NOMO – No Missing Out on Christmas

I’ve been looking for an excuse to try this for some time now. Considering I’ve been trying to cut down on refined carbs and sugar in an effort to lose weight/feel healthier and my wife’s PCOS diet means virtually no sugar at all; we don’t have as much call for chocolate in the house as we used to do.

I’ve never tried NOMO before but it seems quite appropriate that their mission statement is to provide chocolate for vegans and those of us with food intolerance/allergies. So on behalf of part of that subset, thank you very much.

I’ve swung from one extreme to the other in my expectations around chocolate advent calendars. As a milk-allergic kid, I naturally never had them. My mum sourced a refillable postbox system that meant she could put what she wanted into it; this varied from very exciting to very disappointing options over the days and years. Then as a milk-consuming adult, I was still pretty put off by the extortionate prices for, effectively, 24 small chocolates in elaborate packaging. As a result, my wife and I had a generations-old felt Christmas tree string set that had pockets which we could fill with chocolates of our own liking. This usually meant splashing out on expensive Green and Black miniatures interspersed with Cadbury’s chocolate Christmas tree decorations. Even then I found that my desire for chocolate actually wore off after the first few days and there were always a backlog of chocolates come Christmas itself…

So this year it feels very unusual to have a commercial chocolate advent calendar. However, such was my forward planning (or lack thereof) that I managed to pick this up at half-price from Holland and Barratt, given the lateness in November! £5.99 for a large 4-sided box of chocolates doesn’t seem so bad. Plus I knew I had the excuse to review for this website!

Dairy free chocolate can vary wildly in my experience and I find that there are few ‘milk’ chocolate alternatives that are worth eating. I was quite disappointed by Montezuma’s “Like No Udder” ‘milk’ chocolate last year despite the excellent pun of the name. Their dairy free dark chocolate (and importantly some of it is soya-free too) is excellent in comparison. In fact I’m now salivating over the thought of their dark chocolate buttons. Back to the subject at hand… Anyway, considering the average form of ‘milky’ chocolates – I’m interested to see how these ‘creamy’ chocolate disks pan out. I’ve heard good things about NOMO before but have never tried them myself.

So as much as it pained me (who am I kidding) I jumped in first thing this morning and tried the day 1 chocolate before breakfast. Just so I could write it up in good time today for you all, of course (as if!). Well I say I jumped in first thing. Actually what happened is that I opened the window for day one, got out the chocolate disk in foil, unwrapped it and laid it on the floor to take a photo before consuming it. This is the photo I managed to capture:

It appears that while I was being nerdy and trying to get the settings right for the photo (this basically means soft-focusing the background so that we don’t have to tidy up/move all the mess that is omnipresent in our house!), someone reached in and took a big bite of the chocolate. Then my wife had a bite (apparently this is an exception to the usual minimal sugar policy – it was a small bite). As a result, I was handed back approximately 2/3 of the coin and had a bite before Piglet asked if he could have some more before promptly forcing the entire thing into his mouth!

I’m not sure if you need more of a review than that. You may as well just put on the packaging in big writing: “This 3-year-old loves it!” But as a more verbose description I’ll throw my hat into the ring… I hadn’t actually realised but there are two flavours of disc in the advent set. Their normal ‘creamy’ chocolate and a salted caramel flavour. It was the latter of these in the day 1 window today. The flavour works really well. It’s not too sickly or artificially flavoured and the salt works really well with the caramel. The chocolate itself was much nicer than I expected. In fact I’d go as far as to say I really liked it! I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the advent days – I just might have to make sure I get the first bite next time!

In the words of the song playing at this very second on our home hi-fi: “it’s beginning to feel a bit like Christmas”. We are the proud owners of a Christmas tree (although it’s out soaking up water in the garden rather than decorated in the house), we are all stocked up on Christmas jumpers and, as of this morning, we own a matching set of Christmas family pyjamas. We do an ‘Advent reveal’ on the first morning of Advent that involves giving Piglet a small present and getting out any of the Christmas ‘stuff’ from previous years. This includes a variety of Christmas books, a nativity scene and a large collection of snowballs. It’s obviously accompanied by a smattering of Christmas songs too. It all feels very festive this morning, and probably means we’ll be completely done with it by New Year. But for now: Happy Advent, Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings!

Toodlepips x