Christmas has come and gone. The presents are not what they once were. Yes, socks again this year. Useful, sure, but hardly the stuff of Christmas excitement.
Presents aren’t what’s changed the most. It’s the little rituals. The predictable purchases that turn up every December, the ones you don’t even think about because they’ve always been… fine.
For us, Lidl is part of that routine. Every year, we buy the same three things:
- Lidl Favorina Marzipan Stollen Bites
- Lidl’s Christmas Pudding
- Lidl’s Christmas Cake
It’s not glamorous. It’s just a dependable trio of festive sugar and dried fruit that usually does the job.
This year, two of them didn’t.
The Stollen Bites: Where ‘Stollen’ Has Been ‘Stolen’
The Favorina Marzipan Stollen Bites have always been a reliable little hit. Not life-changing, but solid. A decent chew, a proper marzipan flavour and enough festive spice to make them worth buying.
This year, they tasted like someone had turned the flavour down. Not ruined, not inedible. Just muted. The whole thing felt flatter, missing that rich, almondy edge that makes stollen worth bothering with.
If you’ve eaten them for years, you might notice the difference. If you’re new to them, you might shrug and get on with your day.
That’s part of the problem.
The Christmas Pudding: Perfectly Fine, Which Is Not the Point
Normally, Lidl’s Christmas pudding sits comfortably in the ‘surprisingly decent for the price’ category. You expect something mass-produced, but it usually has enough flavour to feel festive rather than just brown and sticky.
This year was average. The sort of pudding you could serve without anyone complaining, but without anyone being particularly impressed either.
The fruit and spice were there, but it lacked the richness I remembered. It tasted like a compromise.
And a Christmas pudding is meant to be many things. A compromise is not one of them.
The Christmas Cake: OK, Just
The Christmas cake was the best of the bunch, which is faint praise but still praise.
It was OK, just. Dense, sweet, fruity and vaguely boozy, if you squinted hard enough.
No fireworks. No great excitement. But at least it tasted much as I remembered.
Shrinkflation’s Nasty Cousin
We’ve all clocked shrinkflation by now. Same packaging, less product. You blink, and your chocolate bar has the proportions of a postage stamp.
But this felt like something else.
Ingredilution (noun): when a familiar product tastes as though someone has quietly reduced the ingredients that made it worth buying.
That’s what these Lidl treats reminded me of.
I don’t know whether Lidl actually changed the recipes. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they didn’t. What I do know is that the stollen bites and Christmas pudding didn’t taste as good to me as they had in previous years.
And that’s the irritating thing. There’s nothing obviously wrong. The products are edible. You could buy them and be perfectly satisfied.
But when you’ve bought something year after year because you genuinely enjoyed it, it’s disappointing to notice the flavour isn’t quite what you remember.
Maybe your tastes have changed. Maybe you’ve just eaten too many Quality Street.
Or maybe something really is different.
So, Are They Still Worth It?
The cake survives. The pudding is ordinary. The stollen bites are the biggest disappointment.
Nothing was terrible. Nothing needed throwing away. But two familiar Christmas favourites had gone from ‘surprisingly decent’ to ‘why did we bother?’