Moo Free Organic Dairy Free Choc + Montezuma's Sea Dog - One Earth [by @NLi10]

Moo Free Organic Dairy Free Choc + Montezuma's Sea Dog Dark Chocolate With Lime & Sea Salt - from One Earth, Digbeth Birmingham

On one of my far too infrequent visits to One Earth in my home town I came across a couple of odd chocolates.

The first of these is vegan milk chocolate! Like most products this was not something I'd ever thought about.  Vegans don't want to consume milk, chocolate is typically made with milk, sadness occurs.  Replacing this with rice milk allows everyone to join in which is great. This has cute hamsters and proclaims itself to be scrummy so is certainly worth a try.

Turns out its not as odd as you'd expect.  It doesn't taste like high-end milk chocolate, but it's much more similar to the cheaper end of the spectrum than I'd expected.  This isn't to say that it's not nice - it is - but there isn't the creaminess that I've come to expect, which is totally understandable. Instead there is a kind of unusual taste floating around, but it's 100% chocolate.

It has none of the terrible texture problems of carob based snacks, and instead is a suitable chocolate for those that don't like their cocoa products weaponised (like I do - see below). My partner (vegetarian) quite liked it and said that you couldn't really tell that it was not dairy.

Our next product goes down the more traditional route of replacing the dairy with more sugar and cocoa solids to form a product that is 70% cocoa solids and 99% dark choc.

But what is that remaining 1%?

Salt and Lime

I'm not that fussed about chocolates that don't have lots of coconut or biscuit in them (Bounty or Twix > Dairy Milk) unless it's seriously potent dark chocolate. This has more than enough going for it to be very exciting.

The first hint of flavour is the lime - which instantly kicks me back to a Thornton's choc lolly from the olden days which was green and powerful and perfect for a growing lad.  I'm guessing it fell out of favour as I haven't seen that in years.  Next up the chocolate itself appears, all warm and earthy and lovely and dark. Then as you chew there are little, uneven pockets of salt that pop up and give you a nice surprise.

While the Moo Free is incredibly good at doing what it set out to do this is just incredible.  My buddy and I ate half a bar of this while playing board games which was not that unusual for him but more unusual for me.  I have resisted so far but did sneak a few cubes to help with the review. Unlike the Montezuma's Chilli (which was nice but so hot I struggled to enjoy it) I can happily grab a bar of this occasionally.  

Phileas Fogg Mexican Taco Rolls – Nacho Cheese & Jalapeno (Sainsburys) [By @SpectreUK]

These new Nacho Cheese & Jalapeno flavour Mexican Taco Rolls by Phileas Fogg came in a 190g bag. Each 30g serving contained 157 calories, with 0.9g of sugar and 8.8g of fat. The ingredients contained no artificial colours or flavours and the Taco Rolls were made with 100% sunflower oil. The ingredients included maize, dried processed cheese, paprika, turmeric, salt, sugar, yeast extract, dried onion, jalapeno pepper, cumin, red chilli pepper, dried garlic, citric acid, chilli powder, dried parsley and oregano. The rolls had impressive curled shapes and were about four centimetres long. I’m sure Phileas Fogg used some new fangled equipment or machine to make the Taco Rolls, but probably could have done the job just as well winding them around an old pencil (seeing as though not many people seem to use pencils for writing or drawing anymore...). Their flavour started with a strong cheesy taste followed by a mild jalapeno spice, which in no way tingled the tongue or left me gasping for air or cold water. However the front of the packet never promised nose tingling burning heat from these Taco Rolls, so I wasn’t disappointed by the lack of burn in the flavour. There was also a heavy paprika and garlic aftertaste mixed in with the cheese and jalapenos. As you can see from the photograph, I enjoyed dipping my Taco Rolls into mayonnaise, but you could try dipping them into a hot chilli, tomato salsa or even guacamole (if you can find a Gremlin to put in a blender).

