Advantage Decadence bar: better than nothing, but just barely
On my way to Uppsala today, I was at the Narvesen kiosk at Trondheim Airport, amassing my usual stockpile of newspapers and magazines for the long, boring flight. I usually buy Illustrert Vitenskap when on the go, but I'd already read the current edition when I was home for Christmas. Instead, I bought VG, Dagbladet, Dagens Næringsliv (Norwegian tabloids), Linux Journal and a new offshoot of SciAm called Scientific American MIND.
While standing in line, I noticed a new candy bar lying on a shelf at the counter. It was called "Advantage Decadence Bar". It also had the name of "Atkins" in small type on it, and a reference to "net carbs".
I don't exactly have positive associations to the Atkins name, and I'm not in a hurry to change to a "low-carb lifestyle". But I thought that, hey, it might actually taste good. So I bought it on a whim, and hurried on.
When I opened it up on the plane to Oslo, my first impression was that it wasn't very sweet, compared to most any chocolate bar I'm familiar with. This was to be expected — low-carb entails low-sugar, after all. To compensate, it had slightly more cocoa flavour, but not nearly enough, in my opinion. Besides, the chewy texture on the inside made me expect some counterpoint to the cocoa flavour, such as fudge, nougat or maybe caramel. But alas, it was the same insipid cocoa flavour all the way through.
So overall, my dice throw for Atkin's Decadence would be 2. It's not the worst chocolate I've tasted — I actually finished it later that day at the hotel room, because I was in the need for a sugar rush, and my brain didn't realize that there was hardly any sugar there. But still, it's leaning towards the yucky end of the scale.
On the other hand, the worst chocolate I ever tasted I just threw away. That questionable honour goes to some Santa figurine made by a German company whose name I can't remember some time in the 1990s. I remember the taste distinctly as similar to rancid butter — although in retrospect, it might have been just that it was some extremely bitter chocolate made from second-class cocoa.
[Sunday, Jan 16, 2005 @ 22:05] | [] | # | G
