Category: Food

The Great Easter Chocolate Battle

  • April 25, 2017

I have fond childhood memories of large foil-wrapped chocolate Easter eggs, and this year I bought some for old times sake.

Here then, a brief review. 


I’m a Cadbury fan from way back, and a maniac consumer of their ‘mini eggs’ so even at $7, the above was irresistible. 

But as you can see, the reality was quite underwhelming. The egg contained only four mini eggs, and they were all broken! Even worse, the egg itself was awful, a criminal example of Hershey branding some of their own vomitous ‘chocolate’ as Cadbury. (Hershey licenses Cadbury brand here, and don’t use the Cadbury formula for all products they label with the name.)

In short: a terribly disappointing product and a rip-off to boot. A good amount of it went into the trash…


This was $10, a Lindt egg packaged with a generous amount of truffle eggs. The price was high (I could have bought two medium Lindt rabbits for the same money) but the packaging was lovely!

But the egg was delicious! Every bit as good as you’d expect; wonderful creamy Lindt chocolate with varying thickness depending on how it set just like I remember. I ate this like a fiend and loved every morsel. The little eggs were too rich for me, but the product was great even without them!

So a very clear winner here: the Lindt egg smashed the Cadbury one into the ground. What more needs to be said?

Well…


I also picked up the above (for $5). I was very hesitant upon opening it, recalling the evil taste of the ‘fakebury’ egg I’d cast into the trash the day before, but this rabbit was sublime.

Here it was: the beloved Cadbury taste. The best chocolate in the world in the shape of a lovely Easter bunny. Every bite was bliss, and even better it made me forget the awful egg.

So in the end Easter was saved! It was a lot of chocolate though. I may have to cut back next year 😉

  • Posted in Food
  • Robert

Frozen Novelties (Part 2)

  • October 14, 2016

The post on ice creams was unexpectedly popular! It led to some digging around on the interwebs during which I found these licensed Aussie ice blocks.

I’ll post them in more or less chronological order:

I can remember these! Apparently the license was so massive that more than one company made SW ice blocks over the years. This was of course in 1978.

 

Licensing was in full bloom by the late 1970s, although obviously the Bionic Man license was cheaper than the Star Trek one based on the cost of the ice block 🙂

The KISS ‘water ice confection’ came out in 1980 and I can remember the cola-flavoured back ice staining your tongue when you ate it. They sold these at school believe it or not!

Look at those flavours on this 1980 ice block! Lemonade, pineapple and bubblegum?!? I bet I loved them!

This delicious Flash Gordon ice cream was also 1980. I’d ruin one of these right now.

Collating these photos gave me distinct flashbacks of perusing the freezer cases in the days all this stuff was available. Happy times!

 

We’re into the early 1980s now. Orange and pineapple is my dream combination; here’s hoping they still market Donkey Kong when I visit 😛

 

The first one is a bit special since they came with glow-in-the-dark stickers. You can read about them here, and I strongly recall having a Spider Man sticker of my own! There other licensed shaped popsicles as well (such as Disney), but I don’t recall ever buying any.

Here things have just got a bit out of control don’t you agree? While this is a box from a New Zealand company, I read (although don’t recall) that Fame iceblocks were marketed in Australia as well.

All these are over 30 years ago, and there were virtually no licensed iceblocks before 1978. This is just another example of how Star Wars changed marketing entirely. Growing up in that era – where even The Bionic Man was a good license for the freezer case – was a privilege indeed.

  • Posted in Food
  • Robert

C.H.I.P.S

  • July 17, 2016

Yesterday we visited a potato chip festival held in Saratoga, the home of the potato chip as a snack food.

We weren’t quite sure what to expect (it was the ‘first annual’) as we each paid our $4 entry charge.

What we found was a big room full of chip companies handing out free product! There were no restrictions and organizers handed attendees as many carry bags (to hold samples) as they wanted. It was chip madness!

KLS won a shirt and we looked at a historical display, but this was very much about the generous free samples. There were smaller companies as well, sampling their wares (which included jerky).

Although we literally left with as much as we could carry, it wasn’t until we got home and emptied out the bags that we realized how much we had got…

Almost everyone had multiple bags of samples and we saw some with many more than us! In retrospect it was all a bit greedy and shameful and we were clearly overcome by the abundance of items available.

Suffice to say we won’t be buying chips for months!