Today's Review: Passion Fruit

Passion fruits are one of the staple flavours of the "tropical" persuasion, and is featured in many an exotic juice or yoghurt. The flavour is very sweet, but also quite tangy, and is quite delicious really. But that's just the juicy version. What of the fruit itself? Well, it's very weird.

Passion fruits are small, about the size of a kiwi (the fruit, not the bird, although I don't know how big kiwi birds are). The outsides are pretty tough, even if they do get a bit wrinkly, so slicing them in half is essential. Upon doing so you are treated to some fantastically moist innards consisting of pulp and a butt load of seeds. Obviously, the pulp is where the flavour lies, that distinctive sweet taste. This is very smooth, and quite satisfying. The seeds, on the other hand, are pretty much inedible. I've tried many a time to crunch these little buggers in my teeth and have only managed to a few times. Still, it's hard to eat around them, and they certainly won't kill you, besides, the juiciness of the pulp makes swallowing the damn things a breeze.

Passion fruits are certainly tasty, but I just wish there weren't so many seeds, they spoil the whole experience for me. I think I'll just leave it up to the professionals to distill that flavour into a drinkable. form. Much easier.

My rating: 3/5

Today's Review: Getting An Electric Shock From Your Toaster

The toaster is a staple kitchen appliance. It sits there all day, longing for the moment when it can warm up your bread, or anything else you stick in it, to crispy perfection. The toaster lives to toast, it's designed to toast. What it's not designed for is administering electric shocks.

Granted, it was my fault. The wire of my toaster melted a little in an accident of my creation, leaving the innards slightly exposed. But the toaster still functioned perfectly, apart from when I couldn't figure out exactly what to turn the knob up to for automatic perfect toast pop up. But again, that's my problem. There the toaster sat, it's life giving umbilical cord damaged, still performing its duties. Then I got a bit too eager with a wet sponge cleaning down the sides, and a bit too forgetful of the wire situation, and a sharp jolt and some painful thumbs later, my toaster had betrayed me, shocked me.

Electric shocks suck. They're not all that bad, but this one was quite strong, especially as it came from my toaster. If expect burns from retrieving errant scones and crumpets, but never a shock. But really I have no one to blame but myself. I should have put the toaster to rest when it was first wounded. Oh well, at least I'm not dead or seriously injured, although it hurt pretty badly at the time. Getting electrocuted by a toaster is not a nice experience.

My rating: 1/5

Today's Review: Fruit Pastilles Orchard Fruits

It's a new kind of fruit pastilles, and this one hosts a variety of fruits that grow in orchards. The trouble is that I'm not sure exactly what they're supposed to be.

The colours are probably a good place to start. We have green, orange, red and purple pastilles, but the ingredients say the only fruit juices present are apple and grape. This leaves orange to apparently be some strange hybrid of flavours that is meant to taste something like oranges. It doesn't. In fact, all these pastilles taste a bit off, certainly not like some quaint orchard fruit. The green is probably the nicest, with a nice smooth flavour. The orange just tastes like no orange sweet should taste, and the red and purple are actually quite sickly in their sweetness. It was a good try from Rowntrees, and these sweets are quite nice, but they're not a patch on the original pastilles.

My rating: 3/5

Today's Review: My Turkish Barber Experience

There's a Turkish barber near mine that is pretty cheap, and though I have enjoyed a nice shave there, the last time I went there for my barnet I was a victim of the insufferable indignity of having my hair a bit too short for my liking. Needless to say, it put me off, so my last few cuts have been given to someone a bit heavier on my wallet. But today, since times are tough and pennies are short, I took the plunge and went in for that elusive £10 haircut.

I was directed to my chair by a young man. I don't know his name, because I'm one of those people who makes hairdressers uncomfortable by not engaging in small talk. Although it might just be me that feels uncomfortable. Anyway, after saying several times that I would like my hair "short, but not too short", and showing him a picture of my short haired self with the key part blocked by my iPhone clock, he promptly went to work on my sides with a buzzer.

