23 April 2011

Haribo Eggstras & Tangfast Chicks – What came first, the chicken or the egg? (Tesco) [By Spectre]


Easter is here again. Store shelves are covered from bottom to top with a multitude of brightly coloured chocolate eggs from every variety. I decided to break with the norm and try something different. Besides, I’ve recently changed job and it now takes me longer to travel back and forth. I’ve fallen into the trap of eating sweets on the train as a sugar energy interim before dinner. It’s difficult to eat a huge chocolate egg on a packed commuter train and small packets of sweets such as these Haribo’s fit in my pocket easily. Consequentially, Not only have I rediscovered my sweet tooth, but my waist size is increasing again. Ho hum…

Haribo Eggstras
These are Fried Eggs from the Haribo Starmix. They are sweet gums in the quaint shape of miniature fried eggs. They have a healthy hint of orange and mango and have no artificial colours. There’s lemon and passion fruit in the ingredients too. Although these two flavours seem to take a backseat to the stronger orange and mango flavours. I found these to be very pleasant and surprisingly healthy tasting gums.

Haribo Tangfast Chicks
These are described as “sour mix” and “fizzy fruit flavoured foam gums”. They are Chicken shaped. Hence the Tangfast Chicks name given to them. On opening the packet I noticed that they had not been counted equally, and I only had two green to taste test. Glancing at the back of the packet I noticed the ingredients included apple, aronia, blackcurrant, elderberry, mango, grape, kiwi, lemon, nettle, orange, passion fruit, and spinach. Funny mix there, especially the spinach and nettle! There were four colours of sour sugar coated gums. On remembering just how sour Haribo gums can be, my fingers dove excitedly into the packet.
The white colour gum is clearly supposed to be lemon flavour. It tastes like lemon, but surprisingly not too sour, rather sweeter and sugary, certainly not unpleasant, just not sour enough. Usually lemon flavour is the sourest in any sour pack of sweets, so I began to worry a little. The red colour is predominantly blackcurrant flavour with a decent portion of elderberry. The red colour was sweet, with a distinctive pleasant taste, but also not really sour. The green colour followed suite as an obvious apple flavour, just not very sour. The orange colour was unsurprisingly orange flavour, but there was little sourness there also. All the gums became slightly sourer the more I ate, but definitely a tame version of sour sweets that didn’t make me twisty faced at any point.

To the question, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” I have to answer the Tangfast Chicks, but only by a narrow margin. If they’d made my tongue twist with a stronger sourness, they’d have been clear winners.

Happy Easter everyone!!
By Spectre

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