By Spectre

Costa Giant Chocolate Tea Cake (@CostaCoffee) [By @cinabar]

Last month I had a lovely shopping day with my mum and stopped off for an Eton Mess Muffin in Costa to finish the afternoon off. While we were there we were very much aware that there were quite a few other new goodies appearing on the shelves for summer and made a note to sample some more next time we were in town.
Obviously when we went back some kind of chocolaty treat was in order and the Giant Tea Cakes caught our eye. If you’ve ever bought own brand chocolate tea cakes, unwrapped the packet and been disappointed at the size of the cakes, then the new ones from Costa were made for you! You certainly can’t complain about the dimensions of these tea cakes, they are fab!
The coating on the outside is a really good quality milk chocolate too, and it isn’t too flimsy, but it does give way nicely to the fluffy mallow inside. The base is like a firm chocolate sponge, and does hold the item together well. The only negative comment I have is that the jam in centre of both mine and my mum’s was almost nonexistent. There was a poster advertising these in the shop and that showed a generous dollop of jam but in reality ours had the jam almost missing. There was just a little bit of stickiness under the mallow in the centre. I wonder if they both just came from a dodgy batch? If it means I have to go back and have another one to investigate then so be it, I will take up that challenge for you. :-)
I don’t want to be to negative though because we thoroughly enjoyed our giant tea cakes, and ice lattes, they made the perfect sunny afternoon treat.

By Cinabar

Esquires - Chicken & Spanish Chorizo Melt with Spicy Salso Mayo [by @NLi10] @PeekayPenguin

Ah - the boring old British sandwich. Most places these days seem to know that once you've entered their establishment you will just choose your favourite from the selection on offer and lump it.  Not so for this penguin!

It's a bit of an odd one though - I was given this by a relative whose neighbours had some left over.  I'm not sure whether it was just from where they work, or they make them, but who am I to turn down a free lunch? I popped it in the oven for a bit to give it a fighting chance.

The bread is a little more interesting than usual, being more in line with the quality of bread you'd buy rather than the hard stuff you usually find on lunch bars.  What really caught my eye was the variety of things that were inside.  They easily could have added all these words to make us excited and to purchase it knowing full well that we probably wouldn't ever come across the brand again, but inside of this there is quality.

I often make a fuss about being able to taste all of the things on the package - and this certainly passes the test (excluding the penguin naturally). The chicken and sausage play off each other like in a nice spanish tapas dish. The pepper and spinach are proportional to the rest of the ingredients and the salsa mayo is good enough to want to buy - it's similar to Nando's perinaise in some respects.  I'm no fan of cheese but that held it together nicely and didn't overpower the other flavours.

I'd happy walk a bit further and pay a bit more to be able to have these at work for lunch rather than the sad, pre-packaged sandwiches we have on offer (luckily due to the sandwich bar making things for us fresh I go for wraps and panini instead).

Turns out Esquires is a UK coffee chain, just not near me! The website had other tasty choices too - maybe a day out in one of their locations is in order (maybe even my old Uni town of Durham!).

Master Rice Thins - Sweet Chilli Flavour Rice Snacks (Home Bargains) [By @SpectreUK]

I’m not a big fan of rice snacks as even passing a packet of Snack-a-Jacks in a shop can easily suck all the moisture from my body. So I was more than a little apprehensive when Cinabar’s colleague recommended these Master Rice Thins as his favourite snack. Apparently his wife had bought them as a low fat treat one day and he has been hooked on them ever since. With this über positive review I just had to try them, and maybe even I would become irrevocably hooked on them too! There was a garlic, paprika and chilli smell on opening the packet, but no garlic and paprika were listed in the ingredients. The ingredients were gluten free, vegetarian friendly and contained rice flour, rice bean oil, sugar, salt, chilli powder, and a few ‘e’ numbers as flavour enhancers, antioxidants and anticaking agents. The 100g packet of rice thins sported “less than 10% fat” as they were baked and not fried. There were 404 calories in the packet with 3.2g of sugar and 4.2g of fat. So these rice thins are really good for you. There was sweetness in the initial flavour followed by a succulent chilli burn. On first bite I found the rice thins ludicrously tasty and moreish to the extreme. No wonder Cinabar’s colleague is hooked on them. I ate the whole packet in one sitting and found them difficult to share. They burn the tongue after a while leaving the whole mouth tingly, yet moist and begging for more. If you don’t buy anything else in Home Bargains, buy these Master Rice Thins, but please leave me a few packets on the shelf!

By Spectre