This scared me. I've heard a few tales of buzz cuts gone wrong, and have regularly thought buzzers were reserved for number ones or skinhead style. But after a few minutes of deft swipes around my ears, I still had some hair left, so that was good for me. He'd also fiddled around with the back, and since I couldn't see it that created some suspense for me. But I didn't have much time to dwell on it before the barber picked up the scissors.

I know how the regular haircut goes. Hair brushed, parted, measured, cut, repeated. I was well prepared to be in for the slow ride. What I was not prepare for was the whirlwind of scary barber turbulence that was unleashed across my scalp. Hair was grabbed, combed and snipped, at speeds upwards of 3 snips per second. A recipe for disaster you may think, but this man knew what he was doing.

In mere minutes my hair was short, uniform, and my fringe actually at a length I found satisfactory. That's hardly ever happened straight after a cut. After the initial cut, the same clipping frenzy began with thinning scissors, and after a few blasts with the hair dryer to get rid of the clippings, I was done. I could only agree with the few words that the man had uttered since he began, like "excellente" and "perfecto". In those minutes I had become a man. A man with sorter hair that is. But damn, is it a good head of hair.

This barber clearly has some kind of hair based superpower. He knew exactly what he was doing and wasted no time doing it. There were a few times where his frantic grabbing and snipping caused his comb to smack me lightly in the face. It seemed too regular to be accidental, perhaps he had a bet with his coworkers to see how many times he can assault his customers, but I was too impressed with the speed and quality of his work to care about it too much. I clearly misjudged the Turkish barber, and I will definitely be returning for that low price, super fast hair cut. 

My rating: 5/5

Today's Review: Raspberry Ripple Mini Rolls

I do enjoy a good old fashioned Mini Roll. So the thought of enjoying a new fashioned one was good too. This raspberry ripple flavour goes hand in hand with a mint chocolate one that make up a new "ice cream" range, just in time for summer. Since I don't like mint chocolate, I just tried this one.

It's basically the same as a regular Mini Roll, but with a bold raspberry flavour. It's very sweet, and perhaps a little overpowering. I think it's because in this variety the cream is also raspberry flavoured, whereas in the regular kind the strawberry is only contained in the jammy swirls. But here we have an almost sickly sweet raspberry flavoured, squishy roll that isn't too satisfying to eat.

But that's not all. The packet implored me to try these frozen, so I did, in the interest of science. I must say that freezing these Mini Rolls makes them taste a lot better. They lose their squidginess, and the creamy filling certainly takes on an ice cream consistency. So while these aren't all that great in their regular state, freezing them kicks them up a notch. Still, a little too sickly for my liking. 

My rating: 4/5

Today's Review: Bob Marley's Mellow Mood: Mango

Hey, looks like another energy drink. But it's not, in fact I think it's meant to be quite the opposite, putting you in a mellow mood. The description states that it is a "low calorie soft drink with herbal extracts and guava-mango flavour", and given the baffling usage of Bob Marley's name and visage, I think we can all assume what those "herbal extracts" are, am I right?

Well, no, they're probably not putting weed in drinks, but they must be doing something right, because this is very tasty. I'm a sucker for tropical juices, and while I love the Rubicon mango juice offering, it was always a little bold for my tastes. This drink certainly lives up to its names, with a mellow, sparkling flavour that doesn't overwhelm the senses. It's a refreshing mango drink, and it's a decent size too. I'll have to try out the other flavours.

My rating: 5/5

Today's Review: Rowntree's Randoms Rip'ems

These are a funny sweet, in fact, they're quite random. Phnar phnar. Contained in this packet are two strips of chewy candy, separated into four different flavours. The idea, obviously, is to rip 'em, because everyone needs a novel and exciting way to eat their sweets.

Unfortunately, it is kind of hard to discern the flavours, because they're not very nice. The packaging informs me that these strips contain 25% fruit juice, but the ingredients don't tell me what those fruits are. The colours suggest we have lemon, orange, strawberry and blackcurrant, but the resulting flavour is something like the elongated innards of jelly beans. So they're chewy, with the texture of a fruit winder, but with some weird flavours that leave a not too nice aftertaste. Still, they're not awful, still fruity, slightly juicy. They're just not very nice, and certainly nowhere near as nice as the regular Randoms.

My rating: 2/5