Hi everyone,
I've just gotten back from a holiday in Marrakech, and it was an amazing experience. I encountered some strange and new things there - camels on the roadside (for tourists, obviously), mile after mile of winding souk (although after a while, they all begin to feel like a variation on the Camden Markets), full body exfoliation at the hammams (ultimately rewarding, but at the time - ouch!) and perhaps the strangest and most unexpected thing of all - a Moroccan chocolate bar!
Ok, so technically, it isn't actually Moroccan. It's from a company called Tiffany, based in Dubai. But you can BUY it in Morocco (from a hole in the wall -literally - shop around the corner from my riad, where you could also buy cigarettes and a wide selection of French-inspired cookies, and where the shopkeeper showed me how much it cost by laying out the correct coins on the counter), so I'm going with it.
The bar in question is a Team Up, with not one but two skinny chocolate bars to delight. Not entirely sure why the bar has an English name (and the vaguely unappetizing-sounding description of 'cocoa coated fingers'), but whatever. Like what I imagine any authentic Moroccan candy bar stored in the hot desert sun would be like, this one is part melted, slightly flattened and reconstituted. So far, so good.
Turns out the melting didn't do anything to mar (and maybe even improved?) the taste. The two chocolate bars are layers of soft, crispy chocolate wafers (think Loacker wafers) covered in a thin layer of chewy caramel, and then covered in a thick-ish layer of milk chocolate. And the end result is a tasty bar indeed!
Perhaps due to the melting, perhaps to the bar itself, the bar is lovely and chewy. The wafers, used to disastrous effect in previously reviewed bars, works in this case because the soft caramel that surrounds it keeps it from being too dry and flaky. There might also be some sort of Loacker-esque chocolate cream between the wafers, but the bars I tried have been flattened a little too much to tell. :P
The milk chocolate surrounding it all is fairly passable - a little too sweet but no weird flavor to it. The bar actually really reminded me of the Caramel deLites (the dear departed Samoa) Girl Scout cookies without the coconut. Maybe it's the sweet chocolate and caramel combo? Weird.
In any case, after not even expecting to find something resembling a chocolate bar in Marrakech, I found myself very pleased indeed about what I did find. This is an eminently eatable bar, and a somewhat less robust but fairly passable Kit Kat substitute while traveling the Arab world. Yum - 3 bars.
I've just gotten back from a holiday in Marrakech, and it was an amazing experience. I encountered some strange and new things there - camels on the roadside (for tourists, obviously), mile after mile of winding souk (although after a while, they all begin to feel like a variation on the Camden Markets), full body exfoliation at the hammams (ultimately rewarding, but at the time - ouch!) and perhaps the strangest and most unexpected thing of all - a Moroccan chocolate bar!
Ok, so technically, it isn't actually Moroccan. It's from a company called Tiffany, based in Dubai. But you can BUY it in Morocco (from a hole in the wall -literally - shop around the corner from my riad, where you could also buy cigarettes and a wide selection of French-inspired cookies, and where the shopkeeper showed me how much it cost by laying out the correct coins on the counter), so I'm going with it.
Perhaps due to the melting, perhaps to the bar itself, the bar is lovely and chewy. The wafers, used to disastrous effect in previously reviewed bars, works in this case because the soft caramel that surrounds it keeps it from being too dry and flaky. There might also be some sort of Loacker-esque chocolate cream between the wafers, but the bars I tried have been flattened a little too much to tell. :P
The milk chocolate surrounding it all is fairly passable - a little too sweet but no weird flavor to it. The bar actually really reminded me of the Caramel deLites (the dear departed Samoa) Girl Scout cookies without the coconut. Maybe it's the sweet chocolate and caramel combo? Weird.
In any case, after not even expecting to find something resembling a chocolate bar in Marrakech, I found myself very pleased indeed about what I did find. This is an eminently eatable bar, and a somewhat less robust but fairly passable Kit Kat substitute while traveling the Arab world. Yum - 3 bars.
Bar-o-Meter
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