I might have to explain this bar to some people. I’m not sure how many people have Aero bars, but I’m pretty sure only Canadians (or friends of Canada) know what a Nanaimo bar is. An Aero bar is a chocolate bar filled with tiny little bubbles, they’ve been around as long as I know and have always come in interesting flavours. Nanaimo is a town on the west coast of Canada that happens to be famous for a baked dessert treat called a Nanaimo Bar. The treat consists of a piece of dense cake with coconut, a yellow custard, and it’s topped with a hard chocolate coating. This dessert has found its way all over Canada, and for me is a way to know if a bakery I’m visiting overseas has any Canadian roots. It’s like a secret bakery calling card for Canadians.

This Aero bar tries very hard to feel like a Nanaimo bar, but it just misses the mark a little. The main problem I can detect is the over abundance of coconut. While coconut is an important part of a Nanaimo bar, this Aero bar is just too coconut forward. For the first few bites coconut is pretty much all I can taste. After a few minutes there is a slight creamy almost custard like flavour, but it’s still kind of coconut flavoured as well. The chocolate in the bar certainly covers for the hard chocolate coating, however the dense chocolate cake really doesn’t make any kind of appearance. The small mounds in the Aero seem to have some kind of dense filling, but it’s such a small part of each bite and just isn’t dense enough.

If you didn’t tell me that this was a Nanaimo Bar themed candy bar, it would have taken me a few guesses to figure it out. I feel like there has to be an adjustment of ingredients to balance out the true flavour of a Nanaimo bar. Less coconut and more dense cake would have made this bar work really well. I also think that this change would be possible in the Aero format.