Shake #23

Today's shake: Fry's Turkish Delight

Taste: 7
Texture: 2
Synergy: 6
Scorn: 3
Total Score: 5.5

General Comments: I love Fry's Turkish Delight. A lot of people find the combination of milk chocolate and bizarre wibbly pink jelly stuff somewhat baffling, but I adore it. Partially this is because it tastes awesome, and partially it's because it allows me to indulge my OCD eating habits (as have been mentioned before) by peeling off the chocolate a piece at a time, revealing a quivering slab of bizarrely coloured matter that can be consumed at leisure. For years I have been pointing out to my parents that whilst the ten pound note my grandparents send every Christmas is in no sense ungratefully accepted, I have long since passed the point where £10 represented a month's pocket money, and am now firmly in the position where it represents the total absence of thought. Whether my parents mentioned this, or my grandparents figured it out for themselves, I now receive £10 worth of Turkish delight each December, and my world is all the better for it.

I even drink lychee juice because the taste reminds me of said confectionery. The initial thought I had when tasting the FTD shake was thus unsurprisingly: "It's lychee ice-cream!".

The second thought was "Why the Hell is my straw blocked?"

The shake itself is very tasty: lychee (well, rosewater, probably) and vanilla with a hint of chocolate. Certainly it suggests lychee ice-cream works well, or at least would work well, I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone attempt it. Unfortunately though the delicious nature of the shake must be weighed against the fact that you can never get more than three mouthfuls before a defiant gloop of gelatinous pink blocks your straw. This problem became so pronounced that I was eventually forced to remove the top of the shake and swig, which solved one problem but simply served to demonstrate how much of the innards of the snack had resisted blending. At one point I found myself chewing through what must have been an entire quarter of the original jelly cuboid, an activity I enjoy under normal circumstances but which has no place mid-drink.

Perhaps the shop's blenders were simply on the blink this time round (C assures me that on a good day they can reduce a Ford Escort to a fine paste, assuming one could fit the car into the machine), but the end result is a very disappointing texture which has cost the shake badly. Those less resistant to combining beverages and chewing, or who don't consider removing the cup-lid to be an unacceptable level of effort, might find this shake more to their liking. Treat it with caution, though.