NEW! McVities Jaffa cakes Chocolate & Orange Blondies (Morrisons)

I'm not sure that we can be friends if you don't like Jaffa cakes. In my books they must be eaten in one of two ways: 

1. Nibble off the chocolate, dunk the sponge in coffee and savour the orange jelly.

Or

2. Proclaim "full moon"... "half moon"..."total eclipse" in a silly accent whilst devouring the Jaffa cake in two bites. N.B. If you don't remember the iconic advert please google it so you don't make me feel old! 

I'm not sure either ritual can be applied to these new blondies though. McVities have also released chocolate jaminger* (sorry, Jamaican Ginger) cakes and chocolate brownies in the same range, but it was the Jaffas that took my fancy.

"Moist Sponge Cake with Orange Flavour Fruit Pieces, Dark Chocolate and an Orange Flavour Topping."

I love the combination of warm brownie/blondie with ice cream so jumped on the opportunity to try these with Tesco's Jaffa Cake ice cream; which incidentally I've fallen more and more in love with. Oh, silly me. Given the topping I'm not sure the squares would microwave all that well. Ambient blondies and ice cream it was then. 

The chocolate was very thin, there's no way I could even attempt to peel it off even if I wanted to. I'm glad I had the chocolatey ice cream to fulfil my fix. 

The blondie was an odd one. Surely for a blondie has to contain white chocolate to earn its name, or is that just my wrong presumption? I certainly didn't think it meant a dense, doughy, un-risen sponge cake devoid of flavour. The 'blondie' was so stodgy that it stuck itself to the roof of my mouth. Not pleasant. 

Don't even get me started on the 'orange flavoured fruit pieces'. Why not use an orange sauce, jelly or *real* orange pieces McVities? Why can't companies use the real deal in products? Argh, I can feel another peanut butter rant coming on. Anyway, the 'orange'  pieces are made from an unbelievable amount of ingredients: Concentrated Apple Juice, Concentrated Orange Juice, Sugar, Dried Apple Powder, Gelling Agent (Pectin), Lemon Juice Concentrate, Glucose Syrup, Antioxidant (Ascorbic Acid), Natural Flavouring, Acidity Regulator (Potassium Citrate)].

It pretty much had the texture of a sauce anyway, but I think you can make out from the photo below that it had sunk down to the bottom of the squares, which made the base all sticky. Taste-wise it was ok, but seeing as it only constituted 6% of the blondie it didn't make much of an impact.

I've made a lot of complaints in this review, but that's because I love my jaffas and I felt these missed the mark. At £1 for four they're cheap and cheerful, just don't expect too much from them.

5/10

*explanation of Jaminger here!