the chocolate chronicles

as you may well already know if you know me, you then know i loooooooooooooooooooooooooove chocolate. not as much as my children or a 10hr block of uninterrupted sleep but quite alot. i have decided to also post about my chocolate experiences here across the pond, where everything is packaged new & differently & therefore more interesting. i think i know a thing or 2 about chocolate, 1st thing being that i like it & have eaten much chocolate - good & bad. my gold standard of chocolate is the contraband chocolate my sister brought from switzerland that sat on a sweltering dallas runway for 2 hrs on a hot summer's day. so de-licious that this stuff converted joe into a chocolate fiend, who's only previously considered haribo gummies & twizzlers real sweet treats.

so here goes . . .

milka: available atr sainsbury's & recommended by my sister & her hubster, ed. they must have tried it in switzerland since it is available in grocery stores & at a very affordable price point, under 1 british pound (my computer does not have the pound british sterling sign so i must spell it out. damn). very smooth, even flavor and not at all chalky or dry like hershey's. definitely would get milka again.

double decker: a concoction made by the makers of kit kat consisting of nougat atop a kit kat bar. kit kat=yummy, nougat=a bit too marshmallowy for my taste so i only ate half & abandoned the rest. will NOT be fooled into getting this again.

gu chocolate pud: my computer also does not do umlaughts & there is one over the "u" in "gu". this packaging describes this as a chocolate souffle. it is in the freezer section of the tesco express (kinda like a 7-11 or am/pm) & apparently needs to hang out a room temperature for at least an hour before entering the fiery depths of your kitchen oven. or you can microwave it but the makers of gu warn that the 2 different cooking methods produce 2 very different chocolate souffles. so i opt for the oven bake this time - there are 2 puds in each package so i can microwave next time. i did have to end up microwaving my gu chocolate pud after oven baking as i took it out to cool & promptly forgot about it. i have eaten enough trader's joe's chocolate lava cakes to know they mean business when they say let product cool for 10 minutes before consuming. if you don't wait the recommended 10 minutes, you run a very high risk of talking with a pronounced lisp the next day as the hot bite melted through your tongue the night before. so wait. all in all, gu chocolate pud good, not great. not a deep rich chocolate but more like a pudding cake. and i think pudding cakes are kind of wimpy since they can't decide which route to go. holding out for trader's chocolate lava cakes but the gu chocolate pud did come in a nice glass keepsake ramkin.

bounty dark chocolate & coconut: as my BFF amy g. knows, i love me some mounds bars. they have been suspiciously absent from the shelves over here as i think some type of mafia deal went down in the 70's - mounds got the contiguous united states & bounty got the european market. sad sad sad little coconut/dark chocolate bar. despite it's dark coating of chocolate, there seems to be complete absence of any chocolate taste in this bar. ditto the coconut. in fact, i am nit even sure i ate this thing because i taste absolutely no remnant. sometimes you feel like a nut & sometimes, you're not feeling it at all.

galaxy ripple: also available at the tesco express. despite it's name it has nothing to do with david beckham or the LA galaxy soccer team, much to my dismay. not that i am a big soccer fan mind you but a mini chocolate david beckham sounds kinda delicious. this is galaxy milk chocolate enrobing light ribbon weaves of more galaxy milk chocolate. kinda reminds me of a flake bar. probably will go for this again.

so up next:
sainsbury's (a grocery chain here) dark chocolate bar
star bar - a peanut, caramel & chocolate bar

stay tuned chocofolks!