Stonking Recipe Contained Within Part II (Lindt Excellence Macadamia Nut)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Lindt Excellence Macadamia Nut
Date:	04/07/02 (272 review reads)
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Ahhh. Now we're talking. Lindt Excellence is my chocolate bar of choice. It's rather more expensive than Cadbury or Galaxy but not that many more pennies it's out of my reach on most days (like Leonidas Truffles for instance). Two or three bar packs of the 70% cocoa solid plain variety, the 30% cocoa solids of the milk variety and the unbelievably creamy white variety are usually available from Tesco at a very good price. And recently they've added some new scrumdiddlyumptious items to the range. One, the white chocolate with coconut, will have to wait for review another day because the one I'm here to wax lyrical about is the milk chocolate with macadamia nut.

Oh my, but this bar of chocolate is gorgeous. Like all the other Excellence bars it's a slim, flat bar divided into squares that would probably be eaten by a polite person in two bites but get crammed in two at a time by Yours Greedy Truly. It's that perfect, creamy, velvety, smooth, oh so smooth, Lindt milk chocolate containing tiny chipped, caramelized macadamia nuts and hazelnuts. I don't think I can beat the Lindt & Sprungli sales blurb (although I'd be prepared to give it a darn good go if pushed) so here it is:

"New milk extra fine caramelised macadamia nut pieces in smooth milk chocolate. Excellence Macadamia nut has been created with the passion of the Lindt Maitres Chocolatiers. Delicious and crunchy caramelised Macademia nuts, enrobed in an extra creamy and smooth milk chocolate: a supreme indulgence The thin shape of the excellence bar enhances the refined taste experience."

And they're gosh darned right you know. I don't want to think of myself as a Yorkie lorry driver, or a Mars work rest and play kind of person: I want to think of myself as a chocolate hedonist. I don't want a big, chunky square of admittedly sweet, but less creamy chocolate with whole nuts in it: I want a lovely, sophisticated, slim s
quare of sweet, creamy, elegant milk chocolate with delicate chips of already-sweetened nut, like this one. And I really don't mind paying £1.09 for a 100 gram bar to get it, even if I can pay £0.73 for a bar of 125 grams of boring Dairy Milk (all prices from www.tesco.com and checked out just for you because I just put the stuff in my basket and don't even check, oops). This bar of chocolate is all these things. It's simply gorgeous, a wonderful chocolate experience.

The other thing I like about Lindt Excellence is the super packaging. The foil around the wrapper is sealed down all around, not just folded, and has a cardboard backing. The outer wrapper isn't just a paper tube so that the foil protrudes each end; it folds down and is again sealed all around. You may be thinking I'm just telling you this to spin out my review, but I'm not, honestly. It means that I can be as sure as can be that my chocolate will arrive to me via that nice Tesco delivery van in the same state as it was when it left the factory. No nasty, dirty fingers will have touched my Lindt before my greedy fingers do. And it looks posh too, all adding to my image of chocolate hedonism.

As ever, if you're not satisfied enough with what I've said so far to make a purchasing decision I'll try to persuade you with a recipe. This one was stolen and adapted to fit Lindt Macadamia chocolate by me from Alkaliguru, who stole it from his aunt, who stole it from Nigella Lawson (the original flavour was orange and lime by the way).

LINDT MACADAMIA ICE CREAM

175g icing sugar
500ml double cream
a few drops vanilla essence
1 bar Lindt Macadamia

Pop the sugar, the vanilla essence and the cream into your food processor and whizz it up until it reaches "soft peak" stage (one whiff of this chocolate and I'm way past "soft peak" stage but sshh). Take your bar of Lindt, bash it up into tiny pieces and
gently stir it in to your creamy mix. Then put the whole lot into a sealed container and freeze it for a couple of hours. The end result is an ice cream easily as nice as anything offered by Ben & Jerry and will cost you £2.80 and a minimum of effort for about 750ml in comparison to the (admittedly lovely) offerings by those nice people which come in at £3.27 for 500ml (prices again from www.tesco.com). If you're any kind of chocoholic at all then this recipe is a must do, believe me. Yummy ice cream, sweet smooth chocolate and crunchy caramelized nuts: what more could you want? Eh?

Anyhow, that's your friendly local chocolate fiend, Jill Murphy, pretty much out. If you're not considering buying Lindt Macadamia chocolate by now then I simply give up. You're clearly a lightweight in the chocolate world. I'm off to eat mine right now.

See youse later!

[Oh, and I know it's not necessary to do it, but just in case there's anything anyone's not supposed to eat, and to prevent disappointment at the checkout, these are the ingredients: Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Whole Milk Powder, Macadamia Nuts, Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder, Hazelnuts, Malt Extract, Skimmed Milk Powder, Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithin)]

[Oh, and has anyone a cure for overuseofparanthesesitis? All help gratefully received!]

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