Kelloggs – Chocolate All-Bran Breakfast Biscuits (Waitrose) [By @Cinabar]

I think I have mentioned several time before about my appreciation of a quick breakfast at my desk. This means I try all sorts of cereal bars and breakfast biscuits with my morning coffee, when I don’t get chance for toast or cereals at home. Chocolate is my favourite flavouring, so generally if an item is available in a chocolate flavoured edition then that is where my preference lays! I’m a little predictable in that way! I was really pleased to see that Kelloggs had extended their Breakfast Biscuits range with a new chocolate version so I grabbed a pack try. The biscuit has 167 calories and there is 6g of fat in the bar, so it’s not too bad for a breakfast.
The biscuit comes as a slab, with a line down the middle to break it into two chunks. It broke nice and easily with a quick snap and formed two fingers. The texture is surprisingly hard, but okay. To be fair it is the same as the other Kelloggs Breakfast Biscuits, so if you’ve tried them you will know what to expect. It is just a bit of a tough cookie! Once you chew the oats and wheat shone through. The flavour was nice as the biscuit had chocolate throughout and had added chocolate chips in it too. Despite this it wasn’t overly chocolaty or that sweet and still seemed to get to around ‘pleasant’ on my scale of yumminess. I did end up actually dipping these in my coffee which softened them up a bit and boosted the taste.
They were a nice enough start to the day, but not worth all the excitement I felt when I first saw them!

By Cinabar

Jack Pots – Sweet Thai Chilli [By @Cinabar]

We review quite a few different crisps here at Foodstuff Finds, but it was brought to my attentions that we hadn’t written about anything from the Jack Pots range. Their crisps are all hand-cooked, 100% natural, they use potatoes from their farm in East Anglia and have a very British feel to them. Even the bright red bag has the outline of the Union Jack in the background.
The flavour feels a bit more exotic though, and as I have a love for spicy crisps It thought I’d give the Sweet Thai Chilli a try. They also make a much more traditional sounding Roast Beef and Horseradish variety which I will be writing about soon too.
The crisps are made with a good cut, not too thick, but enough to given a decent crunch and to allow the potato flavour to shine through. The seasoning was impressive, the heat was warm, and the flavour sweet and spicy. Although the heat wasn’t overly hot the bit of heat that there was enhanced the aromatic flavours. There is a good depth to the taste, and the variety and mix of spices in every bite gave them a good edge. I have to say they reminded me a little of sticky ribs in flavour and were thoroughly moreish and tasty.
I am looking forward to giving the Roast Beef and Horseradish crisps a try, as my first impression of the brand has been a really good one.

By Cinabar

Haribo Milkshakes (Asda) [By @SpectreUK]

I’ve often wondered where the name Haribo came from. My usual information source (Wikipedia) told me that Haribo was established in 1920 by Hans Riegel Senior in Bonn, Germany. Haribo is an acronym for Hans Riegel, Bonn… So now we all know! The company is well known for believing that everyone, kids and adults alike, love Haribo, and with almost a hundred years of high quality sweet production under their (slightly groaning paunch) belt, who can blame them? So when I saw these new Haribo Milkshakes on the local supermarket shelf I was naturally excited to buy them and tuck in.

There were three flavours of traditional style milkshake glass and straw shaped gums to choose from. The first flavour was an off-white coloured vanilla. The gum tasted creamy and sweet and was reminiscent of vanilla. The gum’s flavour had been carefully prepared to give no shock vanilla kick, just a very mild, sweet and creamy texture. Next up was the yellow banana gum. Now I was fully expecting a banana kick here, as banana can be such an overpowering flavour. Yet no kick came, just a very mild and creamy banana flavour, which was certainly not unpleasant, but didn’t stand up and shout “BANANA!!”, as many banana flavoured products usually do, such as Banana flavoured beer, banana cakes, and banana flavoured smoothies. Last of all was the pink strawberry flavoured Milkshake gum. I thought this gum was possibly the creamiest of the three flavours; there was a very gentle strawberry flavour, but no real sweetness and again no kick in the face flavour. Checking on the back of the 150g bag I noticed that each 40g serving was 139 calories, with 27.1g sugar and 0.1g fat. With that much sugar per serving, you’d think that these gums would be a little sweeter! Although there were no artificial colours in the ingredients I also noticed there were also no vanilla, no banana and no strawberry. This slightly confused me. All these Milkshakes are a little muted in flavour, Haribo seem to have concentrated solely on making them as creamy as possible. If this was their goal then they have exceeded it, but sadly at the expense of the actual flavour of the intended milkshakes. Shame, but I think I’ll stick to their sours, as their flavour can make your head explode! ;-D

By Spectre

CyberCandy Store Visit (Birmingham) [By @NLi10]

Sweetshops are terrible, hurtful places full of disappointment and regret, at least they are when you are a small child in a large shop full off all the wonders of the sweetie spectrum and hearing a parent utter the dreaded phrase: "you can choose ONE thing"...  There is never quite enough pocket money to go around, and always something new and exciting lurking in forgotten corners to tempt that last penny out of your pocket.

