Crunchie
Milk Chocolate - Honeycombed Center
Crunchie was invented in 1929 by J. S. Fry & Sons (a Cadbury subsidiary since 1919).
I really like these bars. So it’s probably a good thing I’ve never seen one in the U.S., because their nutritional quality is - well … okay. Certainly not great. Much of what I like about this bar is the core experience (no pun intended). I don’t recommend trying to chew the core - it’s fairly hard at the start. But if you hold a chunk in your mouth, it will dissolve over a minute or two. I would have said it will melt in your mouth, but I think that phrase is already spoken for.
Not seen in the U.S.? Well, Cadbury is an English company, so it makes sense they would sell more in England. Why none instead of less? Sorry, I must have slept through that meeting of the Cadbury Marketing Committee. ;-P Or maybe they are in the U.S. and I just haven't encountered one.
Cadbury Headquarters is in a quaint English cottage in a picturesque village out in the English countryside - see picture. Hmmm. Okay just ignore the big modern urban office buildings in the immediate background. Seriously though, Cadbury is a large candy company, we couldn’t really expect them to shoehorn HQ into a cottage. I think it’s more about the image they want to project. Maybe the marketing department is in the cottage?
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Cadbury’s Crunchie bar consists of - in Cadbury’s words - “Milk Chocolate with Golden Honeycombed Centre.” This is an interesting bar - a bit
unusual. The outer layer is normal - somewhat middle-grade chocolate.
It’s the core that’s different. Think of boiling some really thick
sugar syrup, so that it’s mostly bubbles. Then wave your magic wand so
the bubbles are all frozen in place in the middle of otherwise solid
sugar with a slight hint of molasses flavor. That’s the Crunchie core.
There is actually no molasses in the ingredients list, but there are
“flavorings.” ‘Nuf said.
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Crunchie Ingredients and Nutrition
This bar is perhaps a bit above the
middle of the pack in terms of nutritional quality for a mass-market
chocolate bar. It’s mostly sugar - both the coating and the core
ingredient lists start with sugar. And it contains some vegetable oil in
place of part of the more nutritious cocoa butter that momma nature
built into real chocolate. Of course, your evaluation of this will
depend on whether you think vegetable oils are good or bad
nutritionally.
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Ingredients
Milk chocolate ( ⁃ Sugar, ⁃ Dried whole milk, ⁃ Cocoa mass, ⁃ Cocoa butter, ⁃ Dried whey, ⁃ Vegetable fat, ⁃ Emulsifier (E442), ⁃ Flavorings), Centre (38%) ( ⁃ Sugar, ⁃ Glucose syrup, ⁃ Flavouring, ⁃ Vegetable oil).
CONTAINS: MILK. MILK CHOCOLATE: MILK SOLIDS 14% MINIMUM CONTAINS VEGETABLE FATS IN ADDITION TO COCOA BUTTER.
Ingredient quantity = 9 (I'm counting vegetable oil the same as vegetable fat and all the unspecified “flavorings” as one item.)
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This bar has 185 calories, with 68 of them (37%) from fat.
Don’t remember how much I paid for this
bar. It was in Euros anyway, which fluctuates. However I believe it’s
roughly in the middle of the pricing pack for mass market chocolate
bars.
I’m giving this my
personal score of 4.0 out of 5 stars for Overall Enjoyment, 3.1 for
Nutrition, and 3.4 for Value. Keep in mind this is just my personal
opinion. Your mileage may vary, and there's no accounting for taste.
Now you know what Cadbury Crunchie bar is.
Any questions? You know where my Contact Page is!
Home Chocolate Bars Crunchie
Crunch is one of the (many) English words with a bunch of different meanings, for example:
"The
crunching sound came from Fred crunching a Crunchie bar while working
on his problem; because of the economic crunch he was reduced to
crunching the numbers on a Commodore 64; finally he gave up and went to
the gym to relax by doing 100 crunches."