Gone Chocco

Oh come on, let’s not scoff – The Reject Shop is a good place to get cheap gift wrapping paper, stationery, craft stuff (Sapphire goes through more glue, sticky tape and paper than I do chocolate. Or nearly), and the other day I walked over to their hanging bags of chocolates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiffany brand ‘Break’ looked like a Kit-Kat clone and their ‘Gotcha’ a dwarfed Picnic. The Sorini praline Cappuccino bag was taken in deference to their lovely little hazelnut Easter Eggs.

Firstly, the  Tiffany ‘Break’.  These are made in Dubai by the clearly-very-busy Iffco who set up shop in UAE in 1975 and now make biscuits, cakes, confectionery, icecream, soap, cooking oils, fruit juice, tomato sauces, animal feed, pasta, eggs, flour, chicken and frozen foods.  With such a large portfolio, was their attention really on their chocolate range?

Er, no, as it turned out. The chocolate was so thinly coated that the wafer was visible and the wafer itself tasted stale. In fact, there was very little discernible ‘taste’ at all, just a sweetish nothingness and certainly nothing that said ‘chocolate’.

The list of ingredients sort of confirmed this – sugar, wheat flour, cocoa butter, vege fat, milk powder, cocoa mass, corn starch, soya flour, emulsifiers (several), salt, raising agent, ‘permitted artificial flavours’ (vanillin, chocolate and hazelnut) ~Shudder~

Time for the ‘Gotcha’ or the middle one that looked like something my dog Milly might lay after inhaling a dish of leftover risotto…

Again, the rice puffs and wafers were very stale and the chocolate utterly tasteless. The caramel sticking the wafers together revealed a smidgen of flavour only after all the other disappointing detritus had dissolved.

The ingredients contained a very long list of things not commonly known in this country such as ‘cocoa butter glycerine’, caster oil and the ‘permitted artificial flavours’ of ethyl vanillin and milk crumb.  Yum, yum!

Three has always been my favourite number and it was a great relief to discover that the cheap and cheerful Sorini was not a disappointment but a delight. 

A lovely odour of coffee wafted up before I crunched into the crispy chocolate shell, cracking through to a deliciously creamy cappuccino filling and some scatterings of biscuit crumbs. At two bucks for a 160 gram bag, it was a genuine bargain. It was also nice to see that the ingredients weren’t frightening either.

These were the ones we kept and enjoyed – the Tiffany travesties were dumped into the fliptop kitchen bin with gusto.

 

 

As I said in the last review, I had twelve blocks of heat-affected (ie blooming) Cocolo to play with. Ten year old Sapphire and I decided that we could melt four of them (one 70%, one milk and two bittersweet blocks) and make some home-made Rocky Road.

I know that purists melt their chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over simmering water, but I’m an impatient microwaver every time.

After one minute, you could see that the chocolate was starting to resemble it’s pre-bloomed self:

…. and just needed a tiny bit more heat before …..

Damn, it seized!

Even a bimbo cook such as myself knows that once chocolate has done this, it can’t be undone.

Sapphire was stricken. Our Rocky Road plans had hit a pot hole.

Luckily, I was within arm’s reach of a tin of condensed milk. “Quick, bung that in, and stir like mad,” I said. (She stirred and I stood behind her, sticking the spoon into the tin to get at the sickly sweet remnants)

“Now, we’ll leave out the marshmallows but still sprinkle in the slivered almonds, dried cranberries and sultanas and a bit of coconut.”

As it got harder for Sapph to stir, I sprinked some additional coconut onto the tray that we were going to put the Rocky Road in to set.

“Mum, what are you—?”

“Grab a teaspoon, dip it in, roll it into a ball in your hands, yes, like that, well done – - – ”

 

- – - – - then roll it into the coconut so that it’s not sticky any more and voila!  You’ve got yourself some Cocolo balls!”

 

Sapphire smiled.

“This is like what Matt Preston said on Masterchef. ‘Don’t tell us what it should have been, tell us what it is now.’ Cocolo balls!”

We refridgerated them for around twenty minutes until they were firm and enjoyed ~ahem~ more than one for afternoon tea.

The moral of this story is always have a tin of condensed milk handy and dessicated coconut (or sweet cocoa powder) solves all chocolate-related problems!

 

Oh dear, sweet, accessible Cadbury Creme Egg. My fillings ache just by glancing over at you, glistening in your cheery-coloured foil, dangling fetchingly from a chrome rack in aisle seven.

