Sweet Reviews

Recently, people around me have been buying pick and mix sweets a lot, mainly my gf, who gets them every time she rents a movie (every night) and also my buddy Will, who gets them for the hour train journey back to his parent's house every time he goes there (I have a 'leaving London' ritual too, I always have a Macdonalds at Waterloo, like it's a last piece of London filth before the wholesome dinners my mother will make me when I get home). Choosing Pick and Mix can be a real minefield for the uninitiated though, so I thought I'd make a small selection and let you know how they taste and how much fun they are to play with before you eat them.

These are all dusty and blue, the blue flavour is gross and the dust gets all over your hands, it must be powdered sugar but it's still annoying, the rest of it is kind of chewy but ultimately dull. There's not much fun to be had with these ones either, I suppose you could throw them if you really had to. Not off to a great start, but there's still time...

These are teeth, which is great, as you can put them in your mouth and wear them as your own teeth, although they don't fit on perfectly, i would improve these by changing the mould in the factory to allow for someone to wear them, make them hollow. They taste fine but that's not the point with these ones.

These are bits of what seems to be tough marshmallow covered in a sort of strawberry flavoured sugar. They taste pretty good, all these sweets seem to have more emphasis on texture than taste though, the way the the marshmallow contrasts with the gritty sugar is where the real action is.

Like real eggs, the yolk is the tasty part, and the white is kind of just for texture but still intrinsic to the experience as a whole. The yolk is really tangy and would totally be too much on its own, the white acts as a sort of buffer that dilutes the flavours and has a softer, matt texture.

Black Jacks taste like shit, they're liquorice-y and bitter, Fruit Salads are way better, one half is pink and the other yellow but I couldn't work out if the two halves tasted different at all. the nice thing about these in terms of fun is that they are good to chew and get stuck in your teeth, also flattening out the waxy wrapping and making little paper aeroplanes is fun.

This is made of the same stuff as the fried egg, but it's bigger and looks like a skull, I bit the eyes out, which was fun, the eyes are really tangy like the egg yolks (except a bit more red tasting, if you get my meaning?) and again the skull/egg white stuff acted as a diluter. These and the fried eggs work like Muller Fruit Corners, as in, the yogurt is too bland on its own and the fruit is too tart on its own, but together they compliment each other perfectly.

I'm going to try this again when I get to a place with a bigger and more exotic Pick and Mix selection, this was all at some shop on Charing Cross Road that also sold bootleg London merchandise (is there even official London merchandise?) so it wasn't exactly specialist. Sometimes you have to make do though.