Smith's "Lamington"

Smith's

Whenever I’m presented with a chip that’s themed to a dessert I wonder, is this just a gimmick, or is this really a plausible flavour combination. That’s not to say that a gimmick flavour of potato chips has to taste bad, you can just tell sometimes if it really works or not. Most of the time the gimmick flavours don’t last long on the shelves, and are rarely brought back. While there are a few sweet potato chip flavours out there, most of them fall into the gimmick category. I just imagine that these dessert themed chips were developed by marketing people and not food experts. These lamington flavoured chips are a great example of a gimmick dessert themed chip.

They’re also an example of a gimmick potato chip that kind of works. The flavour you get on the first bite is truly lamington (in case you’re unfamiliar, a lamington is a square cake, often vanilla, covered in a chocolate icing and then coated with coconut), you not only get the chocolate and coconut flavour, but you even get a slight cake like flavour. The stranger thing is that these flavours don’t disagree with the potato chips either. They’re by no means my favourite potato chips, but they’re not gross either. The two faults of these chips come from too much salt, and a lack of Lamington texture. Both of these faults are the reason I won’t be buying a few more bags of these to take home. They’re a fine novelty chip, that you might even enjoy, but it might be hard to get through more than one bag.

As a bonus, while I was working on this review, we happened to also be enjoying some fruit with double cream. I thought I’d try an experiment and dip a Lamington potato chip into the double cream, and it really improved these. The cream cut the salt back a lot, and it added a creamy texture to the chips, making them a little bit more like real Lamingtons. The scores for this review reflect the chips on their own, but with some simple double cream these are definitely better.