Terry’s Chocolate Orange: White Chocolate Smasher [Tutti Frutti Edition] (Sainsbury's)

Another Christmas is approaching and this means that someone over at Terry’s has put together a Limited Edition Chocolate Orange for the Season. Last year we had Volcanic Popping Candy, which was obviously a success as it is back on the shelves this year, but in previous years we have had some less appealing flavours, such as Orange and Hazelnut which was a little confused for my taste buds.
This year’s special is Tutti Frutti, and it consists of fruit flavoured colourful crystals in a white chocolate orange (which reminds me I haven’t seen the Snowball this year either).
The white chocolate is very sweet and creamy, and the wonderfully strong orange shines through. The Tutti Frutti bits add a light crunch in each piece, and also add to the sweetness, as well as giving a hint of a mixed fruits flavour. The Tutti Frutti taste isn’t as developed as I had expected, but it was certainly present and nicely put together.
I think it would be hard to dislike this chocolate orange, it has a good appeal with its speckled colourful chocolate chunks and sweet flavour. However it is quite a rich sweet Chocolate Orange, so less is more, and I found a couple of pieces plenty to relieve my sugar craving.

Posh Biscuits (Marks & Spencer) {by @NLi10}

Sometimes a good deed is its own reward, and for the other occasions there is biscuits. I got the above for helping out at work which was a nice surprise!

Marks & Spencer are still kings of the prestige end of the high street food market, only really stocking the things that they make and some other brands that you only tend to see in posh places and in your Grandma's house. While Waitrose is catching up fast, they tend to specialise in things for people who cook meals while the Ready Meals and snacks are the M&S forte.

The Milk Chocolate & Honeycomb layered cookies were up first. I had a bad experience with a Crunchie bar (well a Canadian variant) and spinning round on an office chair as a child and don't tend to like Honeycomb products as a result. The biscuit is pretty lush and is more of a desert thing for with a cup of tea after a nice meal than a desk snack. While the flavours were balanced well I think the pieces on the top were just a little bit too big for my tastes. I'd happily eat these again.

The Dutch Shortcake (Not Half Chocolaty) biscuits were more surprising. They were VERY crumbly and hard to extract from the package without coating the desk in biscuit. The flavours were worth it and the biscuit itself was very rich as you'd expect from M&S. I don't think you could put these in a biscuit barrel though, they are too refined and would be broken up by the rough and tumble of the rich tea and malted milks like the posh kid in the comprehensive school playground. Realistically if you have more than one person and a packet of these they aren't going to last long enough to go off and I am already on my second packet.

All in all a nice haul - thanks Boss!

By @NLi10

(and yes - the Dinosaur mug does contain Builders Tea)

McCoy’s Limited Edition Chicken Jalfrezi + Lamb Vindaloo flavours [By Spectre] (WH Smiths)

I’ve always been a big fan of McCoy’s chunky ridged crisps. Their offerings are always flavoursome and never fail to impress. My favourite flavour is Flame Grilled Steak, with Mexican Chilli as a close second. When Cinabar passed me these two limited edition curry flavours I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.

Chicken Jalfrezi
These crisps have a spicy Jalfrezi taste to them that drowns out any flavour of chicken, but a spicy curry usually masks any flavour of chicken anyway. The flavour seems so authentic that you can imagine sitting in a dimly lit Indian restaurant tucking into a Chicken Jalfrezi curry and crunching away happily at poppadoms. The fact that this was lunch time at work without the luxury of Cinabar’s company or a cool beer to wash it down with kind of ruined the moment. Having said that, these are probably the tastiest and most authentic flavoured curry crisps I have tasted since the good old days of poppadom crisps. The spice slowly crept up on me part the way through the bag and I felt a few beads of sweat trouble my nose. I really don’t think these should be a limited edition. A bowl of these crisps and a few beers with a good war film sounds like a proper night in to me!

Lamb Vindaloo
There’s a nice reddish colour to these crisps and spicy heat that hits you as you take the first bite. Not enough heat to make you run screaming, but a good tongue tingling temperature that wakes you up after a dull morning in the office. Unlike the chicken flavour, there is a good meat taste somewhere in the background behind all that Vindaloo spice. An image boiled into my head whilst I was chomping away at these ridged crisps of an idyllic summer’s day, a lamb prancing in a green field with a tranquil blue sky above, suddenly the lamb’s gobbled up by the devil holding a flaming pitchfork! The more you eat of these crisps the more you notice the burn. These aren’t the hottest crisps I’ve eaten, and I have a pack of Cofresh hot flavoured crisps in the Foodstuff stock room I’m avoiding at the moment, but they do have a very pleasing spicy heat that makes you look forward to the yoghurt at the end of your lunch.

I’d definitely buy both these flavours again and they should become regulars to the McCoy’s range, not limited edition crisps people will look back on and say; “I remember those McCoy’s curry crisps, they were mmmmmmm goooooooood…..”

By Spectre

Slightly Naughty Jam (hotstuffchillicompany.co.uk)

The packaging and product name rather amused Spectre, he liked the jar and the idea of a chilli product that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Despite this I decided to do the write up of this item, as it isn’t one of the ‘liquid fire’ chilli sauces, and instead is more of a manageable heat.
The jar suggests using the jam with cheese and cold meats, but I decided to try it first as a garnish with fish cakes. Its bright red colour looked attractive on the plate, and its thick jelly nature made it look appetising.
The flavour was wonderfully sweet with a sour edge, which perfectly balanced the heat from the chilli. The spice was decent, adding a good tang and a tingle, but I felt it enhanced rather than overpowered my tuna fishcake. This is an ideal heat for me, I like the fact the chilli shines through, but there is depth to the flavour and it complements other tastes.
I was pleased to discover a strong product behind the quirky jar. We also have a bottle of Hot Scotch Sauce from the same company, which I looking forward to trying, but I might leave Spectre to the right up for that one – he has braver taste buds! In the meantime I am rather looking forward to trying this chilli jam with a rustic platter of bread, cheese, meats and olives.

SWBH Pathology Honey [@NLi10 helped make it, assisted by bees!]

Before I start I should say that this isn’t a product you can buy, (as it is sold out), but it is something I was very keen to feature on the site. The story is a little complex, but it highlights a couple of really good causes.
There are few words that you see that don’t sound very appetising in a product title, but one of them has to be Pathology... you think Pathology, and you think hospital samples, not at all enticing.
Nli10 works in a Pathology department, and helped make this honey. Thankfully it wasn’t made in some strange science lab way, his manager rescued some bees. This is the first good cause I would like to highlight. There are a lot of organisations at the moment trying to save the bees, and I have even donated to a few charities, but this Pathology Department went one step further and has their own hive! Yep, NLi10, along with several of his work colleagues, is a part-time bee keeper. I was lucky enough to get the chance to sample some of this fine honey, and found it to be absolutely divine. It had a lovely light silky texture, and was lovely and runny. The taste was sweet, and gentle but with a surprisingly nice floral tang for a busy city centre honey!
Just when you are probably thinking that the Pathology department where NLi10 works can’t get any better, let me tell you about the second charitable aspect of this post. After they harvested all this fantastic honey from their hard working bees, they then accepted charitable donations from anyone who wanted a pot. They raised £350 for the Pakistan Flood Appeal too!
I just wanted to say a big congratulations to everyone involved in the project, it’s an amazing achievement, and you should all be really proud of yourselves!