I remember buying regular 3 Musketeers bars out of the vending machines in high school. I’d lift off the bottom layer of chocolate, eat that flat piece, and then scoop out the nougat center, leaving me with a nice chocolate trough. 3 Musketeers were never my favorite bar, as the milk chocolate and sweet chocolate nougat get cloying quickly, but I enjoyed them from time to time.
The 3 Musketeers Mint with dark chocolate is a new bar from Mars. I assume it’s intended to compete with the York Peppermint Pattie. Well, York, you’ve got nothing to worry about. The 3 Musketeers Mint is nice and inoffensive, but it’s also uninspiring and unsensational.
I like the way the bar is portion controlled. It’s narrower than the normal 3 Musketeers, and it comes in two pieces for some reason. Perhaps it made for a better chocolate/mint ratio. Either way, it’s nice to easily be able to eat a single bar and save or share the second. I also like that the bar is dark chocolate because I like dark chocolate.
The bar smells sweetly of chocolate and lightly of mint. It’s a gorgeous bar, and the shiny and artfully swirled dark chocolate coating contrasts well with the fluffy and pristinely white mint nougat. The chocolate coating is fairly sweet, but not as stick-in-your-throat sweet as that of the regular 3 Musketeers. The mint nougat has the same texture as the chocolate nougat of the regular bar. The mint taste , like the smell, is not very strong, though it does have staying power. A few minutes after I finished the bar, I could still feel a light mintiness in the back of my throat. Like the bar itself, the lingering mint taste was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
The conclusion?
I prefer the strong peppermint kick of the York Peppermint Pattie. The 3 Musketeers Mint is subtle and therefore a little boring. I don’t think it’ll be able to hone in on the Peppermint Pattie’s domination of the chocolate-mint market. After all, the 3 Musketeers big marketing grab is that it’s lower in fat than most chocolate bars, but the York Peppermint Pattie is similarly “healthier”. The taste of the 3 Musketeers Mint alone is simply not enough of a draw for me. An O.
Varsha