Hazelnut Elite

Does that say elite?

The Attraction

I was strolling in my supermarket recently when I ended up in the Kosher aisle. In that area, there was a whole section dedicated to kosher snacks. Kosher or not, if a snack sounds interesting, I'm in. Enter the kosher snack known as Hazelnut Elite!  

The Review:
I'm not a super crazy fan of hazelnuts, but I'm also not a hater. I enjoy a good chocolate with some nuts inside, be it hazelnut or otherwise. When I saw this in the kosher aisle, I dreamed of potentially uncovering the secret delicious snack that Jews have never spoken about to the rest of the gentile world. Yes, I have a very active imagination and am an optimistic snack consumer.

How bad can any chocolate and nut combination be? Nuts go together with chocolate like Benny and the Jets, Jack and Diane, Frankie and Johnny. Even when its bad, it's never that bad.

You can see the caramel oozing out

I go ahead and liberate the chocolate bar from it's wrapper. Even looking at the picture now is making me drool a little. There's some caramel that found its way to the outside of the bar which gives me a bit of a hint as to what's to come. Caramel, nut and chocolate? Sounds like this could be like a Snickers bar...and who doesn't enjoy a Snickers bar every now and again?

I take a bite and immediately the flavor and texture is reminiscent of a Milky Way bar, Caramel, nougat and a hint of hazelnut....wait, what?! Did I say a "hint of hazelnut"? It's name is freaking "Hazelnut Elite"! How could there only be a hint of hazelnut?! I take another bite out of disbelief and sure enough, there is the smallest amount of hazelnut in there, but it's 90% nougat. The caramel seems to be towards the side of the chocolate bar and there are no pieces of hazelnut to be found.

To give you an idea, imagine you had a whole hazelnut. You then take said hazelnut and chop it with a knife. You now have hazelnut pieces, like this. See the pieces left on the knife? Flick off the large pieces and the dust you have left on the knife seems to be the amount of hazelnut in this snack.

Ironically, this phenomenon seems all to familiar, isn't that right Ms. Holly Original!

Look at all those hazelnuts!
(there hardly are any)

The Sweet:
Milky Way-like familiarity

The Bitter:
Where are the hazelnuts?

Conclusion:
If I've said it once, I've said it a dozen times; its all about setting expectations. If I tried to set you up with someone and you asked me how they look and I said, "They have a good personality.", then you would know exactly what you were in for and would adjust your expectations accordingly. Now if you had asked me the same question and I said, "They are stunning, a model, super hot!", your expectations would be very different.

In the case of Hazelnut Elite (even just based on the name alone), I was expecting a beauty queen to come my way. Instead what I got was the person with the good personality. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with a person with a good personality, but it wasn't "sold" to me that way.

In the end, it just feels like a bait and switch to me.

Video of the Week

There goes what's left of my reproductive years

If you were like me and were around the first time NES came out, then you remember all the hours of fun you had hanging at your bud's house not doing homework and playing video games. Now over 30 years later Nintendo is releasing a small, classic edition of the iconic gaming system. Good thing I grew out of that phase of my life. Now I can spurn work and play video games instead of skipping homework and playing video games.