Reese's Pieces

Product name: Reese’s Pieces
Purchase details: £0.60 for a 43g bag or three for £1.20 (tesco.com)
Calories: 214 per bag
Country of origin: USA

I love Reese’s Pieces but I’d not had them in ages – the last time was as a birthday cake topping over 18 months ago so it was about time I had them again!

The ‘peanut butter candy in a crunchy shell’ used to be quite hard to find in the UK but, thankfully, it’s now a lot more widely available and I quite often see the eye-catching orange bags on shop shelves.

Made by the Hershey Company, these Pieces were a bit like M&M’s but with peanut butter instead of chocolate, and the brown, orange and yellow colours used reflected the branding of the Peanut Butter Cups.

The pale candy centres made up 62% of the product and produced a fairly nutty scent, although this wasn’t pure. They had a lovely peanut butter flavour but, since it had been solidified, it lacked the squidgy texture of ordinary peanut butter.

The shells made up the remainder of the Pieces and these were really sugary – an aspect that was particularly noticeable when sucking. These casings worked really well with the centres, merging crisp and soft textures nicely, although the peanut butter candy didn’t stay in one piece when chewing in the way that chocolate would...it almost had a crumbly feel to it. In terms of taste, though, the Pieces certainly didn’t lack the chocolate, and the flavour was still nice and sweet. In fact, the sweet and salty aspects played off each other perfectly and seemed to create a mini party in my mouth, producing a kind of juiciness too.

I also loved how the bag seemed to last for ages, and that the sweets tasted great individually and in handfuls. They were so addictive that I think I could actually live off them! I definitely need to make them a more regular purchase...

Appearance: 8/10
Aroma: 6/10
Taste: 8.5/10
Texture: 7.5/10
Overall score: 7.5/10

Cadbury Dairy Milk: Marvellous creations (banana caramel crisp)

Product name: Cadbury Dairy Milk: Marvellous creations (banana caramel crisp)
Purchase details: £1.00 for a 200g bar (Asda)
Calories: 128 per 25g serving (510 per 100g)
Country of origin: UK

I was really excited to pick up this new and great-value bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk: Marvellous creations (banana caramel crisp) by Mondelez UK. The product featured the usual Marvellous creations branding but, unsurprisingly, had a yellow border to reflect the flavour. I also really liked the image of a chocolate cannon shooting out bananas and caramel cubes.

Whilst I’d had a banana-themed chocolate before in the form of Amadeo Solo (chocolate-banana), this Cadbury bar was a very different offering and came described as ‘milk chocolate with banana flavour candy pieces (8%), caramel pieces (5%), and malted cereal balls (3%)’.

The bar had the same design (attractive but hard to evenly divide!) as the cola pretzel honeycomb variety but was packed full of different ingredients. Yellow blobs of banana candy were visible through the chocolate’s surface and large, brown cereal balls bulged out of the bar’s base. As for the caramel, these little cubes looked a lot like fudge and weren’t immediately obvious. Whilst there didn’t appear to be a shortage of excitement in the bar, I was slightly relieved to see a less bumpy surface than the cola pretzel honeycomb as I hoped this would result in a texture that wasn’t as busy.

The milk chocolate, unsurprisingly, was standard Dairy Milk. As a result, it had the usual creamy smell, although I was a little disappointed there was no hint of banana in this. However, there was an additional sweetness that was a bit like the cola pretzel honeycomb bar.

The flavours on offer were very much dependent on what additional goodness happened to be in each piece of milky chocolate. The banana candy had a slightly artificial taste and, whilst not subtle, wasn’t overpowering either. Rather than being foam sweets, these pieces were more like sugary beans – they were very sweet and reminded me a bit of the ‘banana medicine’ I had as a kid. As a result, they were a bit harder than I thought they’d be, but they were still crumbly.

The extremely crisp cereal tended to take me by surprise when I hit a piece! It had a slight but noticeable malted taste, as promised, but its rough texture did ruin the otherwise wonderful melt of the bar. As for the caramel cubes, these made more of a difference than I thought. Their flavour was pretty weak but they did provide a bit of a fudgy taste and their soft texture made a significant impact on the overall chunky chew by providing extra resistance and making the chocolate feel more crumbly.

I thought the different elements in this bar worked really well together – it was like having a sweet shop in the mouth after the chocolate had melted! Whilst the caramel wasn’t very powerful, it did seem to mellow the sweetness of the banana. I also quite enjoyed how the flavours weren’t evenly distributed as it provided a bit more variety, whilst always filling the mouth with some kind of deliciousness.

