on chocolate away from home

Life overseas is different in many ways. Ice cream is one. Here, there's far too much ice and not enough cream. Bakery cakes are another. I have no idea how Kenyan bakeries make their cakes to be so horrible. Chocolate is different, too.

Kenya has a few varieties familiar to a girl from Texas. There are Snickers, Kit Kats, Twix, and Peanut M&Ms. There are Mars bars, which are similar to Milky Ways in the US (but if you see a Milky Way outside the US, it's a Three Musketeers; if you see a Mars bar in the US it's something else entirely). The rest is either Cadbury's or Beacon.

I am a dark chocolate kind of girl. I prefer dark, semi-sweet, or bittersweet chocolate over milk chocolate. I can, however, make room in my world for milk chocolate, especially when dark chocolate is hard to find. The rack of Cadbury's chocolate bars usually has 10 or more varieties of Dairy Milk with something added to it (nuts, mint, crunchies, whatever). Beacon is the same. I have only tried 1 variety of Beacon, which is their supposed dark chocolate bar. It tasted like milk chocolate with extra sugar. I don't think I could handle their milk chocolate.

I know some of you love Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and I mean no offense to you personally, but Dairy Milk is an abomination. It's barely even chocolaty. It's like sugar and milk with chocolate coloring.

If something is supposed to be chocolate, why not make it chocolaty? Speaking of which, I do not understand the existence of white chocolate. It's not that it tastes bad, but it's chocolate, without the chocolaty part. What's the point of that? Like blonde brownies. Brownies without cocoa? Why make blondies when you can make brownies?

But getting back to the topic, Cadbury's has saving grace, in 2 products (which is more than I can say for Beacon). First, the Creme Egg, which obviously is in a class of its own (though I strongly believe it would be greatly improved if done in dark chocolate). Second is Bournville, which is a dark chocolate bar we sometimes find here that is actually quite good.


Lately, our Tuskys has had these in stock constantly, but they didn't always. When I first discovered it, we found them so rarely (once a month or so) that Rodgers would buy me one any time he saw them. By now, even Nate and Ben know which chocolate bar to choose for me. I don't think they even realize that the purple Dairy Milk packages contain chocolate, too. And that's as it should be.

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