Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

One of the most famed of all American chocolate. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups set the standard for chocolate-peanut butter hybrids. And finally I’ll be reviewing them.

My pack only had 2 cups in for some reason, as I had a smaller pack, but I am aware, and more used to, the 3 cup packet. The pack is pretty plain looking, a nice orange all over, with the slogan ‘Milk Chocolate Reese’s 2 Peanut Butter Cups’, they don’t need to explain any further because everyone knows what these are, and the name sort of gives the game away anyway, which is something that doesn’t happen with most chocolates.

In the pack are two chocolate cups, inside small black packets, removing the chocolate cup from its packet shows that the chocolate is greasy, very greasy. It has a tendency to melt very easily which can be messy. But these are so good that it doesn’t really matter.

Biting into it reveals a thin layer of chocolate, and in the centre is all peanut butter. And it tastes so good, the peanut butter is salty and yet sweet with the chocolate, it isn’t too sickly, and it’s so more-ish. I’m glad I’ve only got one pack of these because I’m afraid I’d find myself munching through pack after pack until I was sick. The 2 here though were filling enough, but they leave you wanting more, so much more…

Each cup contains 115 calories, 11.5g of Carbs (10g of which sugar), 6.5g of fat (4.5g of which saturates) and 2g of Protein. I highly recommend these, if you are looking for any chocolate with peanut butter, this is it. This is the original, and is still the best.

Cadbury Wunderbar

Ach nein! This is the Wunderbar by Cadbury, and no it’s not from Germany, this is from Toronto, Canada. Why it’s called a Wunderbar, I really don’t know, because they don’t give you any information about it on the packagaing.

What you do get a is a purple package with some orange and yellow mixed in, and a picture of part of the Wunderbar on the front, it looks like it has peanut butter inside or something, so I’m pretty excited about this. Looking at the ingredients I see that it’s got sugar first, then peanuts, so I’m hoping to get a decent bar here.

Opening it up, it smells decent, nice peanutty smell, Biting into the bar was a surprise, there was caramel there as well. What you get is a chocolate coating, below that is a caramel coating, and the entire centre of the bar is peanut butter, with bits of peanut in it as well. It’s actually really nice, you can’t taste any of the chocolate at all, or the caramel either to be honest, so if you’re getting this then I hope you like peanuts, otherwise you’re gonna be disappointed.

The bar has 310 calories which is pretty high by my standards, that’s probably because of the peanuts which on their own would be high in calories. It has 33g of Carbs, 18g of Fat and 4g of Protein. As I said, if you like peanuts and are in Canada, then try this out, but if you don’t like peanuts then quite frankly buying this would be a foolish thing to do. Wundervoll!

Nestlé Peanut Butter Kit Kat Chunky

I remember when this first came out. I was working in my local Morrisons warehouse when a delivery arrived. And on that delivery, was a pallet full of these; Peanut Butter Kit Kat Chunkies. I had imported these from Canada previously and loved them, and now they’d be here! Surely this would be a good thing.

The packaging is a bright yellow, and all the words are big and loud on the front – ‘KIT KAT CHUNKY PEANUT BUTTER’ – with 269 calories per bar. On the back is the caloric information and a short description of the bar; ‘Crisp wafer finger with a creamed peanut topping (20%) covered with milk chocolate’, sounds nice, eh?

And by gum it is. It’s absolutely delicious. I in fact don’t like regular peanut butter much at all, I find it to be really dry and just altogether pretty nasty. But this is different, this is just superb. I love Nestle for making these, they’re just so good. Now, I had this one when I was starving, and found it to hit the spot just right, but my thinking is that it could be a little sickly if you were to eat it as part of a full lunch.

It’s basically a regular Kit Kat Chunky with the peanut butter sat right on top of the wafer, below a thin layer of milk chocolate, and it works so well. More peanut butter-chocolate hybrids should be brought over here, because this has shown that it can be done, and done well.

It has 269 calories per bar, 27.5g of Carbs, 15.8g of Fat and 4.2g of Protein. I highly suggest you pick these up whether you like peanut butter or not, because you’ll probably end up liking them.

Meiji Coffee Beat

This is an interesting premise, chocolate covered coffee beans. I’ve never tried such a thing before, as I don’t have coffee much, and have always belived that it was best drunk, and not eaten. But I thought that with the chocolate coating these could be decent, and decided to give them a shot.

You get a lot of coffee beans in each tube, I’m not sure how many exactly because I’ve been eating these slowly over the past week and never actually counted properly. I did originally think these were coffee beans covered in chocolate, but after actually reading the description properly, it turns out these are chocolate beans with coffee flavour, which is a bit poor.

The chocolate isn’t even nice or good quality either. It’s cheap and sticks right into your teeth, and has an odd, not altogether pleasant flavour. Supposedly you also get white chocolate beans in packs as well, but I sure didn’t. The tube is nice, and these seem to be masquerading as posh chocolate, though they’re not at all. These aren’t delicious, and they weren’t that fun to eat. For shame, Meiji, for shame…

Tootsie Roll

I’m not a big fan of ordinary American chocolate. In my experience, I’ve found that unless it has peanut butter or some sort of filling to take away the taste of the actual chocolate, I find myself feeling rather sick, and this is highlighted best with Hershey’s chocolate, where the majority of British people who try it say that it tastes like vomit.

Fortunately with this, I only had one small, individually wrapped piece of a Tootsie Roll, as shown in the picture above. I say fortunately, because these do not taste very good, and I couldn’t have eaten anymore of this.

