Unibic Choco Kiss Cookies

Everyone's riding the centre-filled cookie wave, and the latest brand to join the bandwagon is Unibic. This Australian brand has been in India since 2004, and today has a wide pan-Indian reach through a number of products distributed through supermarkets and local retail stores. Given the variety of products, I'm surprised this is turning out to be the first review of a Unibic product.

It is, however, no surprise that their centre-filled cookies, called Choco Kiss caught my eye since everyone is making these and the category seems to be doing really well. So far, I've reviewed Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Fills, Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Meltz, Parle's Golden Arcs Choco Filled Rolls. The Unibic Choco Kiss cookies resembles Sunfeast's primary offering in this category, Dark Fantasy Choco Fills more than any other.

It's a plain cookie filled with liquid chocolate in the centre and scores over Parle's product, which has a gooey, but not runny chocolate filling. While Unibic's chocolate filling doesn't score too high on taste, one has to give it points for a very crumbly cookie. However, Sunfeast trumps both in terms of an overall taste experience.

Unibic's Choco Kiss Cookies are individually packed and a 75g box comprises six cookies. Priced at INR 35, each cookie comes to about Rs. 5.80. This makes it the costliest product in the category as compared to Rs 5 apiece for Sunfeast's Choco Fills and Rs 3 apiece for Parle's Golden Arcs Choco Rolls. Sunfeast's Choco Meltz is a more premium product with a chocolate coating on the outside and is priced around Rs. 7 per piece. Unibic, therefore, needs to find another USP if it is to pose any real competition to the existing players. For now, though, they can be happy with one happy tiny customer.

RATING: 3/5

Nestle Bono Chocolate Biscuit

This one seems to have travelled all the way from Brasil to my local supermarket and to my kitchen and into my mouth. And boy, what a wasted trip! I picked up a pack of Nestle Bono impressed by the fancy packaging, and also because I haven't reviewed imported chocolate biscuits in a while. And what a pity that Nestle, Brasil should dent the brand's image with this sorry product.

So, beneath this pretty pack are some of the lousiest chocolate sandwich biscuits I've reviewed. The cookie is overdone, and that makes it taste slightly burnt. It might be a faulty batch, but that's just too bad. One would expect stringent quality control from a brand this big. 

Coming to the cream, there's very little of it in every sandwich. The layer of dark-ish chocolate is so thin in the sandwich that the taste hardly registers. So I did what all good children should do; licked the cream straight off the cookie and that didn't impress me much either. A complete waste for my INR 50 for a 200 g pack. So, here's rating it poorly for taste, value for money and quality.

RATING: 1.5/5

Mars' Twix Cookie Bars

I'm pretty sure the company Mars is aiming at world domination, at least as far as chocolate production is concerned. Every second imported chocolate I pick up turns out to be a Mars product. Can't say I've seen a lot of Twix around in India, but I've 'seen' a lot of it, thanks to global television. And now, because of Chocosophy, I've turned into this compulsive chocolate buyer-eater person and recently picked up a pack of Twix to see what the big deal was all about.

And like an obsessive chocolate blogger, I read about it before I ate it. Never mind my taste experience later, but I was quite blown away by the Twix website. It is most definitely one of the most clever websites (based upon their North American 2012 advertising campaign*) I've ever seen.

So, typically a Twix is a pack of two chocolate-coated biscuit/wafer fingers with some caramel in it. They're called cookie bars and many, many variations and flavours have been made in different countries over the years. Dark chocolate, white chocolate, peanut butter, coconut and coffee (java) are some examples.

Twix also has ice cream bars, which have a milky, creamy filling along with caramel instead of the standard cookie insides. Even Twix ice cream flavours have made a way into the market , showing just how popular they are.

I don't see why, though. I found the classic Twix chocolates to be rather boring. Well, it might have to do with my general dislike of milk chocolate and sticky caramel, but even the whole taste experience is rather underwhelming. Let's say, I feel as much love for Twix as the home-grown 5 Star, which isn't much. I'm definitely not paying INR 50 again for a 58 g Twix pack when I can find similar boring milk chocolate-waffer-caramel combinations much cheaper.


RATING: 2.5/5

Sunfeast Dark Fantasy Choco Fills

"Savour the taste of bliss as you bite into the new Sunfeast Dark Fantasy Choco Fills biscuit. The sun-baked rich crust enrobes the purest of smooth choco cream made to mesmerise your tastebuds..."

This copywriter for ITC Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Fills box really needs to take it easy. I know nothing about baking, but I find it hard to believe that these biscuits are left out in the sun to bake. That's what sun-baked means, right?

Although, a fan of Sunfeast's other Dark Fantasy product, I wasn't impressed with the Choco Fills. Perhaps I expected too much because everyone seems to be going gaga about it. While it is the first of its kind in the cookie/biscuit segment with a 'liquid' filling, the end result isn't anything to write home about.

I was disappointed mostly because the creamy chocolate filling inside isn't dark enough, and the cookie is sweet too, making the product a little cloying. However, it must be praised for the consistency, as the cookie is crunchy, and the filling perfectly creamy. The individual packaging for each piece helps maintain its freshness, though it may come across as wasteful to some.

A 75 g box costs INR 30 and has six biscuits in it, which makes it Rs. 5 per piece. Rather expensive for a biscuit, I say, but okay for an occasional treat.

RATING: 3/5

Parle Hide & Seek

First things first, Parle's Hide & Seek cookies will never qualify as 'cookies' in my eyes, because only round and crumbly and buttery things can be called that. And secondly, they are definitely not the 'World's Best Moulded Chocolate Chip Cookies', but they're good in a way all things with chocolate are. Wikipedia defines moulded cookies as those... 'made from a stiffer dough that is moulded into balls or cookie shapes by hand before baking.

Moulded into balls or no balls, Hide & Seek is one consistent product. Since they launched a few years ago, I've consumed packets of these and they've always been the same. Slightly hard textured, but perfectly crunchy, these 'biscuits' have the right amount of chocolate chips in them to give them full flavour. The biscuit is mostly sweet, and the chocolate is just a tad dark, making for a good combination.

Parle's Hide & Seek is available in INR 5, 10, 20, 30 or 50 packets, and are perfect to go either with hot beverages or eaten by themselves. I like.

RATING: 3/5

Britannia Bourbon Cappuccino

Because chocolate biscuits are the natural fallback for a chocoholic in the absence of the real thang, here comes my first review of the quintessential chocolate biscuit - the bourbon. This variety by Britannia is, however, of the cappuccino flavour. And it is good like all things coffee. 

Priced at Rs. 10, the 50 g pack has four cream sandwich biscuits in it with that fancy-schmancy plastic tray in which the biscuits break anyway. Although it is shaped square, unlike the usual rectangular bourbon biscuits, it has the age old sprinkling of sugar. But broken or not, the biscuits are Britannia perfect with the correct amount of browning and crunch. The chocolate cream is sufficiently coffee-ish, but sweet to a fault. Dunkers will like it only if their chai ki shakkar levels can rival the biscuit's. Go for it, I say.

RATING: 3.5/5