Strawberry Lemonade & Raspberry Ripple Cupcake (@CostaCoffee) [By @Cinabar]

The weather outside might be a bit changeable and rather wet, but at my table in Costa, summer has arrived. The menu has not been put off by the rain, it has still tried to capture the key ingredients of summer to cheer us all up. To be honest on a muggy day, a new ice drink sounds perfect, and the new raspberry cupcake is just about the smartest looking cake ever.

Strawberry Lemonade
The Strawberry Lemonade is a still drink, and although it is not ice blended (ie ice through and through) there is a fair amount of ice added to it to keep you cool on a hot day. The flavour is sweet but natural. The strawberry flavour takes the initial hit, and the lemon kicks in at the end of each sip with a slightly sharp edge to finish. It’s a super refreshing drink, and is perfect on a warm day. I much prefer this style of cold drink to the totally ice blended ones which just take far too long to drink, as you wait for them to melt.

Raspberry Ripple Cupcake
Well this cake is just stunning, reminding us of seaside ice creams complete with its own flake. Underneath the mountain of soft icing, was a lovely vanilla sponge, it was soft and had a good fresh baked flavour. Hidden inside it was a dollop of natural tasting raspberry jam, which wasn’t too sweet but added a nice touch. The topping was super sweet, but also soft and remarkably creamy. The ripple sauce was also very sweet, and exactly what you would expect to find being laced over your Ninety-Nine at the ice cream van. It’s an amazing treat, but with all that sweetness you have to be in the mood for it! I have a very sweet tooth so was in total heaven.

Thank you Costa for bring a little sunshine to our table on a very wet and muggy day.

By Cinabar

Cookies 'N Cream Bites (@CyberCandyLtd) [By @NLi10]

There are some international products that just beg to be located and eaten, and others that you hear about for ages but never try.

The pretend Americans in sit-com-land go crazy for cookie dough, and these are cookie dough bites - but in a cookies and cream flavour. I always figured these to be a bit too close to the Oreo to be worth bothering with, but after the nice folks at CyberCandy gave us the vouchers I decided that these should be high up on the priority list. I almost chose one of the stranger flavours but experience has taught me that going for the closest product to the original is usually best.

I must admit I expected these to be like unbaked cookie lumps, soft but with the texture of say part-baked biscuits. They are essentially lumps of icing with bits of cookie in them.

They are oddly misshapen and apparently this bag is two servings. This is a little crazy to me as after maybe 5 or 6 the sweetness was a little too much! I liked the flavour and I enjoyed the odd soft, modelling clay texture but I don't think I could get through half a packet in one sitting. I was tempted to save these to do as a cinema snack, but I broke them out during the F1 and Wimbledon (which hasn't finished yet), and they are a very distracting proposition. I find that the more I eat the less I notice the sweetness and the more the cookie flavour comes out. This is nice and very Millie's Cookies in a way, and I'm sure the reason that they are so successful.

Maybe it's the 'cream' portion that is the hyper sweetness, maybe it's just my body telling me I don't need more sugar right now, but I can't help feeling that a slightly toned down version of these would be gorgeous and worth all the pop culture references. Maybe Americans just like more sugar in their tea, and maybe I should find the original cookie dough - just to check that it's not always like this.

Great for sharing, though I'm not sure a box and an inner bag is necessary!

By NLi10

Limited Edition Golden Wonder – Heinz Tomato Ketchup Crisps (Tesco) [By @Cinabar]

Ketchup flavour crisps are one of the world’s greatest inventions. Although I would never dip a crisp into ketchup, (although Spectre dips his crisps in salad cream) flavouring a crisp with ketchup adds a perfect balance of sweet and savoury. To be fair I think ketchup should be up there with salt and vinegar and ready salted, but the variety can be quite elusive and certainly isn’t stocked regularly on my local supermarket shelves. Occasionally I kind find the Walkers Ketchup crisps, but you can never count on them being in the shops.
Golden Wonder have seen sense, and brought out a Special Edition ketchup variety, and it’s not just any old ketchup this is the official Heinz brand, and wow are they good. Golden Wonder crisps are thin cut, and although we associate thicker cut crisps with being posh there is a lot to be said about thinner crisps. They are easy to eat, and the lighter texture means they sort of melt away when you munch.
The flavour combines an excellent balance of sweet but tangy tomato with a vinegary hit to finish. There is a lovely depth of spice mixed in too, it isn’t overpowering but helps the taste to develop. If anything it reminds me a little of Worcestershire sauce mixed in.
These crisps are genius. The flavour is well balanced, moreish and super tasty. I have my fingers and toes crossed that when Golden Wonder say “Special Edition” what they mean is it’s so special it is soon to become a permanent feature for the brand. ;-)

