Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Innocent Smoothie For Autumn

Similar to the summer smoothie I reviewed back in August this one is the Autumn variant. The label suggests that this should invoke thoughts of bonfires, foraging squirrels and soaking your conkers in vineger. I'm sure that there are a number of readers not from the U.K. scratching their heads and wondering what conkers are. Well they're kind of a nut that drops from trees around Autumn time. Traditionally schoolboys have collected them, stuck string through the middle and battled their conker against another's, the idea being that the victor still has his conker in one piece at the end of the battle. Kind of like Pokemon with nuts. Wikipedia expands on it further here.
Anyway, back to the drink. It's a blend of blackcurrants and gooseberries which makes it a very sharp drink. It's not unpleasant though. Innocent once again have a winner on their hands as far as I'm concerned.

Skeleton Pops

I love the look of these Skeleton Pops. I could only find an arm and a leg, but wonder if there's more out there. Maybe a spine or a hip? The pack says that they're strawberry flavour, but I'm sick of eating sweets so I'm going to take them at their word. I'll try them out on my niece and nephew when I see them next and let you know.

Scooby Doo! Spooky Snack Pack With Oozing Mallow

More Scooby stuff with this pack of marshmallows. It's a nicely decorated bag with plenty of tombstones and bats surrounding the clear part showing off the actual mallows. The bold colours really caught my eye when I was browsing the Halloween section of Tescos.Once the pack is opened you are presented with individually wrapped marshmallows, which doesn't sit quite so well with my environmental sensibilities, but they've got bats on which is cool.
I suppose the individual wrapping makes them easier to hand out on Halloween too.

The marshmallows taste sweet and have strawberryish stuff inside which does not ooze despite the claim on the packet. I'm sure kids will lap them up though.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Scooby Doo! Halloween Party Pack

It looks like Scooby Doo is looking to enhance his spooky credibility by muscling into the Halloween market with this Party Pack. At first glance it looks like a glorified lucky bag to me.
You do get alot of stuff in this bag. There are some lollys with pumpkin wrappers on them, some gummy eyeballs and small lenticular scenes depicting the gang getting into in various scrapes.
There are also boxes of sweets with various Scooby-Doo characters depicted on them. The sweets inside are red and black. Close, but the colours of Halloween are orange and black.
The most intriguing thing in the pack though, is the bat launcher.
This is a device that launches mini frisbees when you squeeze the bat legs together. The frisbees go a reasonable distance, but may not fly as far when in the hands of a small child as all the power comes from the squeeze. Which is just tough really, stick it in a drawer and get it out when you've got past 30. It'll fly down to the bottom of the garden then.
I even managed to get a snap of a frisbee in flight (which is no mean feat when you are photographer and the launcher).
All in all this is a pretty reasonable pack. It was only four quid and it's packed with stuff that would be great as party favours or passed out to trick-or-treaters. There are minus marks for having the wrong coloured sweets in the boxes though. That's a little bit lazy.

Marks & Spencer Trick or Treat Mini Biscuit Bag

After asking for something new from the Marks & Spencer Halloween range, I got something new. Someone high up in the company must read my blog.
These are small bags of chocolate covered scary shaped biscuits. They come in a suitably illustrated package which bears the same witch from the gums packet and a couple of bats.
You can clearly see what each biscuit is supposed to be. There's none of the "I think it's a lion" type stuff like you get with Animal Crackers. It's a skull, bat, ghost, pumpkin or witches hat and you'll not mistake it for anything else. They're pretty decent little biscuits and they taste a little bit shortbready. There is a decent covering of chocolate on each one too.
These come in multipacks of 6 ready for you to dish out to eager little hands on Halloween. Ideal.

Pee Wee's Playhouse Calender 1990: October

The King of Cartoons ushers in October. The month of my birth and of course, Halloween.