I was in Marks and Spencer's browsing the confectionary isle and this bar of chocolate caught my eye. It sounded dark and strong and I thought it would fuel a late night gaming session.
I inspected it a little closer when I was home and realised it was actually five mini bars in the pack, which I thought was a bit weird. Why would you split the bar in this way? Why also are the cubes on the mini bars so very small, it looked a bit odd, like it was from a dolls house or something.
Also the bar was very dark in colour, almost black. I had high hopes for a nice bar of chocolate with some strong coffee flavours. I opened up the small packet around the tiny bar and was hit by the coffee aroma, rich and dark and very pleasant, but strong. I snapped one of the bars in half and ate that whole piece in one. Then the coffee burn kicked in, in retrospect it was promised on the pack. I've eaten a lot of coffee flavoured chocolate, and many of them have been labelled espresso, and you've still got to look for the coffee flavour. Not here though, this felt like someone had screamed "WAKE UP" and poured an intense espresso into my mouth. I was really taken aback by the taste, I couldn't work out if I liked it, I was just confused by how there was so much flavour in such a small cubic area. I was also trying to decide whether to eat the rest of the bar, and suddenly the tiny pieces on the mini bars made sense...
As I was finishing the bar, somewhat more slowly than I began using the allotted small pieces, I read the back of the pack. There are two things to note, one is that each mini bar has 45mg of caffeine (half an espresso). The other thing is the ingredients, it is essentially cocoa butter, sugar and ground coffee (and some emulsifier). There is no cocoa powder, no actual chocolate ingredients other than the cocoa butter, which explained a lot. They solidified an espresso, and gave it the texture of chocolate. This is genius, scarily strong, but perfect for those who want a serious coffee hit.
By Cinabar
1 comment:
Oh wow, that's an interesting concept, especially for those of us who don't like the harsh crunchiness of those chocolate covered coffee beans. But looking at the bar I would also assume it's just coffee flavoured chocolate... although on second glance it doesn't say "chocolate" on the bar apart from describing the texture as being like it. Perhaps they could have named it a bit clearer, "Solidified Espresso" sounds less elegant but is spot on, you can't get confused about that! :D
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