Manufacturer: The Hershey Company
Location: Hershey, PA
Manufacturer Website
Rating: C-
Today's dark chocolate review is the Cadbury Royal Dark chocolate bar. The Royal Dark bar is reddish mahogany in color. the nose finds cocoa and a big coconut note.
On the palate there is a note reminiscent of sweetened breakfast cereal. Notes of coconut and cocoa are notable as well. The Royal Dark is rather sweet, bordering on overly sweet, and this sweetness seems to drown out the other flavors of the chocolate. Buried way in the background there is a faint note of walnuts/hazelnuts. Chewing the Royal Dark brings some fleeting earthy and nutty notes before the overly sweet coconut floods back in. The mouthfeel has a slight sugar-crystal grit to it. The finish finds coconut and sweetened corn flakes.
Hershey's pretty much misses the mark with the Cadbury Royal Dark bar. The chocolate is overly sweet and is dominated by a powerful coconut flavor that masks just about all the other flavors in this chocolate. This pretty much seems par for the course when it comes to mass-market dark chocolate (I'm looking at you, Godiva), but it doesn't have to be that way. Hershey's is currently producing some excellent dark chocolates under their Artisan Confection lines (such as the Scharffen Berger Ben Tre). It would be fantastic if they could bring some of that high quality production to their mass-market brands.
Monday, January 23, 2012
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I completely disagree that Cadbury's 'misses the mark.'
ReplyDeleteI find this chocolate bar delicious. It has a dark chocolate taste, but is smoother and more palatable than other uber-dark chocolate bars.