If you have been disappointed by Quality Street or Roses this Christmas

[TheDowagerCountessofPembroke]

Can I recommend M&S Big Mix. Nice thick chocolate, shiny wrappers, toffees that will take out your fillings, coffee creams.

These are what you need:

I’d sell one of my children for a proper old-school tin of Quality Street. They really were shocking this year.

Went right off QS some years ago but used to be our family’s go to for hanging on the tree. I remember how the wrappers sparkled in the lights. Haven’t tried Roses for ages.

Thanks for the tip! I have just looked on Ocado but I can't find them - anybody have any ideas why not? Are they called something different?

I assembled my own tin of chocolates this year - did the same last year - as given up on QS and Roses. Not always easy to find a good variety of wrapped chocolates, but Lindor balls, Malteser and Terry choc orange truffles, Werthers toffees, some M&S Italian chocs - which are awesome! - and a few things we bought on a Christmas trip to France have worked well and feel a lot more luxurious.

What does everyone expect for a big tin south of a tenner?

Here they are. You need to search big mix.

www.ocado.com/products/m-s-big-mix-520095011

I was given a bag of the purple ones earlier this year. Wrapped in some greaseproof paper, so they tasted filthy. Plastic and foil were used for a reason.

I've been waxing lyrical about the M&S mix all christmas. Absolutely amazing! And so happy to see coffee creams again!

I agree. Every year people moan that it’s not as good as it used to be while refusing to acknowledge that it is a quarter of the price.

I almost cried when I opened the (lack of) Quality Street this year so thank you. M&S Big Mix it will be in future

My boss bought our team a box of Big Mix, I didn't think they were particularly nicer than QS or Roses. We bought a milk tray, lindor and Terry's chocolate orange segments.

You can order a personalised tin of QS and pick the chocs you want. Did it for my dad a few years ago with all toffee pennies and fingers as those are his faves

We used to hang them on the tree too. It was really pretty with the shiny wrappers but the new ones aren't worth bothering with.

I decided Boxing Day that I wasn't going to bother with Quality Street and Roses again. I only bought the smaller bags rather than the tubs this year as I didn't want them hanging round for weeks. They just aren't very nice these days. Will look at M&S for next year!

TheDowagerCountessOfPembroke - thank you so much!!

A few years ago a tweeted a potted history of Quality Street.

In 1901 J.M.Barrie, much better known for writing Peter Pan, (the rights of which belong to Great Ormond Street Hospital and provide an income, Disney were not happy to find that out), wrote a play about two sisters who open a school for ‘genteel children’.

The play premiered at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York but it only ran for 64 performances. It then transferred to London where it was a huge hit.

The star was Seymour Hicks (born in St Helier, Jersey) who went on to write, produce and direct his own films. One of the films was called Always Tell Your Wife. He fired the co director of this and hired some young unknown called Alfred Hitchcock.
His co star was Ellaline Terriss (from Port Stanley, Falkland Islands). They were already married by this time.

They play was set in the Napoleonic era. The main roles were Miss Phoebe Throssel and Valentine Brown. They are in love but Valentine goes to war and Phoebe waits for him.
However when he comes back she is ten years older and he’s not so interested. She reinvents herself as a younger woman called Miss Livvy who Valentine falls for.
The play, Quality Street, was a huge hit, and when the two actors moved to Merstham in Surrey the cul-de-sac they moved to was renamed Quality Street.
There was lot of merchandise available, not least a selection of chocolates and caramels which features images of the two main characters.
If you think back to the tins of if 80s they always had a man in napoleonic uniform and a woman in a big dress.
They were first made in 1936 by John Mackintosh. Making a tin of individually wrapped chocolates made them affordable. To wrap them he invented the world’s first twist wrapping machine.

Recommend doing the John Lewis pick n mix. My tin was absolutely rammed with our favourites and amazingly there are still a few left. Although the chocs were pretty rubbish it's nostalgic to dip into a generous tin for days on end.

Also, coffee creams!

One of my Christmas gifts from dd was the John Lewis QS tin.

Proper deep tin, filled to the brim with just the orange, strawberry and coffee creams. Absolutely delish.

Wrappers are still shit though. I miss the shiny foil and the see through plastic bits that's were then saved for art projects (Dmum was a pre-school teacher)

It was playing with the QS cellophane wrappers & using them as gels against the fairy lights as a young kid that led me to working in the theatre as crew at 15 (& eventually doing lighting design & running the desk for productions).

What pisses me off this year is that in the cellophane days, the toffee penny was covered with real foil & then adorned in its lovely yellow wrapper. This year, I’ve noticed that the toffee penny is wrapped in a silvered plastic wrapper before the yellow paper one, making me suspect their ‘paper wrappings are for recycling reasons’ schtick is utter bollocks.

I use an old tin for storage. The tin is from around the early 2000s & was the ‘standard’ size (not a double large tin like now). I also have a tub (it’s blasphemy to call it a tin) from this year. I’ve just taken a pic of the bottom of both.

If you look at the weights (ignoring the egregious shrinking of the amount of product you have) you’ll see that the old tin has a weight both with & without the wrappers.

The new tub has an estimated weight, and I suspect includes the wrapper weight in the total.

We all suspect that stuff in our youth was bigger than now (and are well aware of shrinkflation) but we can prove Quality Street is telling pork pies when they say that the quality of the sweets are the same (and their stating that the size hasn’t changed but ‘we’ve just changed the shape!’ of some chocs (the purple one is round this year).

The portion size in the old tin was 2 sweets; now the portion size is 3! So not only have they shrunk the bloody tub & gross weight of the contents, the actual sweets themselves have been shrinking!

Maybe that’s why the square caramel & coffee ones were shelved; perhaps their geometry, in the great Nestle shrinking process, means you could only see them with a bloody electron microscope now.

Bastards.

@HumerousHumous I ended up with 12 galaxies and 5 maltezers in my celebrations tin! I'm not keen on Galaxt chocolate but loved everything else in the tin.

I bought the M&S ones this year but haven't opened them yet. My mum has a box and I've had a couple of her strawberry and orange creams. They are good and the wrappers lovely and shiny. QS were the chocolates of my childhood and I loved the smell as I opened the tin. A Christmas tradition that has now died. Ds will eat any old chocolates and declare it delicious but I'm fussy except in times of desperation.

Yes, I normally have a box of these every year, they win hands down for me.

We were given a tub of QS by a relative and have munched through them, I agree the wrappers look dull and unattractive but agree with reducing plastic waste, I imagine the vast majority weren't ever used for craft projects and they still ultimately need disposing of. I was happy that there were more strawberry creams and caramel barrels than anything else (not keen on green triangles and hated coffee creams, glad they've gone). But overall they are not a patch on how they used to be.

Palm oil is what has RUINED the once British brands.
Tastes greasy and unpleasant.
Foul.

Ditto Cadbury’s Drinking chocolate- it’s disappeared, and the instant version is hideous.

Undrinkable.

I’m glad they have lost their Royal Warrant.
British Chocolate shouldn’t be Americanised or made out of the U.K.

They look and taste horrible now.

We bought a bag of QS and I said no more. The purple one is now smaller and the wrong shape with just a smear of caramel with fake truffle texture gunk replacing the rest. A small box from Hotel Chocolat was much more enjoyable than a tub of those would have been.