Golden Days Dark Chocolate Sesame Snaps

I’ve just been to my favourite Foodland supermarket to find Violet Crumbles to review for Chocablog, only to find its already been done. Curses! And while there, horror of horrors, they have rearranged and removed what must be slow-moving stock. Some of my strange and wonderful foreign imports are gone. Oh the pain of it!

However, we do have this strange wee beastie to help make up for the suffering. Dark Chocolate Sesame Snaps – wonder if this is anything like the Polish Halva I tried a while back?

It turns out, although you’d never guess from the packaging, that these are made in Poland as well, and sold under a local brand name. This also suffers from another one of my favourite complaints: health claims. In this case, big happy ticks on the front of the pack: “Gluten free” and “Cholesterol free”. Turning the pack over we find that sesame seeds and chocolate are the dominant ingredients, but glucose syrup and sugar rate a mention as well. This really makes me very annoyed: Glucose syrup is one of the fastest ways to get sugars into your bloodstream – it’s more rapidly absorbed that fats, and its more fattening! Grr!

And then this warning:

“This product may contain traces of bee pollen and propolis which can cause severe allergic reaction and may contain traces of dairy and peanuts.”

Except it’s all capitals and fairly shouts out. And the grammar is lousy. And what the heck is propolis? Turns out it’s a bee resin. And the really weird thing is, the ingredients don’t list honey!

What is going on here?

So I’m a little miffed and off to a poor start.

My supermarket 3-pack turns out to contain 3 (gosh!) smaller packs, each containing 3 things that look a bit like a sesame-studded biscuit with a bit of chocolate layed over the top in cutesy line. Unusual. How the chocolate comprises the claimed 25% I don’t know because it certainly looks to be substantially less.

Breaking one, we see that there is a heck of a lot of sesame here. It smells vaguely of honey, and looks like the sesame seeds are held together with some kind of stuff – which is probably sugar. There really isn’t a lot of chocolate.

In spite of my whinging, it’s actually not bad. I’ve just demolished one of the small pack-lets from inside, and find it all the rather more-ish: sweet, and with a decent whack of sesame flavour. The chocolate is really there as a bit of a bonus, it contributes little if anything to the flavour.

This is nothin like that Halva, but I’m still pleasantly surprised.

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