Matt-tastic from Lindt never lets me down. He popped into Choco-Locketts the other day to present me with two clear boxes of Lindt Lindor Balls. The first box, was filled with some bronzed little chaps I’ve heard about and been dying to try for ages – Lindor Peanut Butter.
Now we all know that Peanut Butter M&Ms are the bees’ knees. The judges’ decision is final and no further correspondence will be entered into. The Lindor balls, however, are even better. Instead of a brightly coloured crispy shell we have Lindt’s always-superbly creamy and soft milk chocolate with the expected – and granted - buttery peanut centre. Heaven.
My fellow tasters – 41 year old Love Chunks and 9 year old Sapphire agreed and neither of them are peanut butter fans. The trouble is that it is extremely difficult to politely eat only one, or two or three, and our box of eighteen barely lasted one evening. And before you ask, the answer is No. No reading of the ingredients panel, or fat content was undertaken, as that would only spoil things.
The second box, containing Lindor orange, raspberry and mint balls is a seasonal mix that is likely to start appearing on the shelves as Christmas gift ideas. Although, if you’re like me, you’ll have to buy them about six times over again due to eating them yourself before seeing the gift recipient.
Clockwise from top left: Orange, Mint, Peanut Butter, Raspberry
Like a brain surgeon I carefully selected one of each flavour to dissect. It’s so disappointing when it takes me more than one ball to get the cutting right because it means I have to eat – that’s right, the endless sacrifices made in this job - the damaged stuff and try again.
The orange Lindor ball is coated in milk chocolate which is nice. That’s right, just nice, because dark chocolate would be even nicer, Lindt; hint hint. The mint is coated in dark and has long been a favourite of mine as the filling is a creamy white chocolate that melts perfectly after the dark coating is gone. The raspberry Lindor ball is the only one I’m not so confident about. It tastes a tiny bit too ‘chemical-ish’ for me and leads me to hope that one day the Lindt chefs get confused and add their already-fabulous strawberry or pistachio fillings that they use in their milk blocks into the balls instead by mistake. Or maybe they have another go at improving the raspberry flavour?
Stephanie and Brittany from Klondike’s PR firm were nice enough to send me a few samples of chocolate ice cream. The first of these, being part of a health-conscious line, is sugar-free, with Splenda in its place. Now, I like fudge bars, but I’m part of that group that thinks artificial sweeteners taste bad and are worse for you than real sugar. And my favorite fudge bars just hapen to have tofu in them. Gives them a nice texture. That said, what did I think of these?
Well, the first thing I noticed was that the color is a little bland. But that’s forgiveable considering there are no artifical colors added. The problem is that the taste is slightly bland as well. More chocolate would help both these causes. Later on, the flavor gets a bit stronger, tasting more like brownie than fudge. The good thing is that you can’t tell it doesn’t have sugar and neither could I taste any Splenda. And of cuorse the frothy feel, characteristic of a fudge bar, of it is nice.
But there are better fudge bars out there (tofu kind!) than these, though maybe they kept the ingredients short to fit into a hundred calories. So if that’s important to you, sure, these taste fine. But I know it isn’t one of my priorities. I go for taste first, and these aren’t at the very top in that category.
More white chocolate on Chocablog! What is the world coming to??
This time, we have the white chocolate version of the rather tasty Kinder Bueno, which we reviewed back in 2006.
There are two main differences between the original Bueno and this one:
It has white chocolate instead of milk.
It’s much, much messier…
As you can see, it can’t even sit still long enough to be photographed without shedding it’s skin (sorry, “cocoa decoration”) everywhere. I’m quite sure that Kinder designed this bar with good intentions, but it really is impossible to eat without getting bits of cocoa everywhere.
But those tiny granules of cocoa-flaoured stuff do give a slightly more chocolatey flavour than most white chocolate bars, as well as adding a little bit of texture (both to the chocolate, and to my desk and clothes).
Messiness aside, this bar retains all the good features of the original Bueno. The crispy wafer and smooth hazelnut filling make it deliciously creamy and light. It’s delicious. But I don’t think I’ll be buying another, simply because I don’t believe in chocolate that takes longer to clean up after than it does to eat.
So, in keeping with my character, there I was this morning, clad in my cleanest grey tracksuit pants pushing through the hordes of pensioners looking for cheap biscuits down at my local supermarket when I saw a new Twix on the horizon: Caramel Latte. Of course, I bought two of them and two of the originals in order to compare the classic with the newbie.
Mars own the Twix brand and are, to use an Aussie term, “Crackin’ a Cadbury” by reducing the weight of the newer flavour in order to sell it for the same price as the original bar. I’m being nitpicky here though, because there’s only a 3 gram differential – 58g for the bog-standard Twixaroonie, and 55g for the Caramel Latte but I’m mentioning it here so that the big boys know that we little folk ARE aware of their little schemes to maximise profits by surreptitiously reducing sizes.
Love Chunks (my partner in crime because he was working from home today and insisted that a happy marriage means sharing everything) and I had a reminder taste of the original. Always good. Nice crunchy biscuit centre, sweet soft flowing caramel, pleasant enough milk chocolate. I’ve always liked them, but never found them particularly filling (that’s why I bought two but forgot about Love Chunks being home), so have tended not to buy them when I’m hungry and have overlooked them when craving some top quality dark stuff.
As the wrapper opened on the new bar, a really noticeable and inviting smell of coffee wafted up which is a nice touch for a pedestrian bar. As you can see if they were taken out of their packets and swapped you’d be struggling to tell the difference between them, so the sweet coffee smell would help.
“Mmm hmmm, this coffee one is so much better,” murmured Love Chunks, who’d thoughtfully poured himself a glass of icy cold iced coffee to accompany it. I agree entirely. Still the same crunchy biscuit and Okey Dokey milk chocolate covering and the caramel is exactly the same consistency albeit with a nice, latte-flavour inserted. No actual ‘coffee’ is listed in the ingredients, so it’s a victory for chemicals and additives in this case.
The last of the Starbucks bars, and also my favorite, just had to bring in some coffee. When you unwrap it, wow, coffee is just what you get. I couldn’t smell the chocolate at all.
Once it’s in your mouth, they blend together well. The coffee is definitely there, but it isn’t overpowering, either. One odd thing was that it was present in little, tiny bits. Usually they’re bigger, but these seemed like the “Guatemala Casi Ciel” ground coffee had just been casually dumped in.
Not that I minded. I like to suck on chocolate, and when it has big pieces of coffee beans or anything else, they often get in my way. So I like this more. The chocolate appears to be the same one as in the Dark Chocolate bar, but with the coffee here, its sweetness is toned down to a more humane level.
Not bad, Starbucks. Not bad. Although I can’t help but wonder if it’s a coincidence that the most promising of these three is the one with coffee. Is it because that’s what Starbucks does best?
