Latest features Top ten guilty pleasure foods

Date Published:

19/11/2007

We know we shouldn't eat them, but just can't stop. By Matthew de Abaitua and Alex Larman

Millionaire shortbread

Buttery biscuit slathered with caramel and topped with a brittle slab of chocolate, the three textures of hard, squidgy and crumbly clad the palate with their delicious fudgey paste. O sweet cookie brick when I wolf you down I feel like a trillionaire!

Brown sauce

Is the first act of food connoisseurship the rejection of red tomato sauce for the challenges of its savoury brown companion? Peculiar British in a way that the Americanised ketchup is not, brown sauce may look like effluent but comes into its own when livening up a forkful of yesterday's lasagne.

Cheesy Nik-Naks

Nobbly. Corny. Cheesey. Not very promising, is it? But pop open a bag and eat one and there is a satisfyingly salty blandness in the way they mulch up in your mouth. Sure, they may look like the desiccated toes of some ancient arthritic mummy but file alongside Cheese Moments and Scampi Fries in the So-Wrong-They're-Right camp of bar snacks.

Blind Smarties Roulette

While away the boredom of a long train journey with a game of Blind Smarties Roulette. The object of the game? To identify the colour of individual smarties by taste alone. Orange is easy, but what does blue taste of?

Licking the bowl

Excuse us while we come over all Nigella, but cake mix only comes into its own when served on the end of an index finger. The hardcore know the pleasures of curling their tongue around the individual foils of the whisk to lap up trails of raw uncooked mix.