25 February 2012

Ambassadors of London (Westmorland Service Station) [By @SpectreUK]

A service station might sound a strange place to find packets of posh fruit jellies, although you may have heard me rave about the Westmorland Service Station (near Penrith, in Cumbria) before. It’s a veritable Aladdin’s Cave for Foodstuff Finds, with such a plethora of confectionary and savory delights that could easily drive Cinabar beyond sanity when we visit. I picked up these two very smart 270g transparent bags, which were decorated with shiny cards and bows, as they simply screamed quality at me from across the other side of the Farm Shop. I couldn’t wait to open them, but decided to treat myself on the train home from a hard day’s work on a couple of occasions.

Traditional Fruit Jellies

Made from real fruit juice, these coloured fruit jelly shapes were lightly covered with sugar. They are presented in six colours; white had a very mild pear taste; red had a sweet easygoing strawberry flavour; green had a very gentle lime flavour; yellow had a tranquil lemon flavour, and was without the usual sour kick that lemon sweets can have; orange was unsurprisingly an orange flavour, but a calming orange rather than giving the tastebuds a feeling of being Tango’d; and finally black had a blackcurrant flavour. I left the blackcurrant until last as I’ve found in the past that blackcurrent jellies can be overpowering. I was relieved to find that this blackcurrant jelly was not overpowering, in fact quite the opposite and this jelly was my favourite flavour out of all of the colours.

These jellies are not sour in taste, and not overpoweringly sickly sweet. In fact they are not sickly at all. They are juicy and make my mouth water almost uncontrollably as I ate them. They envelope you in a sensuous and peaceful bubble whilst all around you there may be grumpy crowds due to train delays and people in a blind panic to get home after a bad day at the office. These are easily the best luxury jellies I have ever tasted. The transparent bag had screamed quality at me in the store, but the real quality lay within the bag itself. I honestly mourned the empty bag. Ambassadors jellies are way not for sharing, but I did let Cinabar have one or two, simply because I felt too guilty hoarding them all to myself. I also had to show their sumptuousness to someone else, just to be able to let one other person in this whole rotten world understand the pure unbridled enrapturing ecstasy of every bite. It was almost impossible to put the bag down once I’d opened it. I made such pleasurable gurgling noises whilst eating the jellies that I think I frightened the guy sitting next to me on the train. In fact, he did strangely move away from me when I tried the blackcurrant flavour…



Finest Apple and Blackberry Jellies

It states “Deliciously different” on the card tied onto the transparent bag with a bow. After my joyous, and I blush to say overly titillating experiences whilst eating the Traditional fruit jellies, I almost broke a finger nail tearing the bag open with excitement. Inside was a combination of flat green apple shaped jellies and bitable black coloured blackberry shaped jellies. The apple flavoured jellies were two shades of green, seemingly to give them more of an apple feel. They were soft to bite and sugar coated. Having apple in the ingredients, they were sweet and indulgent, and again in no way sour. In contrast the blackberry shaped jellies were coated with mini black balls of hardened coloured sugar, which made them look like an actual blackberry from a short distance away, and were slightly tougher to eat than the apples. The hardened sugar made these jellies sweeter than the apple jellies, but the soft black jelly centre and blackberry in the ingredients balanced the flavour well, ensuring they were not overpoweringly sweet. I just could not stop popping both types of jellies in my mouth during my train trip home from another long, bad day at work. “Deliciously different” is exactly right.
By Spectre

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