I'll Bet You're AMAZED To See Me Here (Lindt Chocolate in general)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Lindt Chocolate in general
Date:	14/03/01 (834 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: What? In THIS little box?

Disadvantages: This box is WAY too big.

Oh my lord. Gosh. Good grief. Ohhhh. Ahhhh. Woohoo. WOOHOO. Woo and double hoo. LOL. ROFL. <Big Grin>. Multiple smiley faces. Did I miss any? I should hope not. I haven’t missed this anyway. This. You know, this. This category. It’s a chocolate category. Now do you see what I mean? I’m excited! This is me, remember - Jill, the one who loves the stuff more than anyone else does – well at least as much as anyone else does anyway.

Lindt chocolate – um…how long have you got? Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep you here all day, I’m going to limit myself. I’m going to stick to just the one type of Lindt chocolate, not the whole range – I don’t think even the best of my friends would have the patience to read my ramblings on all of it. Guess what? I love Lindt chocolate. Quelle surprise, I know, but I do. I have a favourite though and it’s Excellence.

Excellence is the Lindt chocolate bar range. You get dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate. The dark chocolate has that magic minimum cocoa content of 70%. The milk and white come in at a respectable 30% with 20% milk solids. That's good quality chocolate. In fact Lindt Excellence is a very nice chocolate. It's my chocolate bar of choice. I have an occasional fling with Galaxy (never with Dairy Milk) but the usual 'just a bar of chocolate' is Lindt Excellence around here. At the moment my local Tesco are selling a pack of two for £1.59, a single bar is 99p. (I’d have preferred a three pack bargain myself, but then I’m just greedy.)

The dark chocolate is my favourite – it smells heavenly and a square breaks off the bar with a really satisfying crack. It melts cleanly in your mouth, doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth in a cloying way and isn’t too sweet. It tastes, um, well it tastes like the perfect dark chocolate – lovely. The milk chocolate
is nearly as nice and just that right amount more creamy than the dark. The white is very creamy, very sweet and should really be kept for those days when you just crave the same sugary stuff you did when you were little.

I’m always in such a hurry to consume my chocolate stash that I generally just eat it straight (boring for a chocolate person I know – but it’s quick, it’s effective). Lindt Excellence is a jolly good chocolate though so it cooks really well. When melted it goes all nice and shiny like a good chocolate should. You SHOULD try something else than just eating it straight. In my calmer moments, when consumption can be delayed in favour of a short cooking time, I make hot chocolate by melting it in one of those bain marie things (glass bowl containing choc over saucepan of boiling water) and mixing it with heated cream and milk. You’ll have to work out your own quantities and stuff because I never measure, but it tastes nice whatever you do. Use the dark one and add sugar if you need.

Oh, and chocolate fondue/chocolate fruits – you should try that. The same bain marie thing applies here. And you need lots of ‘dippy’ things – I like marshmallows, strawberries and bananas, but you can have anything you fancy. The proper idea is to get your dippy things, dip them in the melted Excellence and do some “place-on-greaseproof-paper, allow-to-ccol, arrange-attractively-on-posh-plate” kind of thing. Nooo, don’t do that. I never do that. Just get the bowl with the melted choc – dark or milk, both are great – sit on the sofa, dip your dippy things and eat them while the chocolate is still hot and runny and drips onto the cloth you remembered to put on your lap (or my case forgot because I was in too much of a hurry to start dipping).

The best thing to do with Lindt Excellence is, of course, simply to eat it as quickly as you can. You never know
, someone might realise you have some and, horror of horrors, expect you to share it. Sneak off to your bedroom with the drink of your choice, some music and a book. Say you want to be alone or something, just make sure you’re not disturbed. Eat it all yourself. That’s the best thing. Of course, if you’re more generous than I you might not need to do this, you might not mind sharing. Of course too, if you’re really, really rich you might not need to do this either, you can just buy more bars than even you can eat alone. If either case applies to you I’m jealous. I wait until Michael’s gone to work and the children are in bed. Naughty Jill.

I think I’d better stop soon. I’m sure you all realise that the bars of Excellence aren’t the sum of the Lindt range. It’s just the part I eat almost every day and it’s the part of the range I like best. Of course there are other things – especially the various boxed chocolates; Lindor, Fioretto, Swiss Tradition, and very nice they are too, it’s just that I don’t eat them much, well I eat them quite a lot actually, just not as much as I do other chocolates. There are Thornton’s shops in almost every town centre and at least two branches of my own personal 'posh choc' place, Leonidas, within three miles of where I live. There are multiple 'posh choc' online retailers – and for posh truffles and the like I’m more likely to use those places.

Lindt have been around for a century and a half. They’re still going strong. I reckon they are destined to a place on the upmarket shelves of supermarket confectionery displays. They might not be as exclusive now as they once were but I bet they'll still sell a lot, much of it to me I expect. If you want my advice on Lindt chocolate I'd stick to the bars of Excellence - they re jolly nice and worth the few extra pennies you'd pay fo
r Cadbury's and Rowntree's. Unless you're a particular fan I'd say there are so many in the way of new, even nicer chocolate retailers around that the posh choc range isn’t the top of the tree any more. Still, I wouldn’t turn my nose up if you offered me one!

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