Review: Marabou Oreo Filled

  

Now, just in my previous post I wondered whether I should stop writing chocolate reviews, but here I am with yet another one… but my DH brought two bars of Marabou Oreo Filled chocolate from the grocery store just so that I could write a review! After such a thoughtful gesture, who am I to say no? ;)

Now, these bars have the traditional Marabou yellow-and-red look with a picture of Oreo filled chocolate. However, they are considerably heftier than your usual Marabou milk chocolate bar (320g vs 185g), which means they’re big and thick – and I do love a big and thick bar!

Um. Where was I? Right, the chocolate looks like this:

The scent is very sweet. There’s the fairly mild aroma of milk chocolate and maybe a bit of vanilla.

The milk chocolate is the typical Marabou milk chocolate. It’s very sweet and smooth – not my favourite because of the sweetness, but not bad at all. The chocolate encases a white filling, which is also very sweet and has a creamy, almost buttery flavour. It’s a little like the filling in Oreos, but I don’t think it’s exactly the same stuff although I could be wrong. Inside the filling nestles the Oreo part, which is a nice, solid layer of that dark chocolate cookie. It is crispy and crunchy and has the typical Oreo taste. Unlike I expected, it actually balances the flavours of the otherwise very sweet chocolate – and in terms of texture makes this chocolate more interesting.

This is a very sweet bar – not intended for sophisticated nibbling but rather something from which you want to break a piece after piece and just stuff your face with those deliciously thick fragments. I don’t really mind all that sweetness… and, oddly enough, lately I’ve suffered from sudden, inexplicable cravings for Oreos! 😨 So this chocolate definitely worked for me.

Review: Marabou Premium Cranberries & Pecan

This isn't exactly new, but it took me a while to get around to tasting it. Marabou Premium Cranberries & Pecan is a dark chocolate bar which comes wrapped in a cardboard box. Upon opening the box, one finds two fairly narrow chocolate bars. The bars are satisfyingly thick, though – I may have mentioned before that while thinness perhaps gives chocolate bars a certain feel of luxury, there's just something wicked and sinful about the thicker bars that I absolutely adore! These are also very pretty, with the pale pecans and crimson cranberries dotting the dark chocolate.

The scent is sweet and warm, and the chocolate, though dark, is also surprisingly sweet and definitely not the darkest kind (not with the cocoa content of 46 %). It's very rich, though, and the pecans and cranberries come in big pieces, almost like lumps, which not only looks good and suits the somewhat rugged appearance of these bars (which I love) but is also welcome variety to chocolates that contain additions in small morsels. The caramelised pecans are crunchy, sugary and have that delicious roasted aroma. The cranberries are juicy and tart and provide a nice contrast to the otherwise very sweet chocolate.

Despite the overall sweetness of this chocolate, I really liked it! It gets extra points for thick bars and big pieces. It's the kind of chocolate that I love to munch on. It would be easy to get addicted to this...

Review: Marabou: Milk chocolate with raspberry and chocolate fudge (Happy Birthday limited edition)

I was going to take a little break from writing chocolate reviews, but then I saw Marabou’s latest invention and I simply couldn’t resist! After all, it has chocolate fudge (yum!) and raspberry fudge (I love raspberries!). I had to have a taste.

The wrapping is typical of Marabou’s milk chocolate tablets with just some variety in terms of colours and images. The scent is simply sweet; without knowing what’s in this chocolate, I don’t think I’d be able to guess.

The milk chocolate is the typical Marabou milk chocolate, which, although rather sweet, is a good, solid milk chocolate which forms a perfect background to various additions. The chocolate fudge bits are soft and chewy and chocolatey – and very sweet, but that goes without saying. The raspberry pieces are a little too few and not quite tart enough to provide much of a contrast to the chocolate or the chocolate fudge bits, but they are delicious - and they're bits of raspberry fudge, which explains why the taste is not particularly intense. Lately, I've tasted so many chocolates with something crunchy and hard and brittle that I welcomed the change in this one; the additions are soft, and, together with the melt-in-your-mouth chocolate they form a silky combo that caresses your tongue.

This combination is very sweet, but is that a bad thing? No! I have to say that I liked this a lot. I mean, chocolate in chocolate!!! And raspberries, my favorite! (Well, one of my many favourites... I also love cherries and strawberries and...) This is a limited edition, a specialty that Marabou launched to celebrate their 100^th birthday, so grab it while you can!

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!

Review: Marabou Premium 70 % Cocoa Salty Liquorice

Last week, I reviewed Fazer's new version of their Kismet bar, the licorice. And now I found a salty liquorice version of Marabou's Premium chocolate! Is this a new trend or something?

