I’ve done Swedish chocolate vs Norwegian chocolate. I’ve done Swedish chocolate vs Finnish chocolate. I’ve done Swedish chocolate vs Swiss chocolate. And now I’m doing Swedish chocolate vs Swedish chocolate.
This is Swedish chocolate from a normal shop, not from Ikea or from the airport so it’s in its traditional yellow wrapper rather than the gold and I have four flavours to try out.
This is our baseline, our ordinary milk chocolate. This is a 200g bar, it’s four pieces across and seven pieces down. I like it, which is why I keep buying it but here’s an endorsement:
When I went to visit Esther, I asked if she wanted me to bring anything from the UK that she can’t get in Sweden, expecting to be asked for Cadbury’s chocolate. No, she wanted vanilla extract, cream of tartar, gravy granules and stuffing. And when we went shopping on the first day, she pointed out the aisle of Marabou chocolate and said “I don’t even miss Cadbury’s because of this. It’s so good!”
It’s creamy and chunky and it’s everything good in a bar of milk chocolate. 9/10.
This, I think, is praline. It’s a sort of hazelnut paste, it’s my absolute favourite. But I could only find it in 100g bars – no sign of the big 200g bars in Stockholm. I bought two bars because it’s my favourite. I ate one there and then and I brought the other home for photos and taste-testing. But somehow, this one melted on the way home. Doesn’t do much damage to the taste – it’s still smooth and hazelnutty and perfect but it didn’t look pristine.
This one gets an 8/10 – it gets 11 for taste but it loses points for not being available in big bars.
I love orange chocolate – but it can be a bit hit & miss because what I like is crunch, real crunch. Sometimes you get chewy little pieces of orange rather than crunches. What do we have here?
Crunch! Real crunch, like in the orange hexagons you get in Quality Street! Oh yes, this scores well. However, the crunch and the chocolate overwhelm the orange flavour. It’s just a hint of orange.
Total score: 8/10 again.
And our final competitor: mint crunch. Caveat, I bought and ate two bars of this stuff while I was in Sweden. Because it’s so so good!
It crunches nicely, it’s definitely minty – not overwhelmingly minty but minty like a Club biscuit. It’s minty enough that it would have overwhelmed the other flavours, which is why I left it until last. It’s flawless. 10/10.
So the winner is mint. But they’re all winners, which is why I bought them in the first place. I wish I’d got some dark chocolate as well, just for the sake of completeness but this is a very satisfying collection and I look forward to finishing them off over the next few weeks (I didn’t eat the entire bar to taste-test!)