By Cinabar

Traditional Porter (Tesco’s Finest) [By @SpectreUK]

Brewed by the Harviestoun Brewery, in Scotland, this 6% volume Traditional Porter is packaged in a 330ml bottle and branded as one of Tesco’s Finest. The label states that this porter is a “Modern twist to a 19^th Century classic”, claiming it has rich chocolate and coffee flavours. This beer certainly has a chocolate smell to it on opening, but with only a hint of coffee, which suited me after the last coffee beer I tried. The ingredients included barley, hops, and yeast, but there was no reference to coffee or chocolate, which made me wonder how the brewers may have exploited the taste from the barley and hops. This Traditional Porter has a smooth dark, almost black, texture that reminded me of the chocolate stouts I have tried in the past. Indeed the beer initially tasted like a mild chocolate stout, giving me that warming filling feeling a good rich stout can lend to. The early chocolate hit was then balanced by the bitterness from the hops and a hint of coffee. The affluent dark chocolate flavour with the bitterness and mild coffee followed through to the aftertaste, leaving a pleasant tingle in my mouth and making me wish the bottle had been a little larger. This is a gloriously strong porter, of which I will definitely hunt out again. It would go equally well with a meat and gravy meal or for an after dinner treat with a side of dark chocolate. Indulge in this Traditional Porter; after all, it’s one of Tesco’s Finest!

By Spectre

CyberCandy loot - Golden Oreos, Strawberry Pelotty, Aether Cola (CyberCandy Birmingham) [By @NLi10]

Here is the first batch of loot from our CyberCandy visit to the Birmingham Store.  See the previous review for more details and pics of the shop.

First up we have Golden Oreos - this is a standard Oreo 3 pack but with two crucial changes - vanilla biscuit and what appears to be a caramel cream.  Essentially these are Oreo shaped but completely not Oreos.  They don't even slightly taste like Oreo which is a disappointment, but our mini focus group of three agreed that they were nice enough.  I'm sure that if you had these in a biscuit tin and didn't have the thought of Oreos in your head then you'd enjoy them. With no intense cocoa hit and creamy-filling these feel wrong,  nice, but wrong.

Next up is the Pelotty which is a chocolate Lollipop on a plastic spoon like thing.  Like most of the Glico (the Pocky guys) products this is more of a fondant than a chocolate but it's a nice variation as the fruitiness blends in.  I didn't spot until I'd opened it that the back is traditional chocolate flavour (you can just see in the pic) so you get two flavours in one.  The online CyberCandy shop doesn't appear to have this flavour in stock, but they do have a Chocolate Vanilla Custard Pelotty which I may have been tempted for just because Doraemon is on the packaging, but custard flavoured sweets may be a little too much.  I'll probably stick to Pocky to get my hit of this kind of flavour, but as a one off it's quite nice.

This has a nice stand in the middle of the shop - and even has CyberCandy printed on the can as the importer, but I can't really recommend it.  It's essentially just fizzy table-water with a cola flavour added and comes across as a little odd.  Yes - the can is excellent and was kept by one of the group to go on his shelf, but we shared the can between the three of us and no-one really wanted to finish it.  Clear cola's have never been that successful in the UK, Tab Clear disappeared almost as soon as it came out.  Maybe there is a kind of part of the process that normal cola undergoes that makes the liquid a funny colour so they add caramel to get the brownness to cover it? Who knows - stick to Fentimans - heck  CyberCandy are missing a trick not selling that range!  They do sell a wonderful selection of exotic drinks in store, and it's the one thing I neglected to take a picture of, but I think next time I'll stay away from the pretty cans and stick to the tasty drinks instead!

By NLi10