Hallo! Neil here with another European treat. This one is possibly found in the States, but I can’t recall having seen it there, perhaps because it launched after I moved over here.

It’s the Cadbury Dairy Milk Bliss Dreamy Chocolate Truffle, or CDMBDCT. Cadbury ran into some trouble with its original ads for the Bliss line, which makes you question the judgment of some advertising firms.

So there’s a short story behind this particular candy bar that has been in my cupboard for the past few weeks. The short version of that story: I didn’t even mean to buy it. I meant to buy another that I was forced out of purchasing. The long version can be found after the break.

The CDMBDCT came in very elegant purple packaging with some gold highlights, making it seem like a real treat that shouldn’t have been pushed at me as a last-minute add-on at a clearance price, LADY [Rosa's note: Neil's indignancy will make sense if you read his explanation after the break]. The  elegance continued with the gold fabric-paper wrapper.

Individual blocks broke smoothly and were quite hefty. Half a block was gone in one bite. An al dente feeling to the outer body and the expected softness of the truffle filling worked well together. The milk chocolate was nothing special, while the truffle’s fluffiness belied its sweetness.

That was all it had though: fluffiness and sweetness. Not much flavor to speak of. “These would make good s’mores,” I thought (Somebody please try this and leave a comment about your results!), but overall, it was not an amazing chocolate bar.

Each block went by quickly. Sadly, this was more out of a hope for it to improve or for my dessert stomach to be satisfied than out of sheer ecstasy. Overall, I really wish I could remember what that other candy bar was that I wanted, so I could pine for its loss properly. I’m going to have to give the CDMBDCT an O.

The longer version, presented as a cautionary tale: I was about to hop on the Eurostar train out of London, and I picked up some trashy reading material from the newsstand. As I always do now, I scanned the candy racks for exciting products. I grabbed a candy bar I didn’t recognize, with the purpose of eating & reviewing it. At the counter, the cashier started yammering at me about the stack of Cadbury bars, which were a Pound, and the one I’d picked up, which was 80 cents, and would I like a Cadbury.

It was all very fast and confusing in a dialect of English I’m not used to, and I said “Oh! Em, er, uh, okay, I, uh, I’ll take a Bliss.”  She rung it all up then handed me… the Cadbury & my magazine. I hadn’t gotten whatever the original bar was that I’d wanted.

UPSOLD! Curse you, cashier lady! I had, in my mind, expected to purchase TWO candy bars. I was okay with that. Yet there I was, with only the one I didn’t want, and a train to catch!

Amused at my “problem” of having purchased a Cadbury bar, I set off for my train home and told my story to my travel companion, who was also pretty mystified at the experience. When I arrived home, I chucked it into my cupboard along with a shockingly high number of other English chocolate products. (Especially shocking considering I changed trains in Brussels and bought no chocolate there! Sorry, Rosa!)

Instead, they turned out to be little caramels with a blueberry flavored center. It looks like I wound up with the blueberry version of Neil’s Cadbury hazelnut treat.

The caramels were soft and chewy, with a texture similar to that of Starbursts, only grainier and not quite as sticky. The caramel flavor was rather boring, just generically sweet with a one-dimensional caramel flavor.

The center filling was where it went all wrong for me. It tasted weirdly artificial with dark plummy undertones that really didn’t mesh with the caramel at all.

In fact, the combination was downright off-putting. A –.

Tiny print on the bottom of the wrapper called them, “solid milk chocolate eggs with popping candy in a crisp candy shell.”

On the outside, they looked identical to regular Mini Eggs – same tiny egg shape, same matte candy shell, same slight speckling. All the fun was hidden inside!

The milk chocolate was the same as that of regular Mini Eggs: lusciously thick and creamy with dusky, caramel tones. In the Popping Mini Eggs, however, that melt was interrupted by the texture of the popping crystals.

Those poppers added an crackly tickle in the mouth. For me, it was mostly experienced in the back of my throat.

