They may look like bird seed..... (Tesco Healthy Living Chocolate & Orange Cereal Bars)

Member Name: yummy87

Product:	Tesco Healthy Living Chocolate & Orange Cereal Bars
Date:	20/10/04 (1132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Surprisingly tasty

Disadvantages: They look horrible

What do you reach for if you want a snack to keep away the rumbling tums until lunch time? If you’re anything like me snack times are when I quite often reach for something disgustingly fattening such as a bar of chocolate. I am trying to be good lately. Really I am. I’ve still not recovered from all the grossly sickly chocolates I consumed over Christmas last year really. Ok. So that’s a lie. I could eat chocolate for England and I do normally, but now I’ve decided that it needs to be eaten in moderation and as a treat. The burning question is, what is going to replace my high calorie munchies?

We were wandering round our local Tesco last week and chanced across the shelves displaying cereal bars. Haven’t cereal bars come a long way since they were first introduced? I can remember the Jordans bars from years ago which were nice, but very dry, so dry that you needed a huge glass of water to swill them down with otherwise they caught in the throat. Yuk. Not a pleasant memory really. The children picked three varieties of bars out and of course they were the chocolate variety, but I decided to be true to my word and looked at the less fattening ones on the shelves.

Tesco do a range of Healthy Living food goods that all promise to have half the fat of normal brands as well as a low calorie intake, and I have tried a few foods in the range and have been pleasantly surprised by how tasty they are. However, when I espied the Chocolate and Orange Cereal bar from the Healthy Living range I admit to be being slightly wary of a cereal bar claiming that it has half the fat (1.6g) of the standard Tesco cornflake cereal bar as well as only 96 calories per bar. Surely it’s going to taste like bird seed?

Before the box is opened you know these aren’t going to be big and juicy like Nutrigrain bars purely from the size of the packaging. A small square box holds six of the bars with each one weighing 25g. There is a warning on the packaging that there may be traces of nuts in the bars, but they are suitable for vegetarians. A pack of six cost me £1.19 so compared with a pack of Muncho Bars that I buy regularly they are 20p dearer. Isn’t it funny how we always have to pay more for low fat produce? That has never made any sense to me at all!

Each bar is individually wrapped in a light blue wrapper and to be blunt, they DO look like a mixture of bird and rabbit seed. The bar is formed into a rectangular shape and a combination of small pieces of crisped rice, oats, candied orange peel and small milk chocolate chips are glued together with syrup make up each one. The chocolate chips are only on the top of the bar, but there is a substantial amount, although not over generous but then again these are low fat bars. The bar is sticky to the touch and has a tacky feel and of course has a bumpy texture. As the bars look to be quite dry, I am somewhat surprised when I break my first piece off. It doesn’t snap as I expect, but pulls away from the remainder of the bar softly, and feels quite syrupy.

The smell from these bars is wonderful though. I am surprised at the citrus aroma that wafts from them, as although they contain orange peel I was not expecting that flavour to be at the forefront. Taking a bite of the bar, the orange flavour is quite sweet, but has a sharp undertone as well. The bar is soft, chewy, and to me absolute amazement, very tasty. Although the orange is strong enough to mask the other flavours somewhat, the small pieces of rice take on a soft texture because of the syrup used to bind them together. There is an underlying taste of oats, but the best thing about the bars is the soft pliable texture and the sweetness. For a bar that is low fat, I am amazed at the flavour. The chocolate chips combine with the orange peel to give a taste similar to a chocolate orange, and it’s not until I have taken a couple of bites I realise that there are pieces of cornflake in the bar as well. The cornflake pieces are slightly soggy, although not in a negative way, instead, they provide a wheaty honeyed taste to the bar and the brightness of their colouring give it a slightly more appealing look! Although the overall texture of the bar is softness, there is a chewiness about it that makes me feel as though I am eating something really fattening rather than something that resembles a rabbit snack bar!

Well, I take back what I thought about these when I first opened them. Not only do they taste damn fine, they do actually fill me up, despite being a low fat snack. Tesco seem to have made a winning combination with these and I will definitely stock up on some more when I next go shopping.

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