ShinyShack.com Blog

Marshmallow Fluff

shinyshack — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:33:27 +0000

Fluff is currently occupying the podium for my most favourite novelty food ever. Yes, I’m a fickle type and am apt to switch favourites from time to time, but I can see Fluff having a special place in my heart forever.

If you like Marshmallows, you’ll love Fluff. Fluff is essentially melted marshmallow in a jar. Somehow, and let’s not ruin the mystery by speculating how, some utter food genius has managed to create a substance just like the melted bit in the middle of a marshmallow when you’ve toasted it to perfection. And it just comes in a jar – no campfire, toasting fork or burnt fingers required.

You can eat it in a variety of ways. I’ve created my own easy version of S’mores with digestive biscuits, chocolate spread and Fluff, which is pretty popular. I have to confess though, that my absolute favourite way is straight out of the jar on a spoon and not sharing it with anyone! Health food it ain’t but for a delicious sweet treat, you can’t beat it.

Fluff also gains extra novelty food bonus points by being suitable for Vegetarians, which is a real bonus as trying to find anything marshmallow-related that veggies can eat is a real struggle.

Marshmallow Fluff – £2.99 from ShinyShack.com

: Marshmallow Fluff

Mensa Brain Trainer

shinyshack — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:40:30 +0000

Feeling stupid? I know I am! Wary that senility might be sneaking up to catch me unawares, I’ve been stretching my brain cells over the bank holiday in the hope that I’ll be able to undo all the damage from not thinking hard enough for years.

This Brain Trainer offers 9 different brain training games that have been designed by Mensa, so it’s hardly surprising that I struggled with some of them. Thankfully there are different difficulty levels for those of us who are more intellectually challenged. It has a nice touch screen with a nifty stylus that slots neatly into the brain trainer, and the whole thing is pocket sized and battery powered so you can exercise your thinking matter pretty much anywhere. It will certainly be in my bag on my next long train journey.

Mensa Brain Trainer – £13.99 from ShinyShack.com

Charm It! Charm Bracelets and Charms

shinyshack — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:40:56 +0000

Charm bracelets and charms a gogo with our new range of Charm It! charms.

The Charm It! range makes collecting charms easy. There’s a whole range of charm bracelets and necklaces and a fantastic selection of shiny and colourful charms that clip easily onto the bracelets.

The charm bracelets and necklaces are all fully adjustable and charms come in all sorts of shapes and colours including animals, flowers, lockets and hearts. You can theme your charm bracelet or go for mix and match of your favourite charms.

Charm It! Charm bracelets and Charms from £3.99 from ShinyShack.com

Fun Fly Stick

shinyshack — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:39:59 +0000

Finally a magic wand you can point at stuff and make it fly! Ok, so you won’t be able to make your little sister fly round the room but still, flying objects with no string attached = pretty cool!

So how does it work? Well inside the ‘wand’ is a little Van de Graaff generator. For those not familiar with this little bundle of joy from the Physics Lab, a Van de Graaff generator creates an electrostatic charge. So when you point your wand at the shiny metallic flying toys included in the pack, they become charged and are then repelled by the end of the wand. Point the wand and the object floats gently away.

Not only can you have weird metal shapes flying overhead, but you can do other cool stuff too. Point the end of the wand at a stream of water running from a tap and watch the flow be pulled sideways by the wand, (careful not to get the wand wet though – that’ll mean an end to all the fun). We also found poking the wand into a bowl of Rice Crispies causes a rather fun explosion of flying puffed rice.

There’s lots of cool electrostatic fun to be had with the Fun Fly Stick and it’s all done by the power of Science – ooooh!

Fun Fly Stick – £24.99 from ShinyShack.com

Chocomatic Chocolate Clock

shinyshack — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:11:51 +0000

As a confirmed chocoholic, I can honestly say that if Santa dropped one of these into my stocking, I’d be a very happy GiftLady!

The Chocomatic Chocolate Clock is a clock with a difference. Once an hour, the clock chimes and delivers a delicious chocolatey treat – and because the clock has a light sensor, it’s clever enough to know that at night you’ll be sleeping and dreaming your chocolatey dreams, so it’ll save the next delivery ’til the morning. Such genius!

