Coffee and coffee-flavored foods continue to be the rage this spring...and I'm a sucker for both.
This week, I tried the new Coffee Caramel Milkshake from Chick-Fil-A. The chain brags that its shakes are Hand-Spun, which to me conjures up an image of a soda jerk scooping ice cream, pouring milk and letting an old-fashioned Hamilton do the rest. 
In fact, the Chick-Fil-A employee does put a couple of liquid mixes into a shaker and holds it under a whirling wand for a few seconds. But it seems to me that most of the "spinning" going on is by the PR agencies hyping this shake. ("Only 97 Days Left" warns the Web site about the "Limited Time" offer.)
So how does it taste? Well, like a generic milkshake, I guess. Sweet and milky but with minimal coffee flavor and even less caramel flavor. The overriding taste is sweet....sweet enough to make your teeth hurt.
And no wonder. There are ONE HUNDRED TWENTY SEVEN grams of sugar in the 17-ounce shake. At 5 grams of sugar per teaspoon, that's 25 shocking teaspoons of sugar. The calorie and fat stats are pretty shocking too: 810 calories and 27 grams of fat per shake. To put that into context, 27 grams of fat represents 80 percent of the daily fat intake recommended for an average adult.
The Web site also gives a list of ingredients which starts with "Icedream," a trademarked concoction of milk, sugar, cream, corn syrup...and goes on to include artificial flavorings, dried eggs, high fructose corn syrup, gums, sodium benzoate, blah and blah. I stopped counting at 28 ingredients.
My mother and I shared one shake. We also shared a real bad case of the "shakes" a couple hours later, when our fantastically elevated blood sugar levels finally tanked.
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