Marks & Spencer Bramley Apple & Cinnamon Crumblecake

I do love Marks & Spencer's desserts, my favourites are the old classics; apple pie or apple crumble. I liked the sound of this interesting combination of desserts in the new Bramley Apple & Cinnamon Crumblecake. Not just a cake and not just a crumble, it's both.

The cake was extremely easy to prepare, it just required 25 minutes in the oven. As soon as it started to heat up the wonderful aroma of buttery cinnamon filled the house. It's such a delightfully autumnal scent, perfect to warm up a cold evening.

The cake itself is quite petite, only 335g in total but we still managed to cut it into four small portions. It consists of an all butter vanilla sponge topped with Bramley apple and cinnamon crumble. First off, the good aspects of this cake. The taste of the sponge is absolutely divine, being incredibly moist and full of buttery vanilla undertones. The apple pieces are delicious too, they have lots of flavour and are not too sweet. The crumble consists of just a few scatterings, it's not a full crumble after all, but what there is of it is extremely tasty. I loved the warming cinnamon sweet flavour.

Now for the slightly odd part about this cake. It has "custard pockets" within it. I'll admit to not fully reading the description on the box of this crumble cake. I simply saw the word "crumblecake" and it was in my basket. If I'd looked a bit closer I would have seen the "vanilla sponge with pockets of custard" on the front of the box. Seeing as my hubby doesn't like custard I wouldn't have bought it. However, the custard was actually not bad at all. Considering it had been sitting underneath the cake and was baked with the cake, it still retained a lovely texture and didn't make the cake soggy at all. I don't know what kind of cake wizardry M&S uses but I like it!

Your enjoyment of this crumble cake will depend on how much you like custard even though there are only small amounts within the cake. I thoroughly enjoyed it, the custard and cake combination worked really well together and it even has extra crumble on top. My husband however will be sticking to the traditional apple crumble!

The Bramley Apple & Cinnamon Crumble costs £2.99 and is also available in a rhubarb version which is called Timperley Rhubarb Crumblecake.

Have you tried either of these new cakes?

Random Review Roundup

Here at Grocery Gems it's shocking how many reviews end up unwritten, how many products end up unloved and unreviewed. So I've decided to do a round up of some of the products that for one reason or another never made it, with a twitter-esque short review. Some of these are not even available anymore but what the hell I took photos and they will be used!

Bacon Jam, from Eat 17 restaurant in Walthamstow London, is a bit of a cult product. The only reason I didn't post a review is because I only took two photos before it was guzzled up. On my "to buy again" list. Highly recommended!

Rolo Biscuits and Rolo chocolate bar. The biscuits were too sweet and nothing special. The chocolate bar was a melty mess once I opened it so I didn't even taste it let alone review it. 

Angry Birds Fruit Gummies. Absolutely disgusting sweets which tasted so artifical they may well have been developed in a laboratory for paint remover. Fat free? Give me the calories any day over this. Worst purchase ever.

Some British themed Jubilee/Olypmpics products next:

Thorntons Best of British: Banana & Custard and Bakewell Tart chocolate squares. I was so excited about the banana chocolate but then completely underwhelmed by the reality. The Banana & Custard was passable as a nice creamy white chocolate but the Bakewell Tart was vile.

Champions by Swizzels Matlow. These were great sweets which did deserve their own review. Not necessarily because of their taste but just the idea behind them. They are basically Love Hearts but for sports fans. 

I went all the way to the M&M Store in Leicester Square, bought gold, silver and bronze (OK reddish brown) M&Ms, mocked up some ridiculous photos and then forgot to write up a review. Doh! I was obviously suffering from Olympic Fever.

Haribo Games Mix. Not affiliated to the Olympic Games. In any way. At all.

Maryland Big & Chunky - The Great British Cookie. I only tried these about three months after the Jubilee. I hadn't bought Maryland cookies for years, they're a bit too hard for my liking.

Other products from Summer 2012:

Marks & Spencer Pear Drops and Lemon Sherbet Sparkling Drinks.  The Pear Drops drink was gorgeous, so much nicer than it sounds, refreshingly sweet. The Lemon Sherbet was too sour to be enjoyed, consigned to the bin or rather down the kitchen sink.

Walls Power Crystal ice lollies. Bought on holiday in Portugal. These appealed to me on a crystal/gem loving basis. Great lollies, not so great photos.

Cadbury's Wispa Bites. I love Wispas but these Wispa Bites were too boring to write about. Wispas but smaller, that's it. However, if you've ever wanted to make a chocolate pyramid then these are the chocolates for you.

Walkers Wotsits Wafflers. Children's crisps which are full of dodgy ingredients such as MSG. I can't believe I even bought these. Tasted horrid too. Bad Walkers, very bad.

Limited Edition Mars Caramel. Should have been a big hit with me, but failed. However, it finally answers the question of what the best part of a Mars Bar is - the nougat.

If you've managed to read this far - thank you! No doubt there will be another Random Review Roundup sometime after Christmas! I will be back to a sensible review tomorrow :)

So fellow bloggers which review have you condemned to a dusty folder on your harddrive?

Lindt Nocciolatte and Lindt Wafer

I keep seeing these Lindt bars everywhere at the moment. I know they are quite old bars and anyone interested in chocolate has probably tried them already but I was quite excited to give them a try. Lindt is more readily known for it's larger style chocolate bars so it's interesting to see them available as individual bars. Originally produced in Italy, the Nocciolatte has an absolutely stunning look when out of the packaging. It's almost a work of art.

The base of the chocolate is an extremely smooth rectangle on top of which are the most perfect hazelnut shaped pieces. It's one of the best looking chocolate bars I've seen of this size.