I’m not convinced Cadbury Dairy Milk: Marvellous creations (banana caramel crisp) is about to become the next big thing but it certainly seems to fill a gap on the mainstream market and I’d definitely buy this again.

Appearance: 9/10
Aroma: 8/10
Taste: 7.5/10
Texture: 7/10
Overall score: 7.88/10

Cadbury Dairy Milk: Freddo (popping candy)

Product name: Cadbury Dairy Milk: Freddo (popping candy)
Purchase details: £0.10 for an 18g bar (Home Bargains)
Calories: 95 per bar
Country of origin: Europe 

Let’s be honest...I only bought this bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk: Freddo (popping candy) because when do you ever see Freddos for sale at the traditional price of £0.10 these days?! I hadn’t actually had a Freddo since I was a teenager, and I’d never had one containing popping candy, so I thought it was time I gave it a go.

I bought this bar over the festive period which is why the purple wrapper had the knitted theme and some snowflakes. It also featured the cute Freddo frog who was wearing different colours on different wrappers (I went for blue as it’s my favourite!).

The chocolate itself was also shaped like the frog but I did feel its appearance was spoilt slightly by lots of little marks – this was probably a result of the popping candy itself but I still felt it made it look less appealing.

Made by Mondelez, this was the standard Dairy Milk chocolate that contained 23% cocoa solids and 20% milk solids. In addition, though, 6% of the bar was popping candy. I actually couldn’t quite believe what a difference 6% made – the texture of the bar was rougher and crunchier and, whether melting or chewing, the popping sensation was felt throughout the mouth.

Thankfully, the quality and strength of the chocolate’s scent and flavour had not been compromised, with the candy being small enough to allow the chocolate to still feel chunky and contribute to a lovely, creamy taste.

I do prefer the unadulterated texture of a standard Dairy Milk bar (Freddo or otherwise!) but this was still a nice change. 

Appearance: 7/10
Aroma: 8/10
Taste: 8/10
Texture: 7.5/10
Overall score: 7.63/10

Vilniaus Pergalé Pergalē: Coconut centres

Product name: Vilniaus Pergalé Pergalē: Coconut centres
Purchase details: £1.00 for a 100g box (Poundland)
Calories: 499 per box
Country of origin: Lithuania 

This box of Vilniaus Pergalé Pergalē: Coconut centres recently caught my eye in Poundland as, not only did they contain white chocolate and coconut, but they looked like a cheap version of Lindt Lindor. Granted, the fillings looked moist and bitty in comparison to Lindt’s truffles, but they even had the pale blue and white colour theme used for Lindor: Coconut!

These 55% white chocolate-containing ‘candies with coconut filling’ came individually wrapped in coconut-depicting, paper-lined foil wrappers. The chocolates were almost like a rose, in shape, and I was pleased to see that their chocolate shells looked nice and thick, albeit slightly scuffed. Compared to the image on the box, the fillings didn’t look nearly as wet, and appeared to have more of a truffle-like texture than I was expecting. However, it was moist and sticky to the touch.

The chocolates did have a coconut aroma but, oddly, this seemed to be mixed with a hint of alcohol. The white chocolate itself was sweet with a milky taste that reminded me of the coating used on Wall’s Magnum: White. This melted nicely but not all that comfortably since the chocolates were quite large for the mouth!

When first biting into the soft, wet filling, the taste that hit me was almost like melon, but this then settled into a coconut flavour, helped along by a bittiness provided by the ‘coconut chips’ that accounted for 2.8% of the product. I would still have liked a stronger coconut taste but what really disappointed me was the taste of alcohol. This was only mild, to start with, but since I’m a non-drinker, I found the warm feeling at the back of my throat unmistakable. On checking the ingredients, I saw that the chocolates did, indeed, contain ‘ethyl alcohol’. I persevered anyway but I found that that the boozy taste only got stronger and I felt that this was such a shame as it was completely unnecessary for what would have been a perfectly acceptable product as it was.

I thought that this was a good concept for a chocolate treat but, for me, the inclusion of alcohol ruined it. Whether or not someone who actually likes alcohol would enjoy these, I’m not sure, but I did feel that, without the alcohol, these were decent enough. The flavours from the chocolate and coconut may not have been the strongest in the world, and they may not have been mind-blowing, but they were certainly enjoyable. 

Appearance: 7.5/10
Aroma: 7/10
Taste: 6.5/10
Texture: 7.5/10
Overall score: 7.13/10