Aero "Strawberry Milk Chocolate"

Nestlé

When it comes to flavoured chocolate bars my expectations are always fairly low. The only "flavour" that I find works most of the time with a milk chocolate bar is mint. That certainly only applies if you like mint as well. After that I find that the quality of flavoured chocolates seems to fall fairly steeply. There are a few exceptions, but they are rare exceptions. This particular bar works well enough, but it's certainly not better than the regular Aero bar, and not even better than the mint Aero bar. I will say that this is a bit better than the orange Aero bar, but only by a little.

Fruit and chocolate are a pretty good combination; fruit "flavours" and chocolate don't work as often. Strawberry, which this bar happens to be, is probably the best fake fruit flavour out there in my opinion. This is particularly true when we're talking about mixing it with real milk chocolate. I think the biggest problem I have with fake fruit flavours and milk chocolate mixed together is that I don’t know why they don't just use real fruit. I understand that fresh fruit wouldn't last long on the store shelves, but people have been preserving fruit for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and preserved fruit works great with milk chocolate.

I think this bar works, but I think it might have been something really special if they had of used a thin layer of strawberry jam instead of a bright pink strawberry flavoured chocolate in the centre. The jam would have added a great strawberry flavour, and if you leave the seeds in the jam, you'd even have a fascinating texture. Aero has no problem adding a layer of caramel into their bar, why not add a layer of real strawberry jam as well.

This isn't a bad bar, but it could have been something really fantastic, and all it would have taken is a few mashed-up strawberries.