The feeling was fun and rather surreal, like holding tiny live jumping creatures in my mouth. As far as I could tell, they didn’t affect the taste at all.

When I eat regular Mini Eggs, I like holding them in my mouth and letting the sugar shell melt away and meld into the thick milk chocolate within. With the Popping Mini Eggs, I preferred to crunch through the shell and chomp right to the popping-ness.

The popping was a fun addition to an already tasty treat. I can’t decide if I like these better than the regular version. I think the Popping Mini Eggs are fun, while the regular Mini Eggs feel more indulgent because it’s easier to experience their melt. These get an OM.

I do believe that the Curly Wurly is named after its crazy loopy shape. It’s comprised of strands of intertwining caramel all covered in milk chocolate.

Alas, mine was a bit broken by the time it made it to me, but that didn’t affect the taste at all – just the Curly Wurly-ness.

The caramel was quite chewy and sticky – as I chomped through the bar, it managed to wind its way into all the nooks and crannies of my teeth. It tasted sweet and butterscotchy.

The chocolate layer was quite thin. It tasted sweet and slightly sour with a light malt flavor and a mild cocoa-ness.

Despite the extra-stickiness of the caramel, I enjoyed the pure caramel + chocolate combination. For a mass produced, check-out aisle-type bar, it was quite good! Taking price point into account, I’d say this deserves an OM.

A labmate went home to China to celebrate the New Year and brought back a lot of candy to share. I asked her to select some for me. Here were my impressions.

(NB: I originally thought the picture on the wrapper was of chestnuts. It’s definitely of hazelnuts. This knowledge makes the review funny-ha-ha-Neil-can’t-recognize-nuts as opposed to just funny-ha-ha.)

The Cadbury Chestnut, as I think of it, was the one most similar to candies I’m familiar with. It presents as a brown nugget that could be mistaken for butterscotch or milk chocolate.

Biting it in half yields a few drops of a sweet sticky liquid in the center of a chewy, but not impossible, bulk. It required a fraction of the chomps that the White Rabbit did.

Here, I have to admit that I’m unsure what chestnuts in their natural state taste like. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve had them roasted over an open fire either. This had “peanut butter” written all over it for my naive taste buds, which have surely been abused by an overconsumption of capsaicin and hops.

I would have liked a bit more liquid than solid, but given that the liquid was a surprise, the manufacturers have probably made the right choice when it comes to making a mess of customers’ chins, hands, and sweaters. This is definitely another OM for me.

The box is pretty descriptive, calling them both “sour then sweet” and “soft and chewy”. The candies inside were all individually wrapped and came in four colors: red, orange, yellow, and green.

The kids (which were shaped more like asymmetrical bow-ties than humans) were all covered in a granulated sour sugar. They had a soft, immediate give when bitten into, and while they were a tad chewy, they mostly (but not completely) avoided getting stuck in my teeth.

Red was raspberry. I am notoriously bad with artificially flavored red candies, as they all just taste like red to me.

I thought it tasted like cherry with a slight medicinal tinge and an almost plasticky bite to the finish. I thought it was the least sour of the bunch.

Orange started with a bright initial sting of sour sugar. It had a lovely concentrated orange flavor with loads of citrus zest that then petered out into a sugary sweetness.

Yellow had that same sour kick to start. There was a light lemon-y zest to the flavor but it was mostly a mellow sweetness.

Green is supposed to be lime, but to me, it tasted like candied green apple as soon as it hit my tongue. There was an unfortunate plasticky tinge to the finish that I think was supposed to be the lime flavor. Aside from the aftertaste, the flavor mixed well with the sourness.

While they aren’t my favorite gummi/jelly candy, they’re decently addictive and good for candy snacking and sharing in the office candy bowl. An O.

Many thanks to Cybele for serving as flavor decoding reference.

In the case of this bar, the soft English toffee refers to a smooth, flowing caramel. It’s sweet and sticky, with a gorgeous golden hue.

