Walnut Whip

When I was in M&S on Saturday I spotted the walnut whips.

As I kid I loved walnut whips. Especially when they introduced the coffee flavoured ones. So I couldn't resist treating myself. As you can see from the packaging M&S claims to have been selling them for 50 years however the walnut whips I remember were not from M&S.I don't know who manufactured them. (Must investigate).

What I do know is that these are nowhere as good as the ones I remember. Firstly, there aren't any coffee flavoured ones. Secondly, there isn't a walnut on the inside sitting on the bottom and thirdly, you have no fear of breaking your teeth when you bite into the new version. The chocolate isn't thick enough.

Feel quite nostalgic now.

Coconut tobacco, black jacks, fruit salads, ice poles..............

Walnut Whip
Launched in 1910 by Duncan's of Edinburgh, Walnut Whip is Nestlé Rowntree's oldest current brand. Over one million walnuts, most of them imported from China and India, are used every week in the manufacture of Walnut Whips at Halifax, West Yorkshire. Nestlé claim that almost one Walnut Whip is eaten every two seconds in the UK.

Variations
There have been a number of flavours of Walnut Whip over the years, including coffee and maple flavours, but currently only vanilla is widely available. The original Walnut Whip contained a half-walnut placed inside the cone on the thick chocolate base, rather than on top. It was later marketed with an extra walnut on top, and subsequently the walnut inside was removed to leave one walnut outside. The chocolate cone itself and the vanilla fondant filling have altered in recent years; the cone previously had a more pronounced tightly knit rough surface and the fondant was more dense. The texture of the outside surface is a skeumorph: the original whips were moulded as a spiral cone of extruded chocolate; as the extrusion was ridged and twisted during moulding, this generated the knitted surface as a result of the process. When the whips switched to being hollow moulded instead, in the late 1970s, the original surface was recreated, although it now had no function other than decoration.