Tried it: Lucky Charms milkshake

Two great tastes that underwhelm together

I'm going to save you some time: it isn't very good.

A diner near me (Papermoon Diner in Baltimore) has a bangin' Cap'n Crunch milkshake that combines all the best things about the cereal and a vanilla milkshake. So I was looking forward to Burger King's Lucky Charms milkshake.

I recently had a weird taste in my mouth from eating some impulse-purchase cheese that I then forgot in my car for a few hours, so when I saw a BK on the horizon I knew it was time.

But the product is inferior to both a milkshake and to a bowl of Lucky Charms. They have achieved the opposite of synergy. It tastes like they took a bunch of stale Lucky Charms, ate a bunch of the marshmallows themselves, then roughly crushed the rest with a mallet and mixed it into a BK vanilla milkshake. Many of the chunks were too large and therefore got stuck in the straw, so even that they didn't get right.

One of the great things about the Cap'n Crunch milkshake is that the pieces of cereal are ground so fine, like little tiny flecks of cereal about the size of the top half of the number 8 in 12 pt font. It's a novel and pleasant mouthfeel. BK did not replicate that success.

The flavor is also not right. Like a lot of cereals, Lucky Charms contains phosphate, which gives it a mild, light tartness while still playing nicely with the creaminess of the milk. But they didn't get enough of that tartness into the milkshake, so other than the stale bready chunks that you have to power through, the dessert tastes almost exactly like a normal vanilla milkshake.

Except that it also tastes a little burnt. Why? I don't understand what part of the production process would introduce a burnt flavor.

I must confess that my three-year-old loved it. But she's wrong, it was a bad milkshake.