h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today was like coming home. Actually, I was coming home when I made
one of the most exciting discoveries of my life. The local "All Days"
shop ("local" to me is 12 miles away, but that's another story) has
started to stock MASSIVE packets of chocolate buttons, a snip at just
99p. My day was almost perfect. Not quite, because these larger
packets don't have a nursery rhyme on them. Can anyone tell me why
that would be? Please...?

It's probably some kind of cost-cutting measure. That's why the can do the huge packets for under a pound, they don't have the nursery rhyme equivalent of the Performing Rights Society breathing down their neck looking for payment ... or something.

make your day perfecter by getting one of the massive packs of Minstrels, sticking them in the fridge for an hour and eating them in multiples of no more than twenty - they start to taste funny if you have too many.

Don't you find that the crunchy bits on the outside get in the way of the
real chocolate? I know that they ensure that "Minstrels melt in your
mouth, not in your hand", but I prefer to get straight down to business,
crush the buttons against the roof of my mouth and savour the flavour.
Scrummy.

Much as I love Minstrels, I have a problem with their advertising technique... fair enough, the chocolate doesn't melt in your hand, but they don't tell you that all the colouring comes out of the crispy shell and stains your fingers!

The crunchy bit on the outside (that begins to taste weird if you eat too many) is a great minstrel-saving thing that prevents them all being eaten at one sitting. Buttons, meanwhile, have to be eaten very quickly, especially as they're usually stuck back-to back and come out of the packet at twice the rate. Minstrels are ideal for putting inside chocolate cakes - they shock the hell out of people not expecting them who think their teeth must be falling out.

Two things:
(1) Does the crispy shell still stop the chocolate from melting, even though they're being baked in the oven?
(2) White chocolate Buttons - discuss.

1: Up to a point - it's best to put them in a cake that you're going to put into individual cases rather than a large, sliceable cake - this also removes the danger of one being sliced through and thus revealed to the consumer.
2: Evil. they are not true buttons. Milkybars are fine and buttons are fine. Combining the two is unnecessary and akin to the evil that is coffee-flavoured (any non-coffee thing).

White buttons have their uses. I tend to go for these when I'm wearing lighter coloured trousers. The reason is obvious. The majority of my button-time is spent at the wheel of a car as I ply the highways of Aberdeenshire. And I don't believe I have EVER completed an entire packet without at least one slipping down unnoticed between my legs and dissolving into an sticky mass of senselessly wasted ex-button, to become a source of amusement throughout the day for my work colleagues.

I agree with the coffee thing though.

Ah. I hate the taste of slightly warm chocolate and thereby avoid it as far as I can; the disinclination for frozen chocolate to melt is a handy side effect. Get rid of the problem of, as it were, Sutton & Cheam by not wearing light-coloured trousers. Do what my dad does and forego the use of trousers when driving altogether.
If anyone ever brings out white Minstrels™ I hope that we all, as right-minded people, will combine to wreak revenge upon the factories responsible.

I'm sure I heard recently about a plan to bring out white, coffee-flavoured, melt-in-your-hand minstrels.

Ha. Evil contains the seeds of its own undoing: The giantism of the new confectionary will make everyone that eats them as lardy as an American - thus they will become unable to actually go and buy any sweets as they won't be able to fit out of their doors. The coffee flavouring will help raise their blood pressure and promote ischaemia; hopefully the appetite-suppressant properties of caffeine will be too weak to have an effect.

But the supermarkets have already thought of that, hence the introduction of on-line shopping. As long as the consumer can roll from the computer to the front door and back again, he/she can continue to eat until he/she:
(a) reaches his/her credit limit,
(b) becomes so obese that he/she has to be forklifted to hospital, or
(c) explodes.

They did those minstrel like things once, "Vice Versa" I think they were called. They had white shells and milk chocolate insides or brown shells with white chocolate outsides. Do you remember them?

I came to the conclusion that minstrels and smarties were better.

What do people think of the mini smarties? They're tiny, but fun. Not enough chocolate per bite for me though.#

(Just thought I'd really confuse everyone by replying to a forum that is soooo old and hasn't been used for ages)

I am very much opposed to the trend for making chocolate smaller. "Fun Size" Mars bars, for example. They're tiny! Where's the fun in that?

I don't know, a big mars is too much for me, I tend to refreigerate it and slice of thin slices every so often. the problem with that is that my mother does the same,
to MY mars bar.

Trip-trip-trippety-tripping down Memory Lane this lunch time, I arrived at this older-than-old thread that I started back when the world was young.

Dr Ændr thought he'd reply in October '99, several months after the last post, in order to cause confusion by resurrecting such an old thread.

Well Ha-Ha!! Six long years have passed since then, and happily the giant packs of Buttons are still with us. Will anyone join me in celebrating this confectionary wonder?