Reese’s Peanut Butter Skeletons (Ocado) By @Cinabar

It is official, we are hitting autumn and the Halloween snacks are in the shops. Naturally, I am using this as an excuse to stock up on all the seasonal sweets, and as someone who loves chocolate and peanut butter, these Reese’s Peanut Butter Skeletons were high on my list of ‘essential’ purchases.

In the pack, we have nicely decorated, foil-covered chocolates with a cute skeleton design. They look great. They are wrapped too, so they are perfect for sharing, but let’s be honest, these are going to be eaten long before anyone knocks on the door wanting to trick or treat.

I gave one a try, and the ratio is different compared to a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. There is more chocolate and a smaller portion of peanut butter. The flavour is therefore more about the sweet chocolate, but there is still enough peanut butter to give plenty of nutty flavour. Purists may prefer the more full-on taste of a peanut butter cup, though.

I still really like these. They are sweet, nutty and easy to eat, and they also look adorable emptied into a bowl. A fun Halloween twist on one of my favourite chocolate and peanut butter combinations.

Harry Specters Luxe Chocolates Box (Gifted) By @Cinabar

We were very kindly gifted this box of Harry Specters Luxe Chocolates for review, and I have to say, I was seriously impressed. Harry Specters has a lovely ethos, using ethical cocoa and natural ingredients, as well as creating employment opportunities for autistic young adults. The founder's son is autistic, and the company is particularly focused on being autism-friendly and creating opportunities and support for autistic people. 

They also make some really interesting chocolate flavours, which was the bit that really caught my attention. I couldn't wait to try them. I opened the box and the first thing that came to mind was wow. These are seriously beautiful chocolates. Each one is individually decorated and they look like little chocolate gems sitting in the box. They are almost too pretty to eat. Almost. I had no idea where to start, so I went with my usual tactic of finding the nutty ones first.

Peanut Butter - The chocolate is sweet and full of flavour, with 40% cocoa, while the peanut butter filling is thick and a little sticky. Peanut butter and chocolate is one of my favourite combinations, and this was absolutely spot on.

Maple and Pecan - Again, we have smooth chocolate, this time with a smooth, sweet and nutty filling. The maple comes from proper Canadian Maple Butter, which gives it a lovely rich sweetness. Pure yum.

Intense Coffee - Here we have strong coffee paired with a 60% cocoa chocolate covering. The flavour is full-on rich coffee and chocolate, and it really is a proper kick of flavour sensation. Seriously, I would eat a whole bar of this.

Apple Cinnamon - I decided to go for a fruity one next, and being a cinnamon lover, this was the natural choice. It uses 40% cocoa chocolate, proper fruity apple purée and just enough cinnamon to give a lovely little hit of warmth. Pure heaven.

These chocolates are next level. I honestly wasn't expecting to be quite so blown away by them, but every one I tried was absolutely delicious. They look beautiful, the flavours are interesting, and the chocolate itself is excellent. These are the sort of chocolates that make you stop after the first bite and think, wow. They deserve to be in every supermarket.

Flipz - Cinnamon Bun - Danish Pastry Flavour Pretzels [@NLi10]

 We've just got back from Denmark/Sweden and I ate a lot of good pastries on the trip.  To remember it my partner picked up these Flipz!

  

We've had a lot of these over the years, but this may be the perfect flavour - it's basically pretzel flavoured pretzels.  Well - with the sugar and cinnamon on the top anyway.

Standard ingredients.  

Standard appearance (although this is quite a bad picture - sorry!) but they have the crunch and sweetness with the lovely spices on top.  Perfect (home) cinema snack and something I'd be tempted to pay full price for!

Love Lane: Black Bird Stout (Ocado) By @SpectreUK

I do love a good stout washing down my steak and chips. I’m not keen on overly creamy stouts. I like a bold flavoursome stout with a touch of creaminess, as well as sweetness from malted chocolate and a little roasted coffee in its flavour.

Inspired by the Beatles song, Black Bird, this Extra Stout was brewed in Liverpool by Love Lane. There are malts of Golden Promise, Crystal, Oats, Wheat, Chocolate, as well as Black malt. So, I’m expecting chocolate creaminess, roasted coffee and sweet dark chocolate. There was Admiral hops added for citrus bitterness to this 6.7% in volume Black Bird.

On opening the can there was a dark chocolate and roasted coffee aroma from this almost jet black stout. Black Bird oozes creamy dark chocolate to begin with. and then that roasted coffee and citrus bitterness combined to pounce on my tastebuds giving them quite a kick. Very flavoursome, full bodied, very nice indeed. Cheers.

Ritter Sport Haribo Balla Bites (Ocado) By @cinabar

Gosh, I was super excited when I heard about this bar and crossover: a Ritter Sport chocolate filled with Haribo Balla Bites. And just look at the packaging, and how wonderfully colourful and fun the chocolate looks. May I never grow up, but more than ten years into doing this blog and I still get super excited about something like this.

Ritter Sport often has fun and quirky flavours, so this is right up my street. I opened up the wrapper and, apart from a few Haribo Balla Bites poking through, it looked much like a regular Ritter Sport. I broke a line off, waiting for the colour explosion, but there was none. So I bit into the top-right piece and discovered that particular cube was pure milk chocolate.

I broke the bar up some more and could see some Haribo sweets, so I deliberately tried a piece with a sweet in it, and that was awesome. It was lime, and the fruity gummy flavour was fab with the chocolate, as was the chewy, fun gummy texture. Another piece shared a Haribo with a neighbouring cube of chocolate, and that was a bright berry taste that worked really well too.

The pieces of chocolate with the sweets in them were fun and brilliant, and everything I hoped for. There just weren’t enough sweets mixed in. I know it would probably be a manufacturing nightmare, but each cube should have had one Haribo Balla Bite in it, just like the packaging suggests, to make every piece that colourful and fun.”