Posts Tagged ‘chocolate’

Cadbury Dairy Milk Mixed Buttons research

Sunday, April 26th, 2020 | Science

Cadbury produces a sharing bag of mixed chocolate buttons containing both milk and white buttons. As soon as you learn this exists you are probably thinking “are there equal numbers of each button in the bag?”

Do not worry. I have painstaking done the research. For months I have been analysing the frequency of each type of button in each bag to work out what the balance is. Finally, my research is ready to publish.

Here are the results:

A paired samples t-test to compare the number of milk and white buttons in each bag. There were more milk buttons (M = 55.38, SD = 1.30) than white buttons (M = 45.38, SD = 1.30).

Test for normality was run (p = 0.327) so Wilxin signed-rank was used (N = 8,

Eggs and soldiers

Friday, March 9th, 2018 | Food, Photos

I saw this on Instagram and had to replicate.

Molly Bakes Chocolate

Tuesday, July 25th, 2017 | Books

Chocolate by Molly Bakes is a cookbook for chocolatey things, surprisingly.

It starts with an introduction to the different kinds of cocoa beans there are, and some useful advice for working with chocolate. This is fine, but once you know the difference between Forastero, Criollo, and Trinitario, you want the more expensive ones.

The core content of the recipes is how to make hand-rolled truffles.

They’re very good. You make a ganache filling and a chocolate casing, and carefully assemble them in stages.

There are also recipes for a variety of other fun things. Chocolate bowls, for example:

And tray bakes, too.

If you like chocolate, this is an excellent book. It teaches you how to produce incredibly rich truffles and desserts, predominantly free from the distractions of other ingredients.

Chocolate soufflé

Monday, May 29th, 2017 | Food

My first batch didn’t rise much and collapsed quickly when I took them out of the oven.

It wasn’t a lack of time because I baked this one to death.

For attempt three, I used Gordon Ramsey’s recipe. It was tediously complex. There were so many stages. But, as you can see above, it did produce better results.

Chocolate cigars

Monday, November 7th, 2016 | Food, Photos

chocolate-cigars

Apparently you are not allowed to smoke in maternity wards anymore. Luckily, Elina got me some chocolate cigars instead.

Cadbury and their nutritional information

Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 | Thoughts

wispa-bar

This is a Cadbury Wispa chocolate bar. I am annoyed by it. Here is why…

I buy chocolate bars in multipacks. It makes sense because it is cheaper than buying them individually and I have to go shopping less often. I have recently written about my diet, which involves tracking the number of kcals I am eating.

They’re smaller

I took a look at how the multipacks were advertised on Sainsbury’s website. They’re not actually called “multipacks” but labelled “4×30.5g”. I suspect the reason behind this is because the term multipack could be seen as misleading: given you are not actually getting a multipack of normal Wispa bars. The ones you get in the multipack are smaller.

wispa-sizes

This is a side by side comparison of a regular bar and the one I got from my multipack.

They say multipack on

I have long found the habit of companies printing on things like “multipack bar – not for resale” annoying. The reason they do this is to try and stop stores from buying the multipacks, splitting them up and selling them on separately.

However, they can’t just ban it, because splitting a multipack and selling the individual items is perfectly legal. So they write these messages on instead.

In my opinion, this is an unfair business practice. I often see multipack items for sale, but never in a big-business context. It is family-run corner shops, small sandwich merchants and refreshment stalls at community events. Such practices disproportionally affect small businesses.

No nutritional information

As if this tactic is not bad enough, Cadbury also removes all of the nutritional information and ingredients list from their multipack bars. You are legally required to list the ingredients on your products, and the food industry has agreed to provide nutritional information too, but Cadbury provides neither.

back-of-packs

The way Cadbury get round this is to insist that the ingredients and nutritional information is available on the outer wrapper of the multipack. However, this is completely at odds with the way most people use multipacks. When I buy one, I open the packet, tip the bars out into my bag of goodies, and throw the multipack wrapper away.

The alternative is to keep a stash of multipack wrappers hanging around in case I want to check nutritional information. Perhaps you could argue that it is merely industry standard to do this and that everyone does it. But you would be wrong…

lilt-can

Here is a can of Lilt Zero, a product of The Coca-Cola Company. It is a multipack can as you can see from the back bar with white writing and the top. And yet somehow, Coke remembered to put all of their ingredients and nutritional information on the can.

Summary

I will not claim to know the mind of Cadbury. However, if I was to guess at their thinking, I would say that in my opinion they choose not to include ingredients or nutritional information on their bars in an attempt to prevent local shops exercising their legal right to break multipack products, even though this means impacting the consumer and not providing the vital information that should be there.

I see no reason why this information cannot be included on each individual bar.

Nor do I believe that enough is done to make it clear to consumers that the bars they sell in the multipacks are noticeably smaller than the bars you would typically buy individually.

Nordic baking

Saturday, May 14th, 2016 | Food

Last month, I wrote about my experiments with Nordic cooking. Having worked my way through the recipes, I then moved onto the second half of the book: the desserts and baking chapters. Excitingly, this opens Nordic cuisine to a whole range of colours, rather than just brown.

Ginger cake

Okay, I’ll give you, this one is still brown. But a ginger cake in any other colour might look a little strange. Those biscuits at the side of the tin are actually…

Shortbread

Shortbread. Made to Douglas’s recipe. I don’t know who Douglas is, but he worked in a Swedish restaurant. You hollow out the middle, fill it with jam, and then bake.

Blueberry tart

Blueberry tart. Of all the Nordic baking I have done, I think this probably looks the most Nordic. The filling is made with sour cream, and then you scatter the blueberries over (and inevitably into) it.

Glazed rasperry fingers

Danish glazed raspberry squares. You bake it as a full sheet of pastry and end up with a 30cm by 40cm single pastry that you then cut up. I found it easier to slice into fingers (finger shaped biscuits, rather than my own fingers) than squares. It’s simple to put together as you bake the two layers, leave to cool a little, then add the jam. You can add the icing later. Make sure you slice it up while still warm though, or it will become very brittle.

Gooey chocolate cake

Gooey chocolate cake. Oh my god this was so good. It comes out as a really thin layer in my 18cm tin, so I might try a smaller one. Or, more likely, the same tin with several times the amount of ingredients. You bake it until not quite set, then leave it to cool before eating. It is amazing warm as well.

Chocolate apples

Monday, October 27th, 2014 | Photos

chocolate-flavour

These are not chocolate apples. They are “chocolate flavour coated” apples.

Chocolate

Tuesday, July 16th, 2013 | Life

Recently, we’ve been having a chocolate off. Having gathered samples from Bon Bon’s, Hotel Chocolat and Charbonnel & Walker, we then set about the arduous task of trying to discern which one was the best.

Unfortunately, after extensive tasting and testing, the results have come back inconclusive. More research will be required before we can announce our findings.

IMG_4706 IMG_4707 IMG_4708 IMG_4709

Big lunch

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 | Photos

I hope people in the office didn’t think this was all for one lunch.