Wall's Magnum (chocolates)

Product name: Wall's Magnum (chocolates)
Purchase details: Tesco Superstore
Calories: 66 per piece (198 per three piece bar)
Country of origin: UK 

I recently reviewed an ice cream that wasn’t an ice cream in the form of the Wall's Cornetto: Vanilla chocolate cone and, today, I’m at it again. This time, it’s the turn of Wall's Magnum (chocolates) which I was, again, lucky enough to receive for free with a voucher from the Magnum website thanks to a heads-up from Magic Freebies UK. Otherwise, this 33g bar would have cost £0.60.

This ‘new chocolate experience’ was described as a ‘vanilla flavoured white chocolate truffle centre with a milk chocolate coating’. I did actually try this product in the Summer (when I first tried the Cornetto: Vanilla chocolate cone) and I can’t say I was impressed as it seemed far less authentic than the Cornetto version had been. However, I thought I’d give it another go.

KCL (under license of Unilever) again did a good job of mimicking the original Magnum’s appearance, here, by presenting the three chocolates in a slightly luxurious, metallic brown and gold wrapper that was similar to the ice cream’s packaging and contained Magnum’s ‘M’ logo. I still found the ‘do not freeze’ warning amusing!

Each chocolate was shaped like a mini Magnum (stick excluded) so were oval in shape and contained a thick chocolate layer that contained an ‘M’ imprint. This was dark in colour and, unfortunately, was also slightly scuffed in appearance. The inner white chocolate filling wasn’t very smooth-looking but it did look a bit like ice cream – particularly due the odd speck of vanilla.

The milk chocolate contained a minimum of 38% cocoa solids and 14% milk solids and emitted a cocoa aroma that wasn’t very sweet. The white chocolate in the truffle centre boasted a minimum of 20% milk solids and, bizarrely, almost had a hint of alcohol in the aroma!

I don’t know about you, but I love the satisfying cracking noise the chocolate makes on Magnum adverts, and I was really pleased that these chocolates provided that experience. It was a really thick layer of chocolate (80% of the overall product!) but I’m afraid I felt let down by the taste. It tasted more bitter than the ice cream version but I did wonder if this was an illusion created by the filling which wasn’t nearly as sweet or creamy as the ice cream. For me, the ‘silky soft vanilla centre’ just didn’t deliver. It didn’t taste like the white chocolate it was made of and I didn’t think it did a good job of mimicking ice cream either. It had quite a grainy texture, hardly tasted sweet at all, and didn’t melt in anything like the same way as the real thing. In its own right, it wasn’t horrible and it was soft to chew, but I never bite ice cream so whether or not it was similar in that respect, I’m not sure.

I recognise that it would be very difficult to make this product taste and feel exactly like a real Magnum but, aside from the fantastic ‘snappy’ chocolate texture, I struggled to find any similarities between these chocolates and the ice cream variety. When taking comparisons out of the equation, I just found the flavours a bit too bitter for my liking, so I’m afraid I’m still not very impressed by this product. 

Appearance: 7/10
Aroma: 6/10
Taste: 7/10
Texture: 6/10
Overall score: 6.5/10