If you’re impatient and can’t wait another hour for your next dose, you can press the ‘cheat’ button and have your chocolate delivered instantly. If you don’t grab your chocolate quickly, it disappears back inside the clock and is saved for the next scheduled delivery.

The Chocomatic Chocolate Clock is a delightful gift for chocolate lovers everywhere, and as it’s refillable it will continue delivering chocolatey pleasure over and over again.

Chocomatic Chocolate Clock – £19.99 from ShinyShack

Space Putty

shinyshack — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:32:31 +0000

What marvellous stuff Space Putty is. You can roll it up and bounce it like a ball, but if you leave it sitting for a while it’ll melt back down into a puddle.

Apparently this stuff has its origins back in the Second World War, when American scientists were searching for rubber alternatives. This stuff really wouldn’t make a great tyre or shoe sole, but it is fun to fiddle with.

You can roll it out into a long rope, plait it, twist it and squidge it back together again, but unlike something like plasticine, you won’t be able to make long lasting models out of it. That intriguing tendency to ‘melt’ means that you’d come back to find your artistic works of art lying in around in blobs. But then that’s part of its charm.

My favourite activity at the moment is to fold the putty to trap the air, then pop the air pockets like a kind of endlessly flexible bubble wrap! All this and metallic silver too, so it looks like a molten metal. Squish it, stretch it, snap it, then put it back in its pot.

Space Putty – £4.99 from ShinyShack.com

Minty Weirdness

shinyshack — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:06:18 +0000

There’s something quite compelling about peculiar flavour combinations. Do you remember Cherry Flavoured Coke? It was that weird a concept that everybody wanted to try it.

I’m suffering a similar fascination with Bacon Mints and Monkey Mints. Firstly let me clarify that Bacon Mints may be bacon flavoured with a hint of mint, but Monkey Mints are definitely notmonkey flavoured. Relieved? Actually, they’re banana flavoured. Slightly worried now?

I’m not sure who came up with the novel idea of mixing the classic flavour of mint with both bacon and banana, but I’m all for a bit of food experimentation. In the words of pretty much everyone’s mum: ‘How do you know you don’t like it until you’ve tried it?‘

Sound advice there.

Bacon Mints – £2.99 from ShinyShack.com

Monkey Mints – £2.99 from ShinyShack.com

Bubble Scrubber

shinyshack — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:02:58 +0000

It’s a nice attempt to make washing up more exciting. I’m not entirely sure that doing the dishes could ever be really fun, but it’s a nice idea that you could stop and blow bubbles using the soapy water.

Who knows? It might even encourage the kids to get stuck into the dishes for once?

Bubble Scrubber – £5.99 from ShinyShack.com

Giant Retro Spacehopper

shinyshack — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:52:48 +0000

This Spacehopper is the exact replica of the one I had when I was a kid. We had an orange and a blue one and they both had that weird face on them.

What I really love about this is that it’s adult sized. So it’s exactly the same experience of bouncing along that I had as a tiddly person, but without the scabby knees and the waterpistol in my back pocket.

It isn’t a dignified way to travel, but it is fun! Great for racing against your friends, especially when you find that some of them have completely lost the ability to space-hop, and you haven’t. Eat my dust!

Giant Retro Spacehopper – £14.99 from ShinyShack.com

Astronaut Ice Cream

shinyshack — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:50:41 +0000

What if you could carry ice cream around with you all day without it melting? Don’t be silly, you’d say, why would you want to carry ice cream around? You have ice cream – you eat it, right?

Well the answer is, you don’t need to eat it straight away, it won’t melt and it’s not cold so it can’t get warm either. Sounds strange? The truth is even weirder.

NASA figured it out, probably because their astronauts got sick of squeezing puréed carrots out of tubes. ‘Yes it’s cool in space’, they’d say, ‘but the food sucks’.

Take a block of Neapolitan ice cream and put it through a freeze dryer. You know, those things that give us coffee granules. What comes out the other side is smaller than what went in, but still recognisably strawberry, vanilla and chocolate striped. But now the ice cream is a solid.

Bite into it and it crunches. But then the water in your mouth rehydrates the ice cream and it’s like you’ve got a melted mouthful of Neapolitan ice cream, but without the cold.

Definitely a different snack sensation and just the thing to take with me for my next lunar landing.

Astronaut Ice Cream – £2.99 from ShinyShack.com