Milk Chocolate with Raspberry (Marks and Spencer)

I was shopping in Chelmsford high street taking a leisurely stroll round the market stalls today and by chance found my way into the M&S store and came across this little beauty! 
I hadn't planned on buying any chocolate today but pink wrapping always catches my attention.


Packaging: - Very simple, bold color and not over complicated which is always effective. Especially in a store which is being refurbished. The additional 'arty' chocolate striping on the front gives the impression that it might have been handmade somewhere along the way. Both the paper and foil wrappers can be recycled which is always a tick in my box.


Description: Milk chocolate with freeze dried raspberries. According to M&S this is a limited edition milk chocolate that has been created from carefully selected cocoa beans from Ghana and Ecuador to form a balanced chocolate rich in cocoa with the addition of real raspberry pieces. Made in Switzerland, suitable for vegetarians. Contains cows milk and soya. No artificial colours or artificial flavourings.




Ingredients: Sugar, dried whole milk, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, freeze dried raspberries (3%) caramelised sugar syrup. Emulsifier soya lecithin, ground vanilla. Milk chocolate contains cocoa solids 35% minimum, milk solids 26% minimum. This item had a best before date of 22.02.11.

The Chocolate: Once I'd carefully split open the silver foil wrapper there was a fairly good waft of sweet milk chocolate coming through. The front of the bar is divided up into squares for easy break-ability. I've flipped over the bar to show you how the raspberries have been dispersed amongst the chocolate. Many 'fruit' style bars have larger pieces of freeze dried fruit floating on the top which can mean the air gets to the fruit and makes it a bit soft. Well, this is certainly not the case with this bar. 


Having placed a square into my mouth the immediate experience was a roughness on my tongue with the melting chocolate on the roof of my mouth. It wasn't unpleasant but it reminded me of my childhood days when my mum made chocolate krispies. The raspberries were crunchy and gave the chocolate a zingy experience which wasn't unpleasant however the chocolate was thin, short and didn't have a great depth of flavour, which is probably what you'd expect when buying a fruit bar. As sugar was the top ingredient it did have a sweetness about it that didn't make me want to scoff the whole lot in one go. The remainder of the bars is sitting in the storage jar waiting for the kids to find it.

Overall I'd give this bar 5/10 mainly for presentation and at £1.59 for a 100g bar I thought it was reasonably priced especially if you wanted to treat yourself to a chocolate fix.