December 1st: Thorntons Moments

I remember receiving a number of requests for me to try this product around a year ago but with Thorntons taking the smaller box out of distribution I have never had the urge to part with my monies for the large 250.0g size i.e. the one being reviewed today. This all changed last week however when I found them on a half price offer in my local OneStop for the price of £1.99, which for the amount of chocolate on offer didn't sound like a bad deal.

The Thorntons Moments collection comes described as 'a selection of favourite centres smothered in milk chocolate' and looks to be Thornton's move to compete with the likes of Cadbury Roses and Nestle Quality Street. The selection itself comprised of 6 chocolates - each of which I will go into below.

Taking into consideration the presentation for a second these immediately struck me as a sub-par Thorntons quality product. Personally I think these were just a victim of the usual high standards that Thorntons set but I didn't like the choice of colours for the inner wrappers with too many of the colours looking similar. The mixture of brown, dark red, orange, yellow, gold and purple was hardly vibrant or colourful. One thing that also struck me as disappointing was the size of the chocolates themselves which looked tiny to size they appeared in their wrappers.

Below are my brief thoughts on each piece:


Orange Crisp - The taste here was dominated by the orange influence which was immediately evident as soon as the chocolate was in the mouth. There was nothing fancy here like a progressive taste or sophisticated textures - just sweet tasting chocolate orange which had a gritty feel when left to melt in the mouth. Really nothing to shout about. Poor.

Double Chocolate Crouquant - This was probably the best designed chocolate out of the lot as the taste did progress nicely from a very sweet milky white chocolate into a stronger tasting milk chocolate when left to simply melt on the tongue. The taste was still way too on the sweet side for me but the two tone chocolate worked to some effect. That said I didn't particularly care for the crunchy pieces in the white chocolate base which I could have lived without. Standard.

Crunchy Praline - Ladies and gentlemen I present to you the worse tasting praline chocolate of all time ... take a bow son! Quite how they thought they could describe this as praline I do not know ... was it creamy? ... no ... was it nutty? ... no!? This chocolate simply tasted of overly sugar laden milk chocolate which had a sandy, gritty inner texture. Awful.

Chocolate Truffle - Finally a chocolate that wasn't crispy / crunchy! Indeed the change up of the textures was nice with the smoother filling, however the chocolate was just the same old sugary sweet rubbish that was used across the majority of these chocolates. The taste was non-progressive and just really not the quality I was hoping for. I think there are quite a few Belgian chocolatiers who would spit at thought of this being described as a truffle. Very Poor.

Soft Caramel - Uh-Oh this looked remarkably like one of Paul.A.Youngs Salted Caramels and given the standard of the rest of the chocolate I sure you know where this is headed. To be blunt this chocolate couldn't lace Paul's boots. The chocolate was of course ridiculously sweet and was only further compounded by the sugary gloop that lay inside. Admittedly the caramel was soft in the mouth but this mattered little when the taste was as offensive as it was. Very Poor.

Creamy Fudge - Finally a chocolate that I can be sort of nice about! Phew! This chocolate reminded me of the Marks & Spencer Fudge bar that Thorntons no doubt produce for them. The chocolate was nothing to shout about but the inner fudge at least had a buttery, creamy taste that I did enjoy. Unfortunately for me this was one of the ones that was portioned less generously in the box! DOH! Good.

Overall ... well where to start!? What an awful selection of chocolates Thorntons offered up here! Never before have I reviewed a box with so many ratings below the average 'standard' rating but some of the chocolates on display here were even lucky to make it on the rating scale at all ... yes Crunchy Praline I am looking at you! The main problem with this selection box was the overall quality of the milk chocolate, which completely sub standard and no where near the kind of quality I have come to expect from Thorntons. Now I am not saying the quality of chocolate is good in the likes of Cadbury Roses or Nestle Quality Street but the milk chocolate here was really sugar laden and sweet tasting despite being billed as 30% cocoa solids. In the likes of Roses and Quality Street one thing they do have in their favour is that the proposed flavours pretty much deliver and make each chocolate unique. The six on offer here were just lacklustre with the one exception being the Creamy Fudge chocolate which was a stand out amongst a poor range. One can only assume that quite a few of you have tried these so it would be interesting to hear if your views are similar to my own.

4.6 out of 10