Ice Magic! (Askeys Treat! Milk Chocolate Sauce)

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Askeys Treat! Milk Chocolate Sauce
Date:	17/10/09 (42 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Yummy chocolate, good value

Disadvantages: I prefer dark chocolate

Ice cream is one of those essential food groups, a dessert treat we just can't do without. It comes in every flavour imaginable, from Ben & Jerrie's Cookie Dough, to Heston Blumenthal's Bacon and Eggs. And yet still we suffer from the terrible compulsion to smother our frozen dessert in sauce.

Truly this sauce must be a thing of awesomeness, in order to pair it with our beloved ice cream. So, a hushed breath of quiet awe please for...

Askeys 'Treat' Milk Chocolate Flavour Dessert Sauce!!!
Straight away, you can tell this product is sexy. The bottle's got the hourglass figure of a 50's pin-up, and if the blue packaging with brown chocolate swirls looks a bit drab and 80's, that's OK, because Askeys is owned by Silver Spoon, who aren't exactly noted for sexy products and at least they're trying...

A standard bottle of this stuff is a staggeringly arbitrary 325g, and you'll pay around a quid for it, depending where you shop. On my current rate of consumption, I reckon my bottle will last about a month, so that's pretty good value really.

Treat Taste Test!
I have some ice cream somewhere in the freezer, but let's be as objective as possible, and squirt some on my finger first of all...

...

OK, so my hand looks like I've run out of toilet paper. Anything else?

The sauce pours out of the bottle at a controllable rate with fairly light pressure, it's not a fight to get the product out, but neither was I suddenly buried beneath a splurge of chocolate sauce. It's pleasingly viscous and pretty much stays where you pour it, which is definitely an advantage for any product which is probably going to be applied by small children at some stage. It's brown, proper chocolatey brown, and smells exactly like milk chocolate. All very good and encouraging so far, I think you'll agree.

Tasting it, I was a bit taken aback, it's velvety and chocolatey and all the rest of it, tasting like pretty high quality milk chocolate, melted Dairy Milk would be my closest analogy. But it's so much more intense, like chocolate concentrate, and very sweet. A real taste sensation, but perhaps one best enjoyed as an accompaniment rather than on its own. Which is, I grumpily concede, the whole point of it.

Poured over some ice cream, the milk chocolate sauce continues to do admirable service. I paired it with mint choc chip ice-cream and it seemed to be a bit of a winning combination. It's worth mentioning at this point that Askeys do a range of flavours of this stuff, including a Dark Chocolate one which I infinitely prefer. I prefer dark chcoolate in general. So I hope you appreciate me suffering for your consumer education here.
Like a good wine, pairing an ice cream sauce with ice cream enables the two flavours to complement and enhance each other. The chocolate becomes even more velvety smooth next to the cold ice crystals, while the perky mint flavour is racketed up a notch in contrast to the rich chocolate tones. I am in raptures, there is a party in my mouth and almost everyone is invited. Unless they're diabetic...


Diabetic?

Ah yes, because, you see, this stuff is a very sugary treat indeed. The ingredients are as follows:

Invert Sugar Syrup, Milk Chocolate Crumb (Milk, Sugar, Cocoa Mass), Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Dried Glucose Syrup, Fat Reduced Cocoa Powder.

So, with three ingredients being composed mostly of sugar, this isn't ever going to be a healthy treat. And I'm not sure what Milk Chocolate Crumb is either, but it sounds awkwardly like something they've swept up from the floor of the Cadbury's factory. Ah well. As well as a risky product for diabetics, it's also not safe for the lactose-intolerant, but is free from all artificial colourings, flavourings and preservatives. So that's nice.

Uses for Treat!
So you've bought some chocolate sauce... but what do you do with it now? Well, here's a few ideas...

* In chilli con carne. I use quite a bit of chocolate in cooking, especially Mexican dishes, chilli con carne being the most obvious, although I also have a dish using turkey fillets which benefits from a few squares of Green & Blacks. Experimentation on this week's batch of chilli con carne (I cook this a lot) showed that not only did Treat! do the job, but it did so without the hassle of having to melt the chocolate first. Gosh, I sound lazy now.

* In the bedroom. A thick chocolate sauce in a convenient squeezy bottle? Now, is there anyone over the age of 18 who didn't immediately think that this might have a few more interesting applications than mere dessert decoration? Suffice it to say that even I didn't mind the milk chocolate flavour when the sauce was decorating interesting parts of my lover. Enjoy this tip and use it well... but don't blame me if you run out of clean sheets!

* On toast. I tried squirting a few thin lines of the stuff over the piece of toast I'd already spread with Nutella and the result was... interesting. Not an experience I'm sure I'd repeat, but variety is indeed the spice of life...

* In cupcakes. A bit of a messy one this, but I piped a few squirts of sauce into one cupcake of a batch I'd baked. It made an awful mess when I ate the cake, but it did also taste like pure sin. Have a napkin handy.

And if all else fails you can squirt a dollop of it on top of a few scoops of ice-cream.

We want to get on with our lives now!
Oh, OK. Treat! costs from 90p to £1 in most supermarkets and makes ice-cream taste nice. I prefer the dark chocolate flavour myself, but that is just a personal preference and I wouldn't hesitate to buy this stuff again if they were out of my favourite. Enjoy.

Summary: Dessert topping or sex aid, whichever sounds more fun to you