My brother was once invited over to a friend's house for dinner.  That friend's wife cooked up a lasagna that my brother said was one of the best vegetable lasagnas he's ever had.  Was she using the finest imported Italian cheeses and sauces and premium noodles?  Anything but.  Everything she used was low priced off-the-shelf ingredients.  It was the simple combination of these low tier ingredients that created the delicious recipe. 

The Old Jamaica Rum N' Raisin from Cadbury (Australia) is a similar example.  It's made from Cadbury's decent but not stellar quality "dark" chocolate.  At 37% cocoa solids, it doesn't contain much more cocoa solids than higher quality competitors' milk chocolate offerings. No chocolate connoisseur would call this real dark chocolate.  And in the last year in the press, Cadbury Australia has been ripped a new one by its consumers when it reduced the size from 250g to 200g, while keeping the price static, of course, and then substituting cheaper vegetable oils for cocoa butter, claiming all the while that consumers wanted this.  It's decent chocolate in the scope of being a Cadbury brand.  In a taste test comparing Cadbury products from 7 different countries, Cadbury Australia's chocolates rated second. Open up that competition to include all brands of chocolate, Cadbury Oz's range become footnotes. 

And yet this bar fabricated, I am sure, with the lowest quality ingredients is simply delicious and addictive.   It definitively proves that certain combinations in chocolate can add or detract from the overall chocolate-eating experience.  We witnessed earlier that adding butterscotch to Green & Black's milk worsened an already average-tasting milk chocolate blend to the point where suicide was contemplated. Adding rum-soaked raisins, most likely artifically flavored rum, to this average chocolate created a final product much greater than the sum of its parts. Two plus two really does equal five for this bar.

I remain flabbergasted.  I do not like raisins in my chocolate.  I shun fruit & nut bars because of the raisins.  But with this bar, the raisins are the perfect size with the perfect amount of rum flavor to counterbalance the mediocre chocolate.  The result is splendid and earns this bar a higher rating than any Cadbury Australia bar on its own would ever warrant.  This bar opened me up to the possibility of sampling rum n' raisin combos with other brands, none of which compare to this one.

Rum N' Raisin was first introduced by Cadbury (UK) in 1970 under their Bourneville line of dark chocolates.  It was later discontinued there.  Rum-craving Brits would have to import their rum n' raisin bars from Oz.  In 2009, the rum n' raisin bar was brought back to the UK.  Like all things Cadbury, the one in the UK probably tastes completely different to the one in Australia. 

Aussie Dave was kind enough to include this one in the first parcel he ever sent me.  Due to personal popular demand, he inserted another one into each subsequent parcel.  Search this one out unless you're a sworn teetotaler.