Sherbet Fountains

In my continuing education on British sweets, I picked up something called a "Sherbet Fountain". Pronounced "SURE-BERT" despite being spelt "Sher-BET"

Sound nice, doesnt' it? In my mind, I picture a nice ice cream dish piled high with lime sherbert, with a can of Sprite poured over, a cooling dessert for a hot summer day. That is not what a Sherbet Fountain is.

THIS is a Sherbet Fountain.

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Described as a 'fizzy sherbet with a liquorice dip, it looked intriguing, all yellow and orange with these weird swirly things on it. It had a little tab on the end which something black was poking out. I secretly hoped that it be a very cool type of chemical reaction candy whereby you pull the black liquorice tab, which would mix the two chemicals and something wonderfully tasty would come flying out, fountain like and you had to catch it in your mouth.

That is not what happened.

It turned out to be far more mundane but yet compulsively addicting type of candy.

I unwrapped it to find that it was a roll of cardboard inside the wrapper, sticking out the 'liquorice dip', which is like a flat long piece of liquorice.

Inside the carton was powdered sherbet, the kind that is kind of like what was in pixie sticks. Basically a slightly fizzy, powdered candy. Despite being slightly disappointed that there was no cool reaction to speak of, it was quite good. The slightly bitter liquorice went astonishingly well with the fizzy sherbet and it was a fun, time consuming, albeit messy process.

Dipping in the liquorice stick and licking it off felt a tad mischievous, kind of like the feeling you get when you were 10, sleeping over at your friend's house and gorging on junk food outside of the view of your Mom. Maybe it was because dipping and licking seemed furtive or because my Mom never let us have candy of the powdered variety. In any case, I enjoyed it and it made the car ride a lot more pleasant.