There’s really just nothing to this. It’s a little square of what seems to be milk chocolate, but really doesn’t taste much like it. It just tastes…bad, like nothing I’ve ever really had, and nothing I ever really want to have again.

Looking at the ingredients actually gives a good idea about why the taste is so bad. The main ingredients are sugar, corn syrup, soybean oil, skim milk, and then finally…cocoa! Yeah, cocoa is nearly halfway down the list of ingredients, and it shows.

This is bad, and I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. You can keep this one, America.

Glico Giant Caplico Cone: Chocolate Flavour

Finally the Kit Kats are over! I’ve been waiting for a while to move on, and now we’re back to normal, I’ll have the Peanut Chunky up in a few days, but other than that we’re in a Kit Kat free zone for the foreseeable future. Hoorah!

This is a rather odd looking snack. It’s a sort of cornetto-looking chocolate cone, except it has no ice cream or anything, instead it has Aero-like bubbly chocolate in the centre of the cone.

It is shown on the wrapper what you’ll be getting, there’s a wafer cone, and in that is bubbly milk and white chocolate, and at the top is a big solid dome of chocolate, which I was expecting to be empty, but was actually completely full of the bubbly chocolate.

I’ve gotta say, I didn’t think this sounded too great, but it is in fact, great. The chocolate is good, in fact I’d argue that it’s better than all of the Japanese Aeros I’ve tasted, though not quite as nice as our English Aero. Unfortunately it’s so messy, the chocolate crumbles everywhere, and the wafer was all breaking off, plus the bottom third of it broke off in the pack and turned to powder, so I had to throw that away.

It’s different, but it’s oh so good. These are available on TokyoToys, and if you want something a little different, and like Aero chocolate, then pick one of these up, they’re strangely good, though they’re gone very quickly.

Sorting out the categories

I was wondering to myself whether to actually make a post out of this or not, and in my boredom I decided I might as well. You’ll see down the right hand side of the page that the Categories are a little different now, gone are categories such as “Kit Kats” and “Aeros”, instead replaced by “Mars”, “Glico” and others. I’ve done this because I noticed the categories were getting a little messy, and some foods would be harder to find here than others, so I’ve categorised everything both by country of origin and by the company which made it.

That should make things a little easier for you to find what you’re looking for, and for me to categorise stuff when I review it as well.  Just wanted to make it clear for everyone!

Nestlé Rich Strawberry Kit Kat

This one seems strikingly familiar in appearance to the Sakura Cherry Kit Kat. The boxes are a lovely pink, and there are strawberries pictured all over the box, looking delicious.

The packs are pink, and so are the Kit Kat bars, much like the Sakura Cherry flavour bars were. The flavour is very strong, floral strawberry. It’s very different to the strawberry I’m used to, this isn’t light in flavour or mellow at all, there’s a very strong off-strawberry taste, followed by a bitter aftertaste when swallowed.

These are very odd, and very different to what we consider strawberry flavour. But they’re strangely good as well, so if you want to try something completely different, then try this. It has 121 calories per pack, so that’s 242 calories per box, which is standard for Japanese Kit Kats.

Nestlé Fine Dark Kit Kat

The dark chocolate edition of Kit Kat is the newest edition in the UK. I was afraid after the failure of the Kit Kat Temptations range that we wouldn’t see many variations for a long time, and to be fair we haven’t, but this is better than nothing, and has been a long time coming.

I don’t know why other companies don’t do this as well, I’m sure they’ve done plenty of marketing but I’m sure dark chocolate Mars bars and Twix’s and such forth would sell relatively well. Either way Kit Kat have drawn the short straw here and become the first major chocolate here to introduce a dark chocolate variety of their popular milk chocolate bar.

I don’t like dark chocolate much, but fortunately this bar is only 52% cocoa solids, so it’s not really THAT dark, and I had no problems munching it at all. The bar is slightly darker than the usual milk chocolate bar of course, in order to remind us that it’s ‘dark’.

It’s only 226 calories per bar, but considering it’s dark, it makes the entire thing a little sickly, though perhaps I just feel a little sick because I’m eating this at 4am, though I think it’s likely the former. Due to me not being much of a connoisseur of dark chocolate then I can’t make much of a comparison here between this and ‘real’ dark chocolate. But I will say it’s a nice chocolate, and coming from someone who doesn’t like dark chocolate much, then surely that says something.

It likely won’t appeal much to people who do like real dark chocolate, as it’s not up there with the big boys there, and it’s not milk chocolate, it’s inbetween in order to attract the bulk of customers.

And for the nutritional round-up, as mentioned earlier the bar has 226 calories, there is also 25.3g of Carbs, 12.7g of Fat and 2.4g of Protein in each bar. They don’t say how much of the Carbs and Fats are Sugars and Saturates, so you can assume that the majority of them are bad (i.e. Sugars and Saturates).

Nestlé Melon Cantaloupe Kit Kat

Well this was it, Melon flavour again. The one I was least looking forward to. I could smell it before I’d even opened the pack, and it smelled disgusting.

And the smell when I opened it, ugh, awful. Such strong artificial melon. I don’t care if it’s a delicacy in Japan, they surely can’t be eating these things up, it just doesn’t seem right.

The smell was luckily, worse than the taste, though only just. I went easy on myself by letting the chocolate melt, and masked the flavour of the melon somewhat, but by gum it was still there. Horrid melon flavour, it’s a shame because I kinda like normal melons, but Nestlé have done it wrong for both their Aero and their Kit Kats.

Fortunately this is very nearly the end of the Kit Kats. I only have two more Japanese ones to review, and then a few of the English ones, and that’s it!