This bar is a perfect example of how well hazelnuts and chocolate can work together. I feel like people assume that hazelnuts and chocolate is a simple combination of ingredients, but I don’t think that’s true. Hazelnuts and chocolate can be a great combination, but there are a lot of factors that need to be perfect for it to work. The first, and I believe most important factor is the quality of the hazelnuts. Bad hazelnuts is like bad fish, when it’s good it’s great, but when it’s bad it’s horrible. Hazelnuts have a very limited shelf date, and when they go stale they’re awful. They also don’t work very well if they’ve been over roasted, a burnt hazelnut is no fun at all.

The quality of the chocolate is important as well, but I feel like it’s not as important as the hazelnuts. I’m not saying that bad chocolate would have worked in this bar, but mediocre chocolate might have been okay. The good thing about this bar is that it’s a Dairy Milk bar made by Cadbury, one of the best quality mass produced chocolates in the world. So bad chocolate was not a concern at all.

The other important part of making hazelnuts works is the ratio and distribution of ingredients. In this case the hazelnuts are crushed up and well distributed throughout the bar. The pieces are small enough that the flavour is well distributed, but big enough that you still get that slightly denser crunch that hazelnuts give. If the pieces where too small you’d lose the crunch and too big runs the risk of a poor distribution of the hazelnuts throughout the bar.

This bar is a simple concept, but it pulls off a fairly well thought out and complicated bar. I feel like anyone who likes the hazelnuts and chocolate combination will enjoy this bar very much.