Malts Marvelous Medicine

Well folks today I’m going to tantalise and tease you with a couple of products. Do you see what I did there? Clever aren’t I? What do you mean you don’t get it? Ah! I think I’ve made a whopping great mistake and got ahead of myself.

Ok so today I’m looking at Malteasers and Whoppers; See now that opening makes all the more sense. Now you can fully appreciate my wit and intelligent humour I’ll begin. I’ve never been a fan of Malteasers; in fact until recently I haven’t been near a bag for some years. Then I spied an interesting product that made me want to revisit those round malty mounds. The product in question was a box of Whoppers.  I had no prior knowledge of them but seeing the Reece’s brand I deemed them worth a try.

This wheat apparently has a lot of potential, not specifically this one obviously.

However upon returning home and fully reading the box I discovered that they were essentially peanut butter Malteasers. I was somewhat disappointed and relegated them to the limbo like state of the snack cupboard. This is because I don’t like malt nor truly understand what it is. I know it comes from wheat and is a very popular drink in America. A drink that has whole milkshake bars dedicated to it and saw prevalence during the fifties. However I also know it as the word that comes before vinegar on the bottles of well, Malt Vinegar. As you can understand the concept of malt is clearly a minefield one I dare not venture too far for fear of having a shake on my salty chips. Malteasers themselves have always seemed dull, chewy and stale with little chocolate and even less excitement. Hence the Whoppers treatment when I saw the full description.

To be fair there is very little description, all I saw was Reese's!

Then one day during my peanut butter obsessive phase I dug them out from the back of their Limbo like existence. I popped open the box and took a peek inside. It was a hot day and they had been left aside for some time so what I saw wasn’t exactly appetising. The weather had turned their coating somewhat gooey and many had gathered in clumps. Put off but clearly not enough to stop my curiosity I popped one in my mouth, and I must admit I was rather impressed. I found the peanut coating melted instantly on my tongue with a great smooth nutty taste and texture. Even more surprising was the malt centre which unlike my past experiences wasn’t stale and dull but creamy, crumbly and melted in a nice smooth taste. I finally had an answer in some way to what does malt taste like?

Soon after this I purchased a pack of Malteasers, to test if I had misjudged them for all these years. I opened them and wasn’t met with an unappetizing gooey clump (though clearly not always a bad thing.) so didn’t recoil in horror immediately. I threw one in my gob with gay abandon and was again quite impressed. The chocolate was nice and creamy and melted well despite not being pre-warmed as the whoppers had. The texture was just right quite fudgy and not too thin, though as always more would be nice. The malt centre failed to impress however, now as smooth and creamy as the Whoppers and worse seem to clump a bit. These seem better suited to crunching on once the choccys gone. On the whole I feel I may have misjudged Malteasers all these years.

This is where I kept them, in hindsight not a great idea.

There is a twist to this happy tale however; as you see I did not polish off the whole box of Whoppers in my first sitting. Somehow they had changed unfortunately, gone were those slightly unsettling gooey delights, Replaced by cold, solid chunks. This was probably due to my improper storage for which they shouldn’t really be punished. I ate a few anyway and found them to have turned rather stale and tasteless. Worse the outside coating tasted rather waxy when not gooey and left a weird residue behind. Be this a cautionary tale to you all to treat your Whoppers well.

Overall I did initially like the Whoppers and it was my fault for leaving them to go stale and cold. They also sparked a newfound love for Malteasers and eagerly await trying the White chocolate variety.

Score

Malteasers 6 out of 11

Whoppers 7 out of 11 initially, 4 out of 11 later

Found

Mr Simm's sweet shoppe

Final Thought

Look after your sweets and your sweets will look after you!!!