And then you get that little bit older.  Suddenly not only can you afford those huge bubble gums but you can buy a whole quarter of them, and get them in both flavours.  As soon as you are in charge of the money and can even reach the sweets on the top shelves yourself then sweetshops are paradises - wonderful, blissful places of escapism and childishness.  We have several in Birmingham that fit this description and I've mentioned a bunch in passing as gradually and systematically review every kind of refined sugar that I possibly can.

Probably the most impressive of the bunch is CyberCandy.  It's like the gift-shop at the end of the WillyWonka factory tour, and the best section of every international food store rolled into one.  And you see how it's underlined above? They even have a website so you can have everything delivered to your door.  It's actually a lot like being in the actual store as it's full of colour and there are things to distract you all over the page - you probably should go have a look as there is far more on the site than you can see in the pictures below.  My favourite function on the site is that I can click on the 'Shop By Country' select Thai and see all the wonderful Glico products and similar things all in one place.

That said - you can't beat actually getting to a store...  The wonderful people at CyberCandy gave us some vouchers and Cinabar kindly let me do the review as it's only a short bus ride from my house.

Here we see our occasional Jr. Reviewer outside the store.  Town is pretty busy on a Saturday so I couldn't get a full shot of the shop without it being full of strangers, but you get the idea - big sweetshop.

And here you see just the scale of things - Pez, Chews, all kinds of Pocky - even jars of Fluff on the right!

 And it just keeps going - this is the American & Australian section. I find this less exciting.  There are lots of different novelty mint tins - do people collect these?

Here we see the reverse view - back towards the counter.  It's not a huge store - but it is well packed in. There are lots of pocket sweets (think Polo - or LifeSavers) here, things to carry around for weeks.

 

Behind the counter they have a £70 giant bar of Hershey's (I'm not a fan of the plain version) and loads of exotic American cereals.  These are a lot more expensive just up the road in Selfridges so I'm often very tempted.  We used to have Lucky Charms in the UK, but they stopped them - I think the demand for similar now means that the Honey Monster should do a Marshmallow variety and clean up! We do have non-vegetarian breakfast cereals in the UK, but I'm not sure how many people spot them!

This is our CyberCandy haul.  I shared these out between the three of us that went to the shop so I won't be reviewing everything.  Some of the smaller stuff got chomped right there and then so you can read about those on Thursday.

I do like the CyberCandy store.  The products are all genuine, and some are well worth repeat buys and some are very much a one off - ooh lets try(!) that kind of deal.  Once you get to the grown-up in a sweetshop phase places like CyberCandy are great as a treat, but I think that it's probably safer to stick to UK snacks for the everyday things.

By NLi10

Hoegarrden Rosée (Tesco) [By @SpectreUK]

Cinabar bought me this huge bright red coloured 750ml bottle of Hoegarrden Rosée to torture me with. I did try to hide it, but unfortunately the bottle was so big that I couldn’t find anywhere large and dark enough to shove it (and it’s too late for any suggestions… thank you). I’ve always liked Hoegaarden beer, but this was described on the (far too large) bottle as; “A spiced white beer with natural raspberry flavouring”, which made it sound like one big red bottled nightmare. I’ve tried plenty of fruit beers in the past for this blog. There have been good beer tasting ones, such as Brussels Red Fruit Beer and fruit pop tasting ones such as Liefman's Fruitesse. This Hoegarrden Rosée was made with a minimum 10% fruits of which 6% was raspberry. Prepared in Belgium (where most fruit beers seem to come from), it contained wheat and malted barley, and was brewed with sugar and sweetener. Hoegarrden Rosée was also low in alcohol at 3% volume! Gah! Where was the beer…?

On popping the cork there was quite a strong raspberry smell, which started some alarm bells. There was a pinkish red colour to the beer on pouring. Cinabar had first taste (who likes children’s fruit pop and hates the taste of beer) and liked it, and so the alarm bells became louder in my mind! This beer definitely smelt more of raspberry than of beer, rather than smelling more of beer than of raspberry. One tasting though, I was surprised to find that there was definitely more beer flavour than raspberry, which made a refreshing change and confused me where Cinabar’s taste buds were concerned. The taste was noticeably Hoegaarden beer, and flavoured lightly with fruits, mainly raspberry, rather than like a kid’s raspberry pop drink. This Rosée beer tasted good and refreshing, and would be a perfect summer drink on a sunny day on the beach, in a park or just relaxing in the sun in your own garden, maybe even after a barbecue if you’re lucky with the weather!

By Spectre