Wendyl Nissen: Whittaker's wins in novelty smackdown

Whittaker's Tip Top Jelly Tip Block. Photo / Supplied

Does your local supermarket have walls and walls of chocolate by the checkout? Mine does. It seems as though novelty chocolate is taking over. No longer must we satisfy ourselves with a simple milk chocolate, now they are mixing them up with biscuits and icecreams and all sorts.

As a self-confessed Jelly Tip addict, there was no way I was walking past the wall of Jelly Tip chocolate and not sampling some. And I thought it only fair to compare it to a new offering from Cadbury, which combines Dairy Milk with strawberry Oreo biscuits.

I'm wary of anything red or pink in processed food so I was anxious to see how safe these were to consume.

Whittaker's Tip Top Jelly Tip Block - $4.99 for 250g

Ingredients ( in order of greatest quantity first):

White chocolate 44%

[Sugar, milk powder 30%, cocoa butter 28%, emulsifier (soy lecithin), vanilla flavour.]

These are all standard ingredients for a good quality chocolate as there is no oil used in here. It is all cocoa butter which is great. I'm also pleased to see milk powder is used for the colouring here instead of beverage whitener or similar.

Jelly Tip filling 30%

[Glucose, sugar, water, invert syrup, acidity regulators (citric acid and sodium citrate), natural raspberry flavour, gelling agent (pectin), thickener (locust bean gum), natural colour (163).]

Yay - natural flavours and natural colour for the raspberry bit. The colour is anthocyanins (163), a red colour which occurs naturally and can be obtained from grape skin, red cabbage, red corn or blackcurrants.

Milk chocolate 26%

[Sugar, cocoa solids 33%, (cocoa mass and cocoa butter), milk powder 30%, emulsifier (soy lecithin), vanilla flavour.]

Again a good quality milk chocolate which uses cocoa mass and butter rather than oil, which in some other chocolates is palm oil.

Highlights

• Uses natural flavours and colour.

• Good quality chocolate with no oils.

• High in sugar.

Cadbury Dairy Milk, with Oreo Strawberry - $3.99 for 180g

Cadbury Dairy Milk, with Oreo Strawberry. Photo / Supplied

Ingredients ( in order of greatest quantity first):

Full cream milk

An essential part of any chocolate.

Sugar

This is high in sugar - per four squares or 25g serve you will get 11.3g which is just under three teaspoons.

Vegetable oil

Is this palm oil? It doesn't say it isn't. And oil in chocolate is not as good as cocoa butter, as above in the Jelly Tip chocolate.

Milk solids

These are standard ingredients in chocolate and are the solids left when you evaporate the water off milk.

Cocoa mass

Cocoa mass is usually included with cocoa butter to form cocoa solids, as above. In this case oil has been used instead of the cocoa butter.

Cocoa powder

Natural chocolate flavouring.

Wheat glucose syrup

Another form of sugar syrup.

Wheat starch

This will be in the Oreo biscuits.

Emulsifiers (soy lecithin, 476)

These will be in the biscuits also. The soy lecithin is natural and the other one is polyglycerol and castor oil otherwise known as polyglycerol polyricinoleate (476).

Salt

This is not a high-salt product with 26mg of sodium per 25g serve.

Raising agents (503, 500)

These are ammonium carbonates produced by heating ammonium chloride and chalk (503) and plain old baking soda (500).

Acidity regulator (501)

This is potassium carbonate which is a synthetic compound with no known adverse effects.

Colour (162)

This is a natural colour called beet red (162) which is made from beetroot.

Flavours

Artificial flavours for the strawberry taste.

Highlights

• Uses artificial flavour.

• Uses natural colour.

• Uses oil instead of cocoa butter

My recommendations

I forced my family to try both these chocolates, which wasn't hard. The favourite was the Jelly Tip chocolate which disappeared quickly. The Oreo chocolate was pronounced too sweet - which is surprising, as the Jelly Tip chocolate has 12.9mg of sugar per 25g compared to 11.3 g per 25g of the Oreo chocolate.

I volunteered to throw the Oreo one out but was told to keep it - so it can't have been that bad.

If you are against palm oil or oil in chocolate instead of cocoa butter then go for the Jelly Tip chocolate. If you want natural flavour as well as natural colour, go for the Jelly Tip.

Because of the biscuit content the Oreo chocolate has more ingredients.

Both are definitely a treat food to be savoured rather than devoured.