Meiji Fran Whipps ‘Deep Bitter Chocolate’

Another Meiji product and this time it has a distinctly more sophisticated feel to it than Kinoko No Yama ot Takenoko No Sato.

The packaging is beautifully explanatory, and the contents didn’t disappoint – they were exactly like the picture. What I expected to find was a stick of biscuit that had been dipped in a white chocolate or possibly the legendary Cool Whipp (with the ‘h’) and then finished with a dark chocolate and dusted with hazelnuts.

Here we have one. It’s rather like a big edible sparkler. Thirteen centimetres long, smooth surface, occasional nobbly bits (the hazelnut). As you can see, a tasteful margin of the white part left on show between biscuit and dark chocolate.

Now these were definitely some of the most refined looking chocolates I’ve seen during Japan week, but I’m afraid that once again the standard of chocolate used let Frann Whipps down. It’s more akin to the artificial chooclate used on cheaper cakes, with the white cream ‘Whipp’ part only adding to the impression of something with only a distant relationship to cocoa and dairy products. I did rather like the crisp, slightly dark tasting biscuit, mainly because it offered a counterpoint to the overall slightly greasy sweetness. Something that looks like it should taste interesting but which turns out to be best suited to those who like their chocolate with more sugar and much less cocoa.

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