V.V.Excited Investigates... Melting Chocolate Bars

Two or three weeks ago a couple of friends of mine brought me back some Toblerone from their holidays. You might be thinking "cheap bastards" and you'd be right, except I brought them back a stuffed moose from my last holiday so I guess it evens out.

I have to say, at the time of writing that Toblerone front page makes me think of some woman giving head to a man with a spear-headed willy. Advertising execs are right perverts.

Anyway, the people who make Toblerone lace the good stuff with honey. I can't stand honey, it always reminds me of being sick - I think it's because Beechams insist on putting it in everything. I couldn't throw it / give it away, it's against my religion to not eat chocolate if it's in the house, so at first I tried eating it and spitting out the honey bits. That's easier said than done, they're all mixed in with the chocolate. Then I had the idea of melting it in the microwave and eating it with a spoon. It made separating the honey infested nougat from the chocolate a lot easier, although things got a little messy after a while.

Anyway, after the success of that it started me wondering - what other chocolate tastes better once it's been melted?

Well, the answer to that is obviously "all chocolate". Half of what's great about chocolate is the smell, and that comes out in buckets once the microwaves start doing their magic. But what about consistency? How easy is it to melt different chocolate bars? How many can you eat before you collapse into a sugar coma? These were questions I thought could stand a bit of investigation.

Today Tescos delivered most of my weekly grocery order, the cretins. They missed out the beef, chicken, cans of baked beans and gave me the wrong doughnuts goddammit... but there is a God, and proof positive was the safe delivery of my first three subjects. I popped them in the fridge to get them to a nice consistent temperature and then, after my tea, I started with what I thought could be a cheeky little number once melted:

It was the dark horse of the pack. I had a strong suspicion about how the other two would turn out but the Snickers could go either way. I was hoping for the best. I had images in my head of a molten slurry that I could spread on toast, or maybe pour into my mouth from a chalice while I was watching TV, like some great Roman Emperor. Maybe I could even pour it over ice cream! It'd still be hot, it'd melt the surface of the ice cream as it was poured on - the creamy white of the vanilla would swirl in with the chocolate, the caramel, the peanuts... all the while the aroma of warm chocolate, vanilla, caramel and peanuts would be filling the room... my God, the possibilities were endless! But first steps first - zap the bugger. Here's a picture of the little slab of healthy and nutritious goodness, and the machine that would hopefully take it to the next plane of chocolate heaven:

The first thing I've got to say is that it doesn't take long for these things to go up. After maybe 30 seconds (E rated oven) I noticed that a nougat volcano had erupted on the surface of the bar and was spewing forth molten nougat at a hell of a rate:

I'd noticed nougat's tendency to heat up and burn with the Toblerone, so I stopped the heating and took it out of the oven. The nougat cooled back down pretty quickly and left a hole in the bar:

Still, it was more than hot enough to stir into a paste...

... and scarf down:

Lovely. One thing to say about molten chocolate bars - they're rich. If you want a sugar hit, melt the chocolate.

Overall I was a little disappointed. The consistency didn't change, there doesn't seem to be enough chocolate in a Snickers bar to get it runny when it was molten. It went into a paste alright, but you'd have a hard time getting it on bread and certainly the vanilla ice cream slick thing wasn't going to happen.

So - onto my second subject:

There are countries in this world that don't have Bounty bars. For those deprived by the Mars Corporation of America (who, incidentally, made all of tonight's subjects), a Bounty bar is two tablets of coconut in a sugar gloop to keep it moist and then covered in milk chocolate. They also do a dark chocolate version, but it tastes like eating coconut-reared rabbit poo.

And in it goes. It didn't take long before the heady hot coconut smell was wafting out - after about 30 seconds or so I thought I'd give it the mush test. It passed:

I wasn't expecting much from the Bounty to be honest - I just fancied them when I was doing my shopping. It went into a paste as per the Snickers, and tasted pretty much like the uncooked version. Except it was so rich it was like I was mainlining it straight into my veins.

Onto the third subject. I'm kind of glad I restricted myself to three different chocolates in the end - by this point I was in a cold sweat and my mouth was dry, the sugar had sucked every last drop of moisture from my body. It was becoming clear that I couldn't take the final molten chocolate hit neat, I was going to have to cut it with something or be out for the count for the rest of the night. I chose... the humble banana.

Note that I'm holding the banana in a classic John Woo pose. Who doesn't? By the way, that God Amongst Directors site wouldn't let me vote for Ridley Scott, which seems a bit unfair. If people could vote for Scott he'd have walked it.

Anyway, getting back. For the chocolate - well, I'd left the best 'til last. Galaxy is Mar's superior answer to Cadbury's chocolate. Hazelnuts are to chocolate what Flakes are to ice cream. Put the two together and you get one of the greatest bars of chocolate known to mankind. We calls it -- "Galaxy Hazelnut":

Step one was to break off a slab and pop it in the microwave. This is what the microwave does to my video sender by the way:

Very annoying. Anyway, the Galaxy was by far and away the hardest to melt. Obviously all the impurities in the Snickers and the Bounty had absorbed the microwaves much better than pure chocolate - they caved in within seconds. The Galaxy took nearly two minutes to bring to this state:

The banana went on next - I sliced it to increase surface area...

... give it a bit of a stir...

... et voila. That was nice. But by the end of it I was feeling pretty dizzy and my teeth were dissolving. That hazelnut Galaxy will definitely microwave up good enough for ice cream though. One day soon, when my eyes start focusing again.