Review: Cloetta Nougat Center and Cloetta Toffee Center

I saw these small (80 grams) chocolate tablets from Cloetta in the supermarket and let my DH persuade me to sample them (not that I needed much encouragement... ;)). One has a nougat filling, the other comes with caramel.

The wrappings are colourful and have simple designs. The impession is not that of a quality chocolate – which is clearly not the intention, either. The bars are divided into small, sort of puffy squares that have the text “Cloetta” on them.

Both bars have a very sweet, sugary but otherwise mild scent. The milk chocolate is, I assume, the same in both versions. It's very sweet, and, with the cocoa content of 25 %, it's very mild even for a milk chocolate. By itself, I wouldn't really care for it.

But it's the filling that makes all the difference here.

The nougat one is filled with pale, silky smooth nougat. The flavour of nuts or almonds isn't as strong as in most nougats – this is almost reminiscent of caramel, which is a little weird but not a bad thing. The flavours of both chocolate and nougat are rather mild and sugary, but even so quite tasty.

And the toffee version. I've said it before but I'll say it again: caramel is my favourite filling in chocolates, so I had high hopes for this one. And I wasn't disappointed! The toffee filling has a slightly grainy texture. It is sweet (well, obviously!) and has that delicious burnt sugar aroma... and is just a tiny bit salty, which makes it just about perfect.

These two don't try to give an impression of quality chocolate; they're the kind of stuff you munch on while watching a movie. And for that they're just right. The toffee version, especially, made me crave for more; I will definitely buy it again.

Review: Cloetta Sprinkle Salted Icecream Waffel and Mint & Crispy Rain

Since I haven't been up to wrestling with words lately, I decided to attack some wrappings. These two are fairly new, so here goes:

The wrappings are colourful with cute/funny images and texts. They let you expect something playful rather than quality chocolate. The chocolate comes in nice thick pieces, which somehow suits the milk chocolate.

The waffle: I wrestled with this wrapping in high hopes, being 1) a big fan of caramel and 2) having developed a liking to the sweet-and-salty combination that some chocolates with a bit of salt offer. The chocolate is very sweet and has no particular character. There are slivers of waffle everywhere in it. If you like waffle, you'll probably enjoy this, too. The association works: eating this chocolate made me think of ice-cream! However, I generally like my chocolate as chocolate – some additions are fine but I prefer them not to take the centre stage as the waffle bits do here. On the other hand, the crunchy caramel bits are lovely – I just wish there were more of them! And the salt? It can surprise you, for it isn't present in every bite, but where it is, it is nicely intense and an interesting contrast to the otherwise very sweet chocolate.

The mint: The mint chocolate has tiny dark spots in it and on the other side you can see some white little pearl-like thingies (rice puffs, presumably). The chocolate is very sweet (probably exactly the same as the other one). The mint flavour isn't too strong, yet it is clearly there, present in tiny pieces of hard, sticky mint brittle. The rice puffs are, as expected, crispy. The chocolate / additive ratio seemed a little more balanced with this one; still, I had a feeling that the rice puffs almost overwhelmed the chocolate. The texture is crispy but the flavour is smooth, which makes an interesting combination.

The additives make both chocolates crispy and crunchy. They're perfect for those moments when you want to chew and munch on chocolate rather than let it melt in your mouth.