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.”

LoveCocoa - Honeycomb Milk Chocolate [@NLi10]

 Another lovely gift here - a tiny tiny slab of chocolate!

But what's this? It's honey comb too - how does that work?

And it's secretly a Cadbury family chocolate? Almost like the family are ashamed by what the factory puts out these days...

This looks rather special.  You can just about see the flecks of the honeycomb from the back.  No wonder I was gifted it.  It's good quality chocolate, but the honey is hard to find in every bite and I want them to stick out more.

It says they are based in London now though - not Birmingham which looses them points too!

Overall - the honeycomb bits are a little too slight - it needs a bit more crunchie and a bit less milky.  I don't know whether it's my tastes shifting over the years but I found it a little sweet too.

Bounty Snowballs (Ocado) By @SpectreUK

I’m not sure why I’ve been tasked with this blog. First off, I’ve been ill for the last day or so due to some sort of bug or food poisoning. Second, I’m not that keen on coconut and chocolate.

Bounty Bars are generally the last bars I go for in a tub of celebrations. I don’t dislike them, but I’m not that fussed either. I did, however, eat and enjoy Snowballs when I was a kid. I sometimes had them in my lunchbox at school or for a lunchtime pudding at home.

These Bounty Snowballs by Mars seem a natural leap into Snowball territory. They seem smaller than regular Snowballs from when I was a kid. Either that, or I was smaller back then.

On opening the packet these chocolate coated mallows covered in desiccated coconut smelt just like regular Snowballs. They tasted as sticky as I remember them.

I know I haven’t had one for years, but these Bounty Snowballs tasted exactly like the Snowballs I had when I was a kid. That definitely wasn’t a bad thing at all.

Information o the packet; Each 13.5g Snowballs has 63 calories, with 2.8g of fat, 7g of sugar, and 0.01g of salt. Please see photograph for the ingredients.

Walkers Salt & Pepper Chicken Multipack Crisps (Tesco) By @Cinabar

Walkers invited people to suggest new flavours for their crisps, and two of the winners have now been made. The one with the most sales will be deemed the winner and the flavour will stick around. We have found both, but first up we are trying Walkers Salt & Pepper Chicken Multipack Crisps.

I opened up the bag and the aroma was lovely. I am biased, as chicken crisps are my favourite, but these had all of that lovely chicken aroma along with lots of seasoning too. There was even a slightly paprika tinge of red to the seasoning.

I gave them a taste and the flavour was so me, it is untrue. They are like chicken crisps, but with the volume turned up. I loved all the spices and the pepper, along with lashings of roast chicken meaty goodness. They were amazing. It would be hard to imagine anything beating these.

So I will be buying another multipack of these, as purchases are essentially a vote for this flavour to win. But I will also be trying the Chilli Jam ones too. It will take something special to beat these, though!