The wrapping boasts beautiful colours of dark brown and purple, a picture of chocolate and... licorice root? Licorice sticks? I'm not sure. The chocolate is divided into satisfyingly large squares. You can actually see tiny dark spots in it – the licorice!

With the cocoa content of 70 %, this is dark chocolate – I suspect it's the same as in the other Premium line products (I've reviewed mint and coffee before). It has a strong scent of cocoa and the taste is smooth yet has that intensity that I love about dark chocolate. The licorice is scattered in the chocolate in tiny, crisp, hard pieces. The first impression is ”salty” (as is stated in the package) but if you let the chocolate melt in your mouth, the licorice brittle also begins to melt and the flavour of licorice is released. It's quite lovely – I enjoy the sweet and salty combination, and the licorice gives it a little more complexity.

I bought this one simply because I was curious and wanted to try something new – but it will likely not be the last time!

Review: Marabou Crispi Peanut & Toffee

I can't believe I haven't tried this before! It has peanuts and toffee, after all. Sounds promising!

The wrapping is very colourful, which suits the product – you're not expecting this to contain anything “classy”, after all. Opening the wrapping reveals two bars, which is a good thing: you don't have to eat everything at once and/or you can share the bar with someone. I am a little puzzled by the name, though. Why crispi? Why not crispy?

The scent is very, very peanutty. I don't have anything against that, but here it's a little... stuffy? But not to worry. I've experienced this before, especially with bars that contain plenty of nuts. They can still taste great.

And so it is: there isn't any trace of that dry stuffiness in the taste. The bar is covered in milk chocolate, which – as far as I can tell – is your standard Marabou milk chocolate. Yes, it's very sweet, but I happen to like it. Under the milk chocolate hide sizeable chunks of peanut. They're not too salty, they're nicely crunchy, and there's a generous amount of them. At the core of the bar is the toffee filling. This was slightly disappointing: the toffee flavour just wasn't very strong or perhaps there isn't enough of the stuff. I was maybe expecting something more caramelly. The filling is fairly solid rather than runny – which is good, you don't have to worry about all the filling falling out of the bar and making a mess.

On the whole, I was expecting more intense flavours; now nothing really stands out. Still, it's a good, solid combination and the flavours work well together. The amount of peanuts makes sure there is no sweetness overload. I might well buy this again – it was interesting, and one half of one bar just wasn't enough. ;)

Review: Marabou Premium 70 % Cocoa Mint

I am familiar with most, if not perhaps all, Marabou premium products. I've liked most of them, with my favourite being the Lemon & Ginger and, especially, the (Winter) Caramel. The latter was one of my favourite chocolates of all time (yes, there are many...), but, very regrettably, it seems to have disappeared from the selection! Anyway, on to the Mint version. This mint flavoured dark chocolate has been around for some time, at least in a tablet form. I've never seen these pretty boxes before, though, and that's a good enough reason to take a little taste.

The box looks very nice with the colour combination of black, green and gold. With the picture of mint leaves, it's clear what it contains. I only needed to open the box and out wafted a very strong aroma of mint. However, it wasn't the crisp, fresh aroma one usually associates with mint but a softer, more... sophisticated (?) scent. Perhaps the aromas of cocoa mellowed it? Each chocolate square comes in its own wrapping: the outer one with a picture (see the picture on the right) and the inner one of plain silver foil. The squares are of a satisfying size, thin but not too small, with the simple, stylish pattern that's familiar to all who have ever sampled Marabou Premium products.

The chocolate has a cocoa content of 70 %. I already mentioned the strong minty scent, but on second sniffing, the aroma of cocoa is also distinguishable. The chocolate snaps when you break it apart and melts in your mouth. It's also very smooth and has an intense cocoa flavour, to which the mint provides a nice counterpoint. Some mint chocolates include the mint in big, very hard pieces of brittle (and I always fear it will damage the enamel of my teeth), but here it's scattered in the chocolate in tiny pieces of crisp that provide a nice amount of crunch yet aren't too hard. The mint flavour, while strong, isn't “toothpasty”.

Mint chocolate seems to be ever popular, most brands offer some variety of it. As a child, I used to love mint chocolate, but perhaps got a little tired of it; it no longer counts among the “chocolates to get excited about” for me. But it is a classic. And there are times when I crave the soothing yet refreshing taste of good mint chocolate. Since this is dark chocolate, you also get the benefit of telling yourself it's good for you... and, another good argument (as if I needed any when it comes to eating chocolate): according to the box, at least 30 % of the cocoa comes from plantations with the Rainforest Alliance certificate.