Whenever I travel, I like to try the local foods. Of course, you have to do this unless you want to starve, but I take it a step further. I actively search out foods I haven't heard of, and eat them. Since I have a major sweet tooth, this usually means I'm raiding the grocery stores for pastries and candy. I thought that with this unique experience of studying abroad, I would share some of the foods I have tried and whether they're a YES or a NO.
First up, Peppermint Aero. One of my friends on this trip recommended it to me, and I like the combo of mint and chocolate, so I figured why not. Basically, it's a chocolate bar with aerated mint cream stuff inside of it. This sounds amazing, but the inside looks quite gross. Getting past that though, it is actually pretty good. European chocolate is always better than chocolate from the US, so I wasn't very surprised. The mint part was very minty and smooth. I will say though, that this melts quite quickly. I bought one near the beginning of my adventures, but it melted in my drawer, and I wasn't able to fully appreciate the fluffiness of the mint.
A slightly weirder candy that I tried was the Fizzy Rainbow Belts. They taste kind of like fruit
rollups, coated in sour sugar crystals. Honestly, not that different from American candy. Pretty good.
I should preface these next few by saying the Sainsbury's is amazing, guys. The normal ones usually have a little bakery in them, and the local ones (like the one nearest Somerville College) at least have some snazzy desserts. I tried pretty much all of the ones available at our local one. No regrets.
Egg custard tarts are weird. I don't like them. They look great, but the texture is very much like cold scrambled eggs, rather than custard. I was not a fan. The crust was pretty good, but I could not get past the idea that I was eating scrambled eggs. And I'm not much of a fan of eggs in the first
place, so these were not my favorite.
Cheesecake. Oh. My. God. Cheesecake. These cheesecakes from Sainsbury's are soooooo good. It’s glorious. Two pounds for two cheesecakes. I don’t know how this can possibly be profitable, since both cheesecakes come in an individual glass container, but I’m not going to complain. There are two types: salted caramel and chocolate. The salted caramel cheesecake is better, even though I’m more of a chocolate person than salted caramel. Let me explain. In
both, they have a layer of cheesecake cream stuff, but in the chocolate one, there is a layer of chocolate on top, and some gold specks (it’s a millionaire’s cheesecake, so I guess that’s where the gold is coming from), but it also has a layer of really dry chocolate cake on the bottom. The caramel cheesecake has a layer of caramel on top, and graham cracker like crush on the bottom. That part is so much better than the weird dry cake of the chocolate one. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be dry or not, but it isn’t great. Not that the cheesecake is bad - they’re both very good - it’s just that the chocolate one would be better if the cake part was different. Anyway, these cheesecakes are my go-to snack. They’re delicious, and portable (as far as cheesecakes go). Definitely a must-have.
Another one of my favorite delicacies from Sainsbury's is this custard cake thing. It has layers of custard and flaky pastry, with icing on top. The icing is kind of gross, but the custard is super creamy and delicious, and the pastry is done to perfection. There is a ton of custard for this cake, and it squishes out when you bite into it. Makes quite the mess. But a delicious mess. All in all, the custard is really good, but quite rich. The box comes with two, but I could never eat both in one sitting. It took me like three days to get through both of them.
Next up is these Sherbet Lemons. They are hard, yellow candies in the shape of lemons. The inside have a teeny bit of gritty white cream. The cream is actually really good, but the
lemon-flavored hard candy isn’t fabulous, and there’ a lot of it for a little cream. Also, each hard candy is individually wrapped, inside of the initial bag. That’s just so unnecessary! These are not my favorite.
I do, however, really like the Dolly Mixtures. They taste kind of like Allsorts. But they’re tiny. There are a bunch of different things in here, too. There’s these colorful sandwich things, which are dry and crumble in your mouth, a bit like meringue. They’re very dense, and firm (but not like a hard candy). Absolutely delicious. The rolls are basically the same idea, but the white part is in the center, with the colorful part wrapped around. Each of the colors have a different flavor. They’re all good, except for the brown one, which is chocolate. But it’s a candy made to taste like chocolate, which is basically a double-stacking of artificial flavors. Not good. It tastes like chocolate that expired two years ago, was thrown out, dragged out of the dumpster by a rat, half-munched, then taken by a very dumb child, to languish underneath a subway seat for a month. It’s gross. The green ones though, are really good - they taste kind of like lime (obviously not like you’re actually eating lime, but more like you’re thinking about one). Those are quite good. Then there’s the gum drops, which are my favorite variety of all the candies in this bag. They don’t taste very different from any other gumdrops I’ve had, but they’re a bit lighter, and less chewy.
One of the restaurants I went to had free Haribo gummy bears as an after-meal snack sort of deal, and they were really good. I then went on a search for some Haribo gummy bears, but the closest thing I could find were these Haribo Tangfastics. They had some marshmallow-backed dummies which were fine, and some cherry-shaped gummies that didn’t taste like cherries. Then there were these gummies which I cannot for the life of me figure out what shape they’re supposed to be. A ring? A baby rattle? A lolly pop? An exploding tadpole? Who can tell? Anyway, they’re just exceptionally good gummies. The last variety though, are these coke bottles. They are gross. They do taste kind like coke, but warm, flat, watered-down coke mixed with Pepsi. It’s so not good. It would be really cool if a candy company could simulate the carbon dioxide of a soda though. Haribo, get on that.
Then, we have some classic Cadbury chocolate bars. First up: the Twirl. I don’t get this one. It’s literally just chocolate coated with more chocolate. The inside of the chocolate bar is thin sheets of chocolate folded on itself. But it’s still just chocolate. I though that, since the surface are of the chocolate was increased, it would melt easier in my mouth, but it didn’t
really. There was remarkably little difference between this chocolate bar, than with another Cadbury’s chocolate bar. To be clear, Cadbury’s chocolate is far superior to any chocolate found in the US.
Next: the Boost bar. It said it would give me an energy boost, since it had nuts and caramel in it, but it certainly didn't work
like coffee would have. It was all I had though, so I had to just make do. I mean, it was good, as far as chocolate goes.
PS: I don't think of the Mint Aero as a chocolate bar, hence I talked about it earlier, instead of here. I think of it as minty-flavored heaven. Also, it's not Cadbury, so it doesn't fit here.