April 5th: McVitie's Caramel Shortcake Slices

Kcal 146 Fat 7.7g Fat(sats) 4.3g Carbs 17.8g (per 29.0g slice)

A little over a month ago you may remember that I reviewed Thornton's Mini Caramel Shortcakes to great success with them getting a score of 9.0. Well given how good they were and my love for millionaire shortbread I could hardly resist giving these McVitie's Caramel Shortcake Slices, especially when they were reduced to half price (75p) in my local OneStop shop. McVitie's here in the UK make some phenomenal biscuits (Hobnobs the best amongst many!!!) so I was pleased to see that they had brought their own little twist to the caramel shortbread concept as it constituted of 'McVitie's digestive biscuit shortcake topped with smooth caramel and milk chocolate'.

These Caramel Shortcake Slices came in a pack of 6 x 29.0g servings. I thought the presentation of the product on the whole was pretty good with the gold colour theme nicely supporting the actual product concept and the on pack pictures giving a fair idea of the slices inside. Contained within it was nice to see that each piece had it's own individual wrapper which meant that I could easily transport these to work without creating a mess in my bag. As I have referred to already the pieces looked exactly like they did on the packet with clear distinguished layers of biscuit, caramel and chocolate looking very enticing indeed. Aswell as looking pretty tempting the slices didn't smell half bad either and they a very familiar wheaty McVitie's biscuit aroma made itself immediately known as soon as I ripped open the plastic packets.

Everything up until this point was looking great but I unfortunately have to report that the taste didn't match the build up. As you probably expected it wasn't the biscuit base that let this product down but more the chocolate and caramel layers which were pretty lacklustre. The digestive biscuit base was very comforting and unsurprisingly tasted almost identical to McVitie's digestive biscuits with a strong sweet, salt hinted malty taste. As the biscuits obviously had to be crushed the base was a bit moister than your average digestive biscuit but that aside there it was very little different. Despite the ingredients list naming caramel as the dominating element the taste did very little to suggest this was the case. Both the caramel and milk chocolate lacked telling flavour influences, the caramel more so as it only contributed a very subtle brown sugar like influence on the taste of the shortcake. The milk chocolate was equally as mild and just really failed to exert itself into the taste whatsoever. I don't know about you but when I think of Caramel Shortcake I expect a very rich tasting experience but this just wasn't it, thus one slice was a calorific but not fulfilling snack.

Overall I was pretty disappointed with these given the pedigree of McVitie's for making biscuit products. Indeed they did produce a very nice tasting biscuit base for the product but I was never doubting that this wasn't going to be of a good quality anyway. What really let these slices down though was the abysmal quality of the caramel and milk chocolate which I would say were both verging on being near flavourless and were just bland. Because these elements were so poor it made eating these slices almost entirely pointless and I think I would have got more enjoyment from just tucking into a few digestive biscuits. If your a big fan of caramel shortcake like myself I would probably just stick to the Thornton's ones, or better yet head to your local bakery to get some freshly made real stuff. Who would I love to see a caramel shortcake product produced by? I think Cadbury could have a great go at it if they used their normal Dairy Milk and Caramel recipes. I wouldn't rule out this happening at some point in the future given they have just recently moved into making flapjacks and brownies!

5.7 out of 10