The bar is segmented into square pillows, each stamped with the Cadbury logo. I think each pillow is supposed to completely contain the English toffee filling, but some of my breaks oozed.

The milk chocolate is thick and cloying, with a slight grain as it melts. It tastes dusky, with buttery notes and a throat-burning sweetness.

The caramel filling tasted strongly of butterscotch. Together with the sweet milk chocolate, this bar was a total sugar bomb.

Cadbury’s Soft English Toffee bar was crazy sweet and intensely decadent. It was too sweet for my taste, but some friends of mine enjoyed it and quickly gobbled it up. An O.

The Starbar is “shot through with peanuts and caramel,” which made me think that it would be a Snickers-like bar. Well, not exactly.

The milk chocolate coating (14% of the bar) was greasy. Immediately under the chocolate was a circular layer of gooey, sweet, and sticky caramel. A few salty peanuts studded the nougat, but they were few and far between, not exactly “shot through” with peanuts.

I think there were also little wafer bits inside the sweet nougat center that weren’t advertised on the wrapper. I don’t know why not, as it’s a nice feature. It provides an enjoyable textural contrast that gives this bar an extra edge.

I was disappointed by the lack of peanuts but pleasantly surprised by the wafer bits. Not sublime, but pretty good for a mass-produced bar. An OM.

The Flake Dark is just a normal Flake but made with dark chocolate (44% to be exact). For dark chocolate, it is way too overly sweet. Unsurprising for a mass made bar but still disappointing. It was also pretty waxy. Still, it did at least taste like cocoa, which is more than can be said for many Hershey’s products these days.

The Flake Praline (below photo) fared somewhat better in my taste test, but it still wasn’t great. As far as I could tell, it was a normal milk chocolate Flake with its base dipped in a praline/hazelnut/chocolate mixture. The Flake texture still comes across, only this time it comes with a tinge of hazelnut flavor and crunch. Still, the thing was overly sweet. I often have that issue with chocolate + hazelnut combinations but usually still manage to enjoy the two together. In the case of the Flake Praline, not so much.

Finally, we have the Flake Dipped, which is a Flake bar dipped in  chocolate. The dipping didn’t do much for the taste or the texture, but it at least contained the Flake crumbles (the previous two were rather messy and shed chocolate bits everywhere). I found the chocolate to be too dry with a sour finish, unusual for U.K. bars.

Overall, I found the Flake line to be pretty disappointing, which is why I never bothered to try the original. If its jazzier versions were bad, the plain milk chocolate version could only be worse. You can also get Flakes in miniature bits as a soft serve topping (at KFC, I think?). I tried them that way and was not impressed. An O for this mediocre trio.

The Chomp is a small flat log of chocolate covering caramel. If I remember correctly, it’s about the size of a Twix finger, just flatter. For some reason, I expected the insides to be a smooth, liquidy caramel, I think because I got used to sticky caramel being described as toffee in the U.K. The caramel inside the Chomp was quite stiff and thick. It was sticky but doesn’t stick to your teeth.

I found the caramel to be meh on flavor. The chocolate was pretty meh too, which surprised me. I vastly prefer Cadbury’s dairy milk to Hershey’s as it has a nice creamy dairy finish to it, but the chocolate on the Chomp just didn’t do anything for me. The whole bar reminded me of a U.S. Milky Way – the texture of the Chomp’s caramel approximates that of the mix of nougat and caramel in a Milky Way. An O for mediocrity, though it’s tiny size and price tag makes it a great impulse purchase.

The Cadbury Fudge has a pretty self explanatory name. It’s chocolate fudge covered in a thin layer of chocolate, also in log form. The chocolate layer was so slight that it was completely overshadowed by the fudge. As for the fudge, it was soft of cocoa flavored but tasted mostly of sugar. I don’t like fudge because I find waaay too sweet, but I was pleasantly surprised that the Cadbury Fudge wasn’t as whomp you over the head sugary as I had expected. It still gets just an O, but it could have been worse.