| Occasionally something (or someone) comes into your life and changes it forever. Since childhood I have been content with home-grown offerings on the chocolate biscuit front - indeed, a sense of pride still wells in me as I bite into a McVitie's Chocolate Homewheat - but during a recent browse along the biscuit section of my local Safeways I stumbled across a foreign invader which puts our meagre British offerings in the shade.
The Bahlsen Choco Leibniz is a triumph of design and Germanic biscuit engineering. The slogan on the box - 'More chocolate . . than a biscuit' - probably lost something in the translation into English, but it's true to its word in having the thickest, most exquisitely crafted slab of plain chocolate welded to a precision-made Rich Tea biscuit. I'd say the biscuit is a token gesture intended simply not to make the consumer feel guilty about eating so much chocolate. The biscuit does usefully help prevent getting chocolate over both fingers but is nevertheless quite secondary to the sensory pleasure of the eating experience.
My only criticism is that there is no obvious way of eating one that is likely to annoy a loved one. I found it impossible to lever the chocolate from the biscuit using my bottom incisors; nibbling around the outside only serves to give you one very chocolately finger; and licking the chocolate off is, frankly, quite impossible for one so lacking in patience like myself.
I like to think of my discovery in terms of having driven an Austin Maxi for the past 20 years and then being given an Audi A8. Bahlsen is to McVitie's as Audi is to British Leyland. Je repose mon valise, as they say in France.
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