August 28/29th: Ritter Sport Schokocreme

Kcal 578 Fat 40.0g Carbs 50.0g (per 100.0g)

Just when I thought it had gone a little quiet on the Ritter Sport front, last week a 2.0kg box arrived on my doorstep (poor postie!). Inside the well packaged Ritter Sport branded parcel, there were eight bars of this new Schokocreme flavour - that is Chocolate Cream of course to us Brits. On the wrapper the new bar came described as 'milk chocolate with a chocolate cream filling (43.0%) and small rice cereal pieces (2.5%)'. In proposition this didn't sound like the most innovative or exciting of all the flavours to come out of Ritter HQ recently, but I approached it with an open mind and roped in some of my fellow family members to try it with me (I say that as if it took much convincing :D )

As I have noted above the package I received from Ritter was rather large, which is lucky for you guys as it means I have the opportunity to give one of these bars away. If you can do some easy maths and calculate the weight of this bar, pop me an e-mail at Jim[@]ChocolateMission.net (take out the brackets!) Winner announced Saturday 4th September. As you will no doubt have noticed in my photo above, this was another presale sample sent to me by Ritter, so the packaging on show is not actually the finished article. From what I could gauge from the products received, I think it would be a safe assumption to make that the eventual presentation will be just fine. Sat in the middle of the standard sized blocks, the chocolate cream looked well portioned, whilst the small specs of rice cereal were also very evident.

Smelling the chocolate, my senses were soon filled with some familiar Ritter Sport milk chocolate scents that did a sound job of setting up the taste that followed. Placing the first block in my mouth the experience started out like most other Ritter milk chocolate bars do, with the taste fast taking a sugary cocoa led flavour base. Excuse me again for repeating myself from past reviews, but whilst the chocolate was fine and did a sound job of providing the chocolate flavour hit, it was pretty generic in taste and had nothing about it that made me want to shout how great it was from any rooftops. In the centre of the blocks the chocolate cream did little to enhance the sugary, milky flavours of the chocolate, though it did at least offer a differentiated texture that felt softer and smoother during the duration of it's melt. Throughout the chocolate cream the small crispy pieces similarly didn't prove to be the most compelling flavour wise with their mild rice cereal suggestions. On the plus side however, they did bring a degree of interest to the textures with their crunchy, disruptive mouth feel a nice contrast from the faster melting, smoother chocolate constituents.

Overall it was felt by not only myself but my entire family that this was a pretty average Ritter Sport offering. Whilst it was fine at fulfilling the proposition it put forward, the flavour combination wilts in the presence of some of the other more distinctive offerings that there are in the range. A thing that particularly disappointed myself about this chocolate was the fact that Ritter Sport have continued not to implement their finer milk chocolate recipe across the rest of their range (See that bar HERE). I think another opportunity that they had with this chocolate was also to differentiate the outer milk chocolate, with the inner chocolate creme. I think it would have certainly of been interesting to see what a bar with a milk chocolate exterior and dark chocolate cream filling would have been like - that would have been a nice alternative to the Ritter Sport a la Mousse au Chocolat bar which happens to have this proposition just the other way around. To conclude this bar was absolutely fine at what it did, but it just wasn't all that special. Don't forget to enter the competition above - you better get your calculators out :D

7.2 out of 10