Easter marketing may have started on the 1st of January, but I forgive you your haste.  In fact, I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again: ours has been a long love affair dating back to the deep mists of time – or 1981 to be precise.

I was a shy Australian girl starting high school in Aberdeen, Scotland.  Accents were inpenetrable, as was trying to negotiate the cliques of Punks, Poseurs, Skinheads and Swots.  In science, I was given a dare: put an entire Cadbury Creme Egg into my mouth and not be found out by the teacher.

That. Was. It.  It was easy to be silent and I prayed only that the teacher wouldn’t call upon me to answer a question.  I was lucky that day, and inside my gob the egg slowly dissolved.  Ickily sweet, dreamily creamy, making science divine.

And so, 29 years later, as a not-so-shy grown up back in Australia and at the supermarket I now find my hands excitedly fumbling for my wallet; coins spinning on to the moving checkout belt. My surrender is now complete.

The family groceries are paid by credit card but the pack of four Cadbury Creme Eggs are paid in cash like a guilty secret and shoved into my backpack before anyone else can see. Like a true addict, I fidget nervously and look around for a secluded spot to eat one. Not out in the sunlight where it would be too public and possibly offensive for people to see, but in the shade, yes, over there, under the train tunnel next to the station. My feet are yearning to run like the wind instead of badly act out the casual saunter my brain is imposing upon them. It wouldn’t do to have someone else guess my purpose; I was never ever going to share.

A quick glance around reveals no other passersby, just bird crap-spattered cars, takeaway containers and cigarette butts. My shaking hands rip off the foil as I eagerly hunch over the egg, shielding it from view. My eyes close as my two front teeth bite hard into the thick chocolate. The egg white fondant pours out of the top and runs becomingly down my chin, but I am already far away from my grimy spot on earth to care.

Another big bite sees the fondant turn into a yolky yellow as I greedily gulp it down and chew the chunks of chocolate at a more leisurely pace. Blood is pumping warm and strong in my veins and successfully insulates me from the disapproving look of two nannas heading to the shops. After only three precious mouthfuls, I reach the last morsel – the bottom of the shell. No fondant, just a thick layer of Cadbury dairy milk chocolate. A cruel consolation because it left me wanting more…..

Luckily I had three more to take home.  And eat in an embarrassingly quick time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

….and then I went back to the supermarket the very next day, bought two more bags of four eggs each, put them in the fridge so that they were firm enough to cut and photograph and then gobbled them up!

Like Mick Molloy and any US-cop show whose title is an acronym, I’ve avoided Mars Confectionery’s ‘Pods’ for as long as I could. 

The annoying advertisement with some down-trodden bloke in an inexplicably British accent trying to tell us that these things are more brilliantly designed than the Egyptian pyramids (so hilarious) and being overpriced for a weird-sized 160 gram plastic bag that is hung on the hooks beside the chicos and spearmint leaves at my supermarket hasn’t exactly intrigued me. 

Still, they were on special (who doesn’t like seeing chocolate on special?), so I bought one bag of ‘Ingeniously crunchy’ Pods with Mars and one with Snickers.

 

I’ve deliberately set them on my lounge, because they don’t seem like the things you’d take to a dinner party to share, but are something you’d scoff in private, with the telly on.

And they look tiny.  And crushed – heaps of the ‘crispy wafer’ shell had cracked, raining the rug in dusty crumbs that my dog hoovered up instantly.  They remind me a bit of something that drops from a tree when it needs to be eaten by a bird and pooed out in a distant forest for germination purposes.

And they taste…..

 

……like something that’s been eaten by a bird and pooed out somewhere else for germination purposes.

 The wafer (are they allowed to describe it as ‘crunchy baked wafer’ when it tastes like a dried out prawn cracker flavoured with dirt?) is truly awful and the tiny blob of chocolate and whatever the heck they’ve used to indicate a Mars or Snickers bar is negligible. 

At the very least, each Pod weighs around four grams and contains a mere single gram of fat.  Trouble is, if you possess no working tastebuds (or brain cells) and therefore can’t tell the difference between a good quality, homely choccy snack and potting mix are you going to stop at one?

Of course not: the whole bag will be eaten in front of something featuring Mick Molloy or a US cop show advertised in a breathy overdone voiceover by channel ten’s announcers.  If that’s the case, you’ll be whalloped with 28 grams of fat, of which 18 grams is saturated.  Plus, you’ll feel unsatisfied, unpleasantly full and a bit ripped off.  Avoid.