The premise of chocolate and hazelnut is also a dream combination for me and I was not let down with the taste. Inside each of the hazelnut shaped pieces is a truffle like chocolate with a whole hazelnut at it's centre. Apologies for the rather poor photo below but unfortunately the chocolate did not hang around for long enough for any more decent photos!

The chocolate has the fantastic flavour we would expect from Lindt. It is a gorgeously creamy and full flavoured milk chocolate. The centre has a smooth finish and a subtle hazelnut flavour but the actual hazelnut is quite soft so it unfortunately doesn't provide a satisfying crunchy nutty texture.

Also available in  the same individual size is the Lindt Wafer. Despite not being as elaborately named as it's Italian cousin, the Nocciolatte, this Austrian produced bar has the same sleek blue and gold packaging. The chocolate bar inside the packaging has a much plainer appearance to match it's simpler name.

The bar is fairly drab looking but maybe I'm just unkindly comparing it to the Nocciolatte which is stunning!

The inside does not have discernible layers of wafer as illustrated by the picture on the packaging. In fact it's hard to detect that there is any wafer at all from looking at it. However it does have a great taste overall. It provides a lovely intense milk chocolate flavour. The wafer is a little disappointing, as it doesn't have much of a crispy texture but I'm not a hugest fan of wafer anyway.

I'm not sure if I would buy these again but they were certainly worth a one-off try. The Nocciolatte is available from Waitrose but you can also find these bars in local convenience stores.

Innocent Veg Pot: Caribbean Jerk Curry

Innocent veg pots are one of those products that I buy as the colder months start to set in. In case you've never tried an Innocent Veg Pot, they're a meal made up of various vegetables mixed with rice or lentils. They are similar to a soup but just much thicker and very filling. All of the Veg Pots contain 3 of your 5 a day, and they make a fairly low calorie lunch. This new variety, Caribbean Jerk Curry caught my eye mainly because the description included the words "coconut rice". How could a coconut fiend such as myself resist?

On opening the pot, there is a sunny array of veggies, rice and beans which looks colourful and appetising. There is a also lovely fragrance predominantly from the fresh coriander on top of the pot. The veg pots are ridiculously easy to prepare since they just need a quick zap in the microwave (4 minutes in total). After cooking, and stirring, the colours and ingredients have all melded together nicely giving a thick stew like substance.

The flavours are all fantastic and very fresh tasting. Let me start by saying that I have never tasted real Caribbean jerk curry so I won't be able to review this product on the basis of that taste. The "curry" flavour is very mild, there is no heat as such, but I could taste the lovely warming spices of paprika and mild chilli. This Caribbean Veg Pot is a lot sweeter in taste than the other veg pots I have tried.. There are large chunks of the surprising ingredient mango. I was unsure about the inclusion of fruit but I was glad to find that the mango chunks tasted more like a sweet butternut squash than mango. I also loved the coconut rice, it has a deliciously rich flavour.

This Caribbean Jerk Curry has become my favourite Innocent Veg Pot so far and I have bought it quite a few times as a quick lunch. (As a curious aside my least favourite Veg Pot is the Thai Coconut Curry, even though I should love that one from it's name! It had so much lemongrass in it that I found it inedible).

The Innocent Caribbean Jerk Curry veg pot cost £3.69 each but are currently on a buy one get one free offer at Sainsbury's. Each pot contains 355 calories.

Weetabix Oaty Bars Rainbow Smashems

Today I'm featuring yet another new cereal bar, this time aimed at children. I really couldn't resist these new Rainbow Smashems Oaty Bars by Weetabix, they had me at the word Rainbow. Without a doubt my favourite type of weather phenomenon. I bought this box of five cereal bars in Tesco for £1.29.

My kids were extremely excited when they saw these cereal bars, you could probably hear their squeals of delight from the moon. It's a rainbow and cereal bar mash up! I didn't tell them that these Rainbow Smashems are basically the regular chocolate Oaty Bars but with colourful Smarties, I mean "crispy coated milk chocolate pieces".

Each bar seems to have a completely random scattering of the colourful beans. We had one bar with mostly green coloured beans but no blue and another with blue but no green. I only mention this in case you have the type of kids who will wail "but I wanted blue Smarties chocolate pieces".  I'm sure most kids will eat them up too quickly to notice. I had suspected that the name "Rainbow Smashems" was some clever marketing talk for "most of your chocolate beans in this product will be smashed into small pieces". However only a few of them were actually crushed and those were all along the edges, which is understandable.

The Weetabix Oaty Bar itself is quite a simple cereal bar in terms of taste. It's a basic mix of oats and crispy rice with a little drizzle of chocolate on top. They have quite a soft and chewy texture and are quite sweet. They chocolate pieces taste good, but they are quite small so they taste mainly of the sugary coating rather than chocolate. Despite this these Oaty Bars are marketed as having half the sugar of the average children's cereal bar which is a great bonus. They are also low in salt which makes the overall flavour much more suitable for children's palates then for adults.

Overall, these Rainbow Smashems have a fantastic look and great packaging and I'm sure they will be a big hit with children. My kids are already big fans of Weetabix Oaty Bars and they love this new addition to the range.

Nutritional Information (per bar): 81 calories, 1.3g protein, 1.7g fat, 5.1g fibre, 0.01g sodium.

And just for fun here are some of my favourite internet rainbow happenings:

The rainbowiest blog of all time: Rainbow Geeks

Ever had a double rainbow moment? What does it all mean? Extreme reaction to a Yosemite Mountain double rainbow.