but it would've been nice to taste one too. 

The flavour itself is nice, quite rich with a stronger 'proper' chocolate flavour but still worlds away from what I'd call dark chocolate due to the sweetness. 

Rating:

The Black Magic eggs fell short on my expectations due to the sugar, I'm not used to that amount in my dark chocolate so it was surprising.

However, that doesn't mean they're not tasty. There is more of a real chocolate flavour than its Cadbury counterparts and less sugary sweetness - in fact, this is what a standard milk chocolate should taste like, Slightly higher (but not too high) cocoa percentage, with less sugar. 

Nit dark enough for yours truly though. 

7/10 

Cadbury Mini Eggs Chocolate Dessert

Its January which means it's time for the Easter products to come out, well they've been out since December but I really couldn't bring myself to buy any before Christmas! 

I love the Cadbury chocolate desserts, him indoors usually chooses the flake  and I have the buttons, I saw this mini egg version in Lidl and I'm on a total crunch kick at the moment so I had to buy this! 

I had a Creme egg on Friday, and while I still enjoyed it (and maybe this is my brain playing tricks) but it did taste different to me - less rich, I know the fondant inside hasn't changed - but it certainly didn't taste as fulfilling to me as last year, still good though. I'm pleased to report, in my opinion of course, that the mini eggs are as good as ever. The chocolate dessert (I don't know what else to call it, it's not really a yogurt and it's not mousse) smells wonderful when you peel the lid back, sweet and chocolatey everything you associate with Cadbury. I was wondering where the mini eggs where though... 

FIVE! 

 Five teeny weeny mini eggs, what a rip off!! I was not impressed, luckily what this lacks in mini eggs it more than makes up for in taste. Who would have  known liquid chocolate would add so much to the mini egg. These are seriously good I just wish there were more so for that reason 

Rating 6/10 

I really was annoyed at my 5 eggs!!