Review: Marabou Japp

Now, if you take some milk chocolate and, as an addition, put in pieces of a chocolate bar... what do you get? I'm pretty sure the answer is “a chocoholic's dream”. I mean, chocolate in chocolate... Still, does it work? What does it taste like? Those were questions that required some research, so I boldly set myself the task of investigating Marabou's latest invention.

The wrapping is the traditional, colorful yellow-and-red of Marabou. When you open it, you find a tablet, divided into squares, and you can see little lumps in the chocolate – these are the chocolate bar pieces.

The scent is very sweet, there's milk chocolate and... caramel! It is not entirely unexpected – the Japp bar contains chocolate, caramel and chocolate meringue (soft, not crispy). But, as a caramel lover, that gets me very excited!

I can actually remember the very first time I tasted a Japp bar – it must have been the early 80s, and my aunt brought us those bars from Sweden. It was delicious! Perhaps they weren't available in Finland at the time, since I don't recall ever having any before then – or for several years after. Even now, every time I tear open a Japp bar wrapping, I remember that first bite. That was another reason why I was very curious about the new Japp chocolate!

The milk chocolate is your standard Marabou milk chocolate – it's very sweet, but not among those almost intolerably sugary varieties. The Japp pieces are soft, chewy and they taste a lot like some sort of fudge, there's perhaps a hint of vanilla and certainly some caramel. They're yummy, but I wouldn't have recognised it as the Japp bar. The combination is very sweet indeed, but I'll have to admit that I like it. I like it a lot. What's more, the soft, chewy texture of the Japp pieces is a huge bonus – perhaps I've sampled too many chocolates lately where the additions come in hard, crispy pieces because the softness was a very welcome sensation.

If you're not really into the sweet stuff and prefer your chocolate in some sort of elegant form, stay away from this (more for me, hahahaha!). But if you like it sweet, go for it!