Child Of The 1980's

The image here shows the Barratt’s Sherbet Dip Dab as it is today, but it doesn’t seem a million miles away from the packaging I remember. I’m pretty sure the colour scheme is the same, and the image and logo aren’t much different either. I’ve always preferred the Dip Dab to that other classic the Sherbet Fountain simply because I don’t like liquorice.

The Dip Dab consisted of a little paper bag full of sherbet powder and a strawberry flavoured boiled sweet lollipop. Some countries know sherbet as an ice cream or sorbet style food stuff, but for us in the UK sherbet will always be a fizzy white powder that looked a bit like icing sugar, that made your tongue fizz when you ate it. The Dip Dab was therefore aptly named, as you are it by dipping the lolly in the bag, dabbing it in the sherbet, then licking the lolly clean and repeating.

Personally I loved the sherbet much more than the lollipop, so would often purposely eat the lolly as quickly as possible so that I could spoon the rest of the sherbet out of the bag straight into my mouth. Mmm, lovely!

There were a couple of pretenders to the Dip Dab kingly status. The previously mentioned Sherbet Fountain came a close second, since it contained the exact same sherbet powder. A closer competitor, though not as nice in my book, was the Swizzels Double Dip, which contained two pouches of a less tasty sherbet-like concoction, one flavoured orange and the other cherry. You ate this with a Swizzelstick, a lump of fairly tasteless candy.

There also appears to be a new kid in town, in the shape of the Love Hearts Dip, which appears to be similar to the Double Dip, but you get an edible stick that is meant to be Candy Floss flavour, and there are three different flavours to dip into – orange, raspberry and lemon.

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This entry is filed under Sweets and Snacks and was posted on February 8th, 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.