You spend hours and hours creating delicious home cooked food from scratch, buying the best ingredients you can find, then you hear you kids discussing the best type of chocolate or sweet and flavour of crisps (chips) in the back of the car*.  You feel deflated and slightly aggrieved that all that hard work is for nought.

Then, Jay, our eldest, says that he hates school chips (french fries) and much prefers Daddy's home made fried potatoes, while Emily, our youngest, cannot eat enough of home-made roast chicken with all the trimmings made yesterday, and they both love home-made Yorkshire puddings.  Emily enjoys making a salad for us all today for lunch, while Jay even helped to mix the batter for baking cheesecake yesterday, which they both wolfed down greedily.

You justify yourself that it is all the fault of strong advertising that they see on the TV, plus the treat factor of eating what they rightfully call "bad food".

Actually, I think it is only fair that you let your children have the choice and experience of eating all the manufactured foods as well, although strictly only once in a while.  You do not want them becoming cranky like you are yourself. 

So today, in the miraculous heat that appeared on this mid August day, after weeks and weeks of cold, rainy weather, and after the Premier League football season has recommenced, I decided that we should trial recipes for milkshakes for Emily's birthday that's coming up in October.  This was with some trepidation as it would open the floodgates to some seriously evil food groups, and lo and behold, I was dead right.  The chosen flavours were banana (me), strawberry (Soph), Snickers and separately Skittles (Jay) and for Emily Curly-Wurly and Rolos, respectively.

We played around with combinations of the basic ingredients and the recipe below is what we came up with; you can ignore the banana but we felt that it needed something to add some body to the milkshake, and a small amount of banana seemed to do the trick - too much and the banana flavour started coming through in the other flavours.  By the way, Jay could not finish the Skittles as they were too sweet and revolting, but they did enjoy the other flavours ("the horror, the horror, the horror" to paraphrase Kurtz in Apocalypse Now).

The Milk Shake Base

2 good sized scoops of vanilla ice cream, relatively soft scoop (we use Brymoor or Cream Of Yorkshire)

225ml / 1 cup full fat milk (don't go all skinny and healthy here, as it's pointless)

3cm / 1 inch of ripe banana

Your Flavours

This is really up to you, but it should be about 3 tablespoons in volume, so:

1 Curly-Wurly, 1 Pack of Rolos, 1 Snickers Bar

10 strawberries, ½ a banana

Or whatever you want, but some things really are just too sickly sweet, e.g. Skittles and Starburst.

Put all the ingredients into the bowl of a food processor or juicing machine and mix up thoroughly.