May 18th: 'Bits n Bobs' Chocolate Chocolate Biscuit, Cookies & Cereal Bars

There have been so many new products in the biscuit, cookies and cereal bars category recently its been hard to keep up with the pace and give them their ChocolateMission reviews. Here are a few products that I have trying out recently, that haven't quite made it on to my 'SNACK OF THE WEEK' weekend shout outs. The reviews are short and sharp so be sure to leave your own thoughts on them.

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Kcal 71 Fat 3.3g Fat(sats) 1.8g Carbs 9.5g (per cookie)

To my knowledge, Oreo Double Stuff are currently available in Tesco & Asda where you can buy 185.0g packs for £1.30. As you can probably tell from the name, these are simply your standard Oreo cookies with twice the amount of 'stuff' (vanilla flavour creme!) sandwiched in the middle. These have been a long time coming to the UK, but Kraft have finally obliged, and by my ruling they are very welcome. The additional creme may not do much for the taste, but the beefed out creme does provide a little more moistness to the very dry biscuits, and it does make them seem like a more satisfying product compared to the originals. The only problem you guys might have with these, is that like myself you may find yourself never being able to look at the original Oreos in quite the same way - they just look a little meagre now I'm used to these.

8.3 out of 10



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Kcal 126 Fat 4.3g Fat(sats) 1.3g Carbs 19.4g (per bar)

The Mcvitie's Hobnobs Medley range was first featured on the site back in July 2010 - See HERE when I reviewed the chocolate & raisin variant in the range. Although this peanut variant was released at that very same time, the distribution of it was rather low, and it was only recently that Tesco stores actually started carrying this part of the line. Described as 'biscuit & cereal bar with peanuts & milk chocolate chips', I was excited that this variant might be more to my liking than my previous raisin experience. The packaging certainly looked a bit more suitable for Hobnobs with the use of the orange colouring to indicate the peanut flavour, though I was a little disappointed to find it was hard to pick out the peanuts aesthetically when looking at the real thing. Essentially these turned out to be nice enough cereal bars, however they struggled with the same issues that the raisin variant did with the influence of both the biscuit and peanut contents lacking cut through against the syrupy oat base. As I said, nice enough, but couldn't of been better with a greater presence of chocolate and peanuts.

7.3 out of 10



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Kcal 65 Fat 3.1g Fat(sats) 1.6g Carbs 8.6g (per biscuit)

Perhaps I was being a little presumptuous, but when I saw the press release from Fox's about the launch of his Amber range, but I was expecting them to be positioned as a premium tier offering to their usual 'Chunky' cookies. You can imagine I was relatively surprised then when I saw the entire line on a £1.00 deal in Tesco - a much cheaper option than the 2 for £2.50 deal running across the 'Chunky' cookies. Looking at both packaging and presentation of all three Ambers variants there was very little disparity, though it was the Praline flavour that caught my eye. Billed as 'golden honeycomb biscuit, baked with praline and dipped in chocolate' I thought these sounded like they had great promise stepping in to a 'praline' territory not ventured in to often by the likes of McVitie's etc. Unfortunately when it came to the tale of the taste, the praline element didn't come through strongly - a blind taste test on some colleagues totally proved this when they failed to register nut content of any sort. The taste was dominated by a strong golden syrup influence, with the oat and milk chocolate very much secondary players in the background. The taste was resultingly very, very sweet - too much so in my honest opinion. These weren't bad biscuits, but they didn't deliver the praline experience either promised or desired.

6.8 out of 10


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Kcal 495 Fat 24.7g Fat(sats) 14.5g Carbs 59.7g (per 100.0g)

After a few demoralising product reviews from M&S recently I have been a little less willing to check out their confectionery range, though these chocolate coated pretzels did catch my eye when I saw them instore. At first it was the rather ghastly green colour of the packaging that got my attention, however the premise of chocolate pretzels encouraged me enough to part with £1.49 for a bag. The whole area of chocolate covered salted snacks is a massively untapped area of the market here UK what with Nestle Flipz being a sore loss from our shelves a very long time ago. I thought this presented M&S with a real opportunity to offer something different here, but unfortunately they didn't quite manage to deliver the product I had in mind. Cutting the long story short, these pretzels were coated in a thin layer of no better than average, sweet tasting milk rooted sugary chocolate. The potential of the savoury pretzels was unfortunately not taken full advantage of - they were neither flavoursome or salty enough to really deliver the contrast of flavours that these needed to give - if anything they just tasted like rather bland biscuits. These could have been so much better and I wish they were - a real opportunity missed out on by M&S here.

5.8 out of 10


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Kcal 131 Fat 6.8g Fat(sats) 4.0g Carbs 15.9g (per bar)

Unlike most of the others featured today, these Fox's Classic Originals weren't so much a new product, but more the case of an existing product being added to the shelves of one of my local stores. Indeed, coinciding with the rest of the latest shelf update, these 'milk chocolate covered cream filled honeycomb biscuit bars' popped up in my local Tesco. A £1.00 expenditure bought me a multipack of seven bars - just about enough for me to dish out to the people sitting round me at work. As you can hopefully see from the photos, the standard of packaging and overall presentation was really rather standard - the cream poking out between the biscuit pieces was at least somewhat appealing. General consensus when it came to taste test was one of disappointment, with no fewer than 5 out of 7 saying they wouldn't buy again (myself included!). The main point of issue with these chocolate biscuit bars were that the terrible milk chocolate meant they were ridiculously sugary tasting, and both the biscuit and cream elements added little or nothing to experience. These were fundamentally bland tasting sugary biscuits - I wouldn't recommend.

5.4 out of 10