Dust? Anybody? High in fat or low in fat? Anybody? Dust? (Guylian La Trufflina)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Guylian La Trufflina
Date:	14/02/05 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Guylian

Disadvantages: Not seashells

A good 10 years of my life have been shaped by an unrelenting love for Guylian Seashells. There’s just nothing like them. Or so I believed. But then I saw the other products the company market in the UK, and I began to wonder if I was ultimately missing out as a result of not being willing to try them for a change. Currently the range includes sugar free chocolate bars, seashell-inspired chocolate bars, Opus and La Perlina ranges (mixed chocolate boxes – not lingerie as the names might suggest) and a truffle variety pack jazzed up with a European sounding name: La Trufflina.

The truffles are now widely available in UK supermarkets and food halls and come in varying pack sizes for varying appetites / moods:100g when you’re feeling a bit too hungry to settle for one normal chocolate bar, 200g for when you need to give a gift to someone but don’t want to spend too much, 400g when you’re buying for a larger family, or for your own and want to make sure some are still left for you after the vultures have tucked in, and the 800g for those days when you’re in the mood for chocolate for breakfast, chocolate for lunch, chocolate for tea and the odd chocolaty snack mid morning and late afternoon. Yes, as far as choice goes, La Trufflina does well. But only silly people would choose chocolates based on how many come in a box as apposed to, oh, say, how they taste, so we must also consider this

Some (strange) people dislike Guylian’s signature product because, they like to moan, they’re all identical. No variety. Boring. Everyone the same as the last. The truffles are not entirely like this, without being entirely unlike this. Whatever sized the box it comes with 3 different chocs inside. Thus a varied selection. Sort of. You see the chocolates may look different (flakes of white, milk or dark chocolate adorn each one) but underneath, as with the seashells, they’re all the same – filled with a milk chocolate truffle. So those that may look white and dark truffles aren’t – they’re milk truffles rolled in a few dusty bits of a different coloured chocolate.

Truffles come in all different types, and I like most of them, it has to be said. Hard truffles, soft truffles, flavoured truffles, plain truffles – they’re all good. Sadly, Guylian’s attempt at this style of chocolate is not. It’s a mixture of several mildly disappointing features that combine to give an overall majorly disappointing end product. Firstly the interiors are hard and almost chewy at times – not so much melt in your mouth as sit in your mouth for half an hour refusing to slope off on their own and requiring significant jaw movement on your part. Secondly, the coatings are sparse – even with the truffles that don’t have a milk chocolate coating you can see that underneath the shavings the chocolate has such a core. It’s like a crocheted or badly knitted cover – full of holes that allow you to see through. And, the coatings, already thin on the ground, have a tendency to float off into the bottom of the boxes plastic insert, forcing you to do the old licked thumb probe to savour them. I like truffles that are so over-adorned they leave a chocolaty trail wherever they go, but these do so at the expense of the main truffle bit which is then left semi-naked as a result.

The taste of the truffles is quite dry and dusty. They taste cheap (though they’re not especially – even the smallest box is a couple of pounds) and send you running for a drink after more than a couple.

The chocolates have some good points even though the taste is not one of them. They’re nicely presented in little white paper cases (or dainty pleated collar to use their preferred description of it) which make them easy to put on a plate and serve to people without them thinking you’ve been fingering them with your grubby mitts. The packaging is splashed with the Guylian name, and looks higher quality than Tesco’s own (though these probably taste nicer).


Dust? Anybody? No?

I wouldn’t recommend these truffles. The only reason I bought them was for the Guylian name, but they didn’t live up to what I was expecting. They taste so poor that nothing else – the presentation, or the price or whatever – can really make it worth your while buying them.

Summary: