Cadbury Dairy Milk: Chips ahoy!

Product name: Cadbury Dairy Milk: Chips ahoy!
Purchase details: £1.00 for a 120g bar (tesco.com)
Calories: 85 per three chunk serving (678 per bar)
Country of origin: UK

Mondelez really are rolling out the new Cadbury products aren’t they?! I must say I was really surprised when I first found out about this Dairy Milk: Chips ahoy! bar since the Chips Ahoy! cookie brand isn’t one generally sold here in the UK. Personally, I’ve only tried two of their varieties from import stores in the past (the Big & chewy original and Big & chewy chocolate), and they weren’t even the standard kind!

In keeping with the brand name, the purple wrapper contained a fun image of a pirate cookie, and my initial thought was that this product would be similar to the Golden biscuit crunch bar. However, the description of ‘milk chocolate with a biscuit flavour filling (38%) and chocolate chip biscuit pieces (12%)’ showed that it was actually a very different concept.

The bar’s appearance was very similar to the Snowy delight – it was divided into 24 chunks and had a pale filling. This time, though, the creme was a beige colour and it also had dark biscuit pieces within.

I’m so used to Dairy Milk smelling like Dairy Milk that I was stunned to find this slab actually had a strong and buttery chocolate chip cookie scent...and that was before I’d even broken it apart! The Dairy Milk’s flavour did remain prominent, though, and it was a very chocolatey bar all-round. However, the smooth, soft and creamy centre did have a part to play too. It didn’t taste as much of biscuit as I’d expected, based on the smell, but it did have a slightly syrupy flavour which was lovely. The flavour was also very sweet but I had no problem polishing off the whole bar (having saved my calories, of course!).

I’m not always a fan of added crunch in chocolate but, here, the biscuit pieces worked wonderfully. There wasn’t too much but there was plenty to fit with the theme and provide an authentic experience. The texture of the biscuit itself was spot on – exactly what chocolate chip cookies feel like to chew – and, the more biscuit a piece of the bar had, the more I enjoyed it. The only problem I found with the filling was that the combination of soft and bitty meant it was hard to get a clean break when snapping each piece off.

I didn’t, for one moment, expect this Dairy Milk bar to be bad, but I ended up enjoying it even more than I thought I would. My lack of knowledge about the American cookie brand means I couldn’t judge whether or not it lived up to the Chips Ahoy! name, but the crunchy pieces certainly met my expectations, as a Brit, of what cookies should be like!

Appearance: 8.5/10
Aroma: 8/10
Taste: 8.5/10
Texture: 9/10
Overall score: 8.5/10