Cadbury Chocolate Aplenty, Part 2

We're back with the second part of our feature about Australian company, Snack Box Hampers. Today I'm going to share the other half of the tremendous amount of candy, 24 individual candy bars/pieces, that was in the Cadbury Faves Chocolate Gift Box Hamper. Assistant testers' words will be put in italics as is our norm and I will clearly state when someone helped me with a product. Let's get the legals out of the way. I was sent the free product in exchange for a honest review of this product in today's post; no other form of compensation was received for sharing my experiences.

Let's look first at the biggest bar in this entire book:  Cadbury Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations bar weighing 190 grams and measuring 6.5 X 3 X 0.5 inches! The wrapper tells me that this will have "Jelly popping candy beanies" and I have no idea what that might be! Until other sectioned chocolate candy bars, the sections here are unevenly split which gives it a fun look. If you focus when you break the bar up, it will come apart along those lines relatively easily because they are recessed from the top of the bar, figuring out which piece to try and break off 20 sections was fun to do, too. You can see hints of colorful candy pieces under the milk chocolate. These have a hard shell over firm, sticky, fruity gummi pieces; the shells crunch but not for long. The chocolate is creamy but surprisingly not as sweet as some of the chocolate we turned in Part 1 of these feature. While I know I would love this with a much darker chocolate, I had a lot of fun trying this out. If you can find it, I recommend it.

Dream is basically a white chocolate bar which by the ingredients meets the legal standards of the USA with the only fats and oils used being cocoa butter and milk. This is an important point, because white chocolate is the most mislabeled type of "chocolate" candy out there, so I applaud Cadbury for the expense in making such a large bar at 5 inches long and 3/4 inches thick. The scent is milky with just a hint of vanilla, the color is lightly yellow which is show be because of the cocoa butter.

Picnic is a candy bar with peanuts, wafer, caramel, rice crisps, and milk chocolate. The wafers are laid out on top of one another with a bit of caramel between then along with caramel cover the two wafers so that the peanuts and crisps are then stuck on it before it is covered with milk chocolate. The sound of the peanuts and rice are different, the peanuts are louder, and there seemed to be more krispies than peanuts. The wafer and creamy milk chocolate are the first flavors, but the main flavor is sweet caramel which lingers along with a salty edge. The caramel is quite sticky, so be careful if you have problems with such foods. 

Boost should have a chocolate and biscuit (cookie) rolled in caramel, and coated in milk chocolate. You can't see it well in the photo unless  you enlarge it, but there is a layer of caramel underneath the outer milk chocolate. Inside in the chocolate and cookie pieces that are easy to see. When I took a bite it was much softer than I expected, reminding me of the inside of a Three Musketeers bar. The cookie pieces did crunch when you bit into one and there are a good number of them throughout the candy bar. The caramel was slightly sticky. All of the flavor blended together very well. If there was a version of this in darker chocolate, I'd love to try it.

A Crunchie should have honeycomb coated in milk chocolate; I have no idea what "hokey pokey" means in the context of the wrapper, but let's see if it means anything once I cut it in half. Still not sure what that phrase means but the inside is far more powdery than I expected. Yes, I have had chocolate covered honeycomb candy before and it didn't look like this. The scent is difficult to pinpoint, certain sweet bit particularly honey or chocolate. The chocolate coating is thin so it isn't a surprise that the dominant flavor is the honey sweetness that is intense. The honey builds up with each bite and also starts to melt and then get sticky in my mouth, so don't eat this if sticky foods are a problem for your teeth. Otherwise it crunched for most of the chewing I did.

This box had a set of what I predict will be primarily milk chocolates in the shape of animals. As you will read below I was partly correct in my assumption. However, sadly, I am clear not the target audience for these because the majority were too sweet and definitely not chocolate tasting enough to please me.

The Caramilk Wallaby was the one that had the greatest chance to please me because I wasn't expecting anything other than a caramel creamy flavor. Before we get to the flavor, I want to say that of the three shapes, this one was my favorite. The bar has a brown sugar fragrance with a hint of creaminess and a touch of that tang I like my caramel to have. It is easy to break in half and the color you see on the surface is throughout it. The flavor reminded me of creamy caramels, soft but firm enough to hold their shapes, and the tanginess builds if you let it melt in your mouth instead of chewing it.

Two Caramello Koalas came in this box. He looks so happy and cute that I didn't want to bite his head off, so I used a knife letting you all see the caramel inside. Unbitten or uncut, the scent is a sweet milk chocolate, but once you open that shell, a tangy caramel fragrance escapes. The caramel is thick and not very sticky though both the googyness and the tangy flavor build up with each chew. Both the milk chocolate and the caramel are on the sweet side, but those flavors balanced well in this case. This was my flavor of the set, followed by the previous Caramel Wallaby.

Three varieties of Freddo were included; the shape maintains the historical connection to a company Cadbury acquired called MacRobertson's, an Australia candy maker.

Freddo Milk Chocolate is very much what I expect now from a milk chocolate Cadbury bar – creamy and low cacao percentage. The shape is adorable and the size might make it a great choice for kiddos or for inclusion in gift or treat bags/boxes.

The Freddo Strawberry is really the milk chocolate with a center of pink something that almost has a caramel look to it. The scent is like a strawberry milk, intense and creamy. It is very soft to bit into and makes no sound. The inside is so sweet that if my brain didn't expect strawberry, I doubt I could guess that flavor. 

The best thing about the Freddo Milky Top is that it could please both a Cadbury white chocolate and a milk chocolate fan. If you love both, you get both or you can split it with someone.However, that's the problem I had with this one because it was just too much sweet and cream flavors.

The final candy bar in this box was a small Dairy Milk bar. It has two sections that break apart very easily. This is an incredibly creamy, sweet milk chocolate with a hint of vanilla at the end. It is easy to chew and at this size it could make a good little gift to add to other smallish items. Since I'm not a big fan of such creamy chocolate, it wasn't difficult for me to let someone else try the other piece.

My favorites in this Cadbury sampler were the Marvellous Creations for the wackiness of it and the Boost for the surprising softness and the balance of flavors. The Picnic was good but I wanted more peanuts or at least a balance of them to the crisps. Overall, now testing and writing about Cadbury varieties, I can say that I'm not a fan of their white or milk chocolate, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to try all of those brands that we normally cannot readily find in the USA.

The two Snack Box Hamper gift boxes I received came in a larger box packed with biodegradable peanuts. I wanted to highlight this because sustainability, being eco friendly, and not generating as much trash as possible is important here on The Chocolate Cult. Remember, as far as we know, only Earth grows chocolate and cacao trees only grow in a limited region on this planet. Let's protect it!

Snack Box Hampers has a lot of options. While some of them are chocolate or include chocolate, several are not. There are themed options for occasions, there are lollipop, snack, and cookie focused gifts, as well as vegan and gluten free hampers. Check them out!