Christmas Dissection: Mr Kipling Chocolate and Caramel Slices

Quite what is Christmassy about chocolate and caramel I have no idea, but Mr Kipling is adamant that the combination warrants tinsel-covered trees, snowflakes and reindeers, all flooded with an orange glare that makes the packaging look like Christmas in Chernobyl.

Which I’m sure is lovely; I bet there are no last-dash supermarket scrums there. If there were, they’d certainly be able to defeat me: they say that two heads are better than one and I can imagine that’s very true in a supermarket scuffle. A new and exciting programme idea for ITV.

It would certainly appear that the design department at Mr Kipling weren’t totally on-board with the festive cake theory. The cardboard container features giant images of the cakes complete with unfinished icing layers that make the product look cheaper than a salmonella-filled burger at an industrial park fairground.

The reality, at least, was different. It turned out that the icing machine (or homely, gentle, experienced family chef as Mr Kipling would likely want you to believe) was more generous in real life, having slapped each slice with a hefty coating of chocolate icing.

Clearly the kindly chef was less experienced when it came to squirting the inner cream (steady…), which was not only spread so thinly that it barely registered as existing at all, but also took on a weirdly grey colour (as though it was made out of sharks’ skin, old ladies’ hair or lampposts).

The greyness tasted very much of grey. It was perhaps one of the strangest components of a sweet treat I have ever eaten, as it seemingly consisted of nothing at all. Maybe I ate another dimension, or some other fragment of weird Doctor Who shit. Anyway, it didn’t support Mr Kipling’s cause.

Another taste omission was the caramel, which was perceptibly discernible but unquestionably of no abounding quantity or quality. I think that it came from the yellowy section of sponge, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps my brain just tricked me into believing it existed at all. It produced the same results as drinking the cheapest supermarket lemonade.

The brown and golden areas of sponge cake were deliciously soft so performed their functions beautifully.

Although the chocolate icing was applied in enormous amounts, for me this apparent brilliance actually produced a severe issue – specifically, there was too much, making the icing totally overpowering and sickly. This is fine in a Christmas Day cheesecake, but for a light snack it’s just over-facing.

Plus, at no point was my Christmas conundrum solved; what exactly is Christmassy about chocolate and caramel? Maybe it’s simply the greed of cake executives trying to make a last ditch surge in sales with seemingly ‘special’ and ‘imaginative’ products.

A bizarre trip into the void: 2* out of 5.

Review by JAMES LEWIS
Wanderer, wonderer and editor of the Chocolate Dissection blog (which will ideally melt hearts rather than brains). Reliable with sarcasm, less so with a scalpel. Twitter: @IdeasJimbound


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