Juicy Drop Blasts - YouTube Hyped Kids Candy (@NLi10)

I'm not one to be swayed by all the hype and advertising, we still haven't tried Prime - even though it's ONLY £5 now from the paper-shop who diligently go and buy Asda out every day.

Before all that hit I used to get adverts every day for a kids sweet called Juicy Drop Blasts. Made by the big corp Bazooka candy (presumably Joe has retired now) and with very snazzy adverts I presumed they'd be very expensive.

But it's £1 for a bag!

 

The crazy professor never told me that!

It's basically breaking bad with rainbows instead of drugs.

Look at all the different flavours they do - clearly that's what the lads are discussing here.

I love adverts for sweets for 12 year olds that use 18-21 year olds as the actors!

As I don't have friends to do sour challenges with I just made a graph.  Seems they expect you to want more strawberry ones and raspberry than the odder flavours.

Lemon is great - it's a chewy lemon sherbert

Strawberry is fine - a nice sedate flavour

Raspberry is like the squishies

cola is odd - 2 was correct

I'd like more of the apple one - I love green apples

Watermelon tastes accurate but sherbet watermelons are odd.

Overall - these are just Starburst//Opal Fruits with some sherbet down the centre.

Good harmless fun, and nowhere near as sour or daring as the adverts suggested - but really nice to have as a treat occasionally at work.

Mrs Brown’s Kitchen - Chicken Fajita Crowns (Iceland) By @Cinabar

I did my first online Iceland shop order which was quite exciting and as ever with a new shop I have a good browse to see if there is anything that I needed to try because it is a bit different and that is when I stumbled across this, Mrs Brown’s Kitchen - Chicken Fajita Crowns. I found this quite a confusing concept, firstly curry flavours with cheese, odd; in pastry, odder; it is marketed with Mrs Brown’s image, oddness overload.
Mrs Brown’s Boys is a silly, rude, sweary TV show but it does make me laugh, it shouldn’t but it turns out I’m not very high brow. The bakes are popped onto the oven and they smelt lovely. The curry flavour was rich with lots of paprika and gentle kick of heat. The chicken was moist, and there was plenty of veg. The cheese worked, it probably shouldn’t have but it did. The pasty was tasty too and the whole thing was very enjoyable, it was a weird medley of flavours and ideas but I have to admit I liked these Mrs Brown’s Kitchen Chicken Fajita Crowns a lot. If you are not a fan of the Mrs Brown’s Boys show do put it aside as these pastry bakes are surprisingly good, even after you have binned the box.

We were on BBC1! -or- In defence of 'Biscuit Bloggers' #RipOffBritain (by @NLi10)

Today - something unusual happened - the long awaited release of one of the great cinematic treats of our age! No - not some superhero thing, but us on TV eating biscuits! 

  The below will contain spoilers - so watch it here first!

It's a fairly obvious premise - Thin biscuits are a new trend so they cost more, you get less in a pack so they aren't great value for money - Cinabar wrote about this some time ago - the BBC spotted it and got in touch and so we were on the telly!

There were a couple of odd things that went on that day though - firstly the venue was a house that Cinabar & Spectre had only moved into two days previously so was all a bit of a rush.  I was recovering from the Flu so a little bit dazed and confused generally.  Also the BBC brought all the biscuits and really wanted to dunk them.

To me dunking cookies and Oreos in tea is madness

Here is me dunking a Danish butter biscuit which is also madness

Here is me dunking a chocolate covered Freddo which is also madness in my world - as evidenced by me on the TV commenting that I wouldn't dunk chocolate biscuits.  Cinabar would - but she's been wrong before.

I'm on the left.  Note that my biscuits were all snapped in half to mimic the rich tea finger - the correct dunking biscuit.  Did we get to compare to those?

Nope - chocolate covered (Cinabar dunks these) and cookies (crazy people dunk these) and Oreos (sane children dunk these in milk, tea - less so).  Oreos should be split in two and dunked as separate halves.  We discussed this at length in the filming but you film a lot more than you use.

I think the main problem with not bringing rich tea fingers to test is that they are the default M&S dunking biscuit.

And they are also a Thin.

Sure - they don't carry the trendy branding, but they have the same altered density of the Thin compared to the round Rich Tea biscuit so don't suffer from dunker's droop as much.

The Freddo above is also a Thin without the branding - a chocolate covered one at that!

Personally I think that the extra money involved in the packaging and branding of thins in their nice boxes compared to the cellophane wrapped regular biscuits accounts for a lot of the cost, and turns them from a snack into an experience.  I don't think this meshed with the message of the piece (or Cinabar's original article) so wasn't left in.  We only had around 3 mins TV time after all!

As you'd expect we had lighting and cameras and people doing all the technical stuff too - the amount of time taken to do all the packshots was unreal, but at least Cinabar's kitchen tiles are now famous too.

And here's the full gang - Me (NLi10), Angela (who doesn't have an Xbox), Lis (Cinabar) and Justin (Spectre) - who was cruelly left out of the broadcast (which I think made him quite happy).

Angela was a delight to spend time with, and the group chatted more about the NHS's impending anniversary than biscuits, mostly while doing extra dunk shots and making sure the sound was good on the reviews we gave.

I can forgive all of the odd biscuit choices (I'd have probably dunked my phone in the tea and reviewed it out of ten if Angela had asked me to), and the general silliness of the whole day (and it did take all day) because it was just so much fun.  I think the people of Twitter understood that it wasn't meant to be taken entirely seriously although I think some people thought this was a full time thing and the BBC were paying us (side-ways laughing emoji).

And now we know what to expect if we ever get invited back to do something similar again!