Chosen By you : Strawberry Flavour Milkshake Malties

 It's Saturday evening and what am I doing eating a bowl of cereal. Not just any cereal, a new cereal by ASDA, apparently chosen by us, although I've not yet been consulted on cereals by this supermarket. Despite this, after eating said cereal I can only surmise that 'chosen by you' in fact means chosen soulless husks with no idea of flavour or taste except that of dried cardboard, As you can tell, I'm not a fan, but let me take you on a journey.

 You can clearly see the idea of this cereal, Coco-Pops has chocolatey milk, as does Coco Shreddies, so the next logical step is something that turns milky strawberry-ey, right ? I get the idea.

Now I'd like to point out my patented MAR metric was not used in this review as unfortunately, the batteries in my kitchen scales died. Not to worry! There is still a scientific measure of sorts in this review, which I will layout later.

So we start off with the bowl imaged below:

 Looks okay on the face of it, the standard cross hatched structure for maximal amount of surface area interaction for the tongue I like it! Although what I wasn't a fan of was the strawberry 'coating,' I mean, they're not red, they are brown, the only hints of red are small fleks of colouring periodically which look akin to blood splatter patterns, so I continued eating assuming of course this is strawberry and not the result of some brutal murder at the factory.

I added the requisite amount of milk as guided by the side of the packet and began chomping spoonfuls of this new cereal.

The texture wasn't brilliant, the cross hatched structure felt strange and alien to my tongue, and despite the weakest taste of something sweet / sugary, I assume being the artificial flavourings to simulate strawberry, the fundamental cereal bit was displeasing, On top of the aforementioned texture, the crunch wasn't there as much as I'd like it, infact after a short while the cereal became very mushy, which is not what you want from a square cereal. If you want mush, go for porridge, or leave Weetabix in a bowl of milk for 2.8ms.

The whole hook of this is the strawberry flavour, which yes I got in some regard, although at minimal, and in fact a very clever advertising ploy, for what I wanted to be strawberry flavour was actually closer to strawberry milkshake flavour (even with no milk on). I digress, the whole point of flavoured milk is for the finishing slurps. The extra few mL of milk in the bowl that you can guzzle down like a kid and not care of who is watching. In this case you want strawberry flavoured milk. But after a while of leaving the cereal I was disappointed to see little / no colour change. Unfortunately I didn't have a picture of this, but let me paint you a picture of the milk colour afterwards.
Imagine a glass of milk, now imagine puting a strawberry next to the milk and hoping diffusion or some other transport mechanism moved the redness of that strawberry to the milk. That is how the milk looked. Infact I was so confused by this lack of mixing of the strawberry flavouring I decided to do some science......

Imaged above a the Jasco V-570 Spectrophotometer. The basic working principles of this machine is to shine a light on a sample and then measure what light goes through, or gets reflected, regardless it gives an idea of what a material is and how concentrated it is.
So I got 2 vials of equal volumes semi-skimmed milk (bought from a farmer because we should pay fair!)

And into one of them I added a single cereal square, now I did the calculation and the amount of milk I used obeys the same ratio as 30g:125mL of cereal : milk advised on the cereal packaging, just scaled down.
I left both sample for 10 minutes under ambient conditions to allow for flavour mixing of the admixture.
Using a pipette I then removed equal volumes of the mixture and placed 2 drops into a vessel containing deionised water

I then used the spectrophotometer, initially performing a base line correction with no sample in.

Above, the results obtained from this experimental venture. The blue line corresponds to plain water, the red and green line to raw milk product and strawberry admixture respectively. Now with my limited knowledge of this technique I can say that the peaks above 1500 are most likely absorption lines of water the interesting feature is the doublet that may be in the blue line at ~1250nm but becomes clearly resolvable in the red and green traces, also, it is clear there is most absorption in the visible end of the spectrum in the milky mixture. What I cannot see are new absorption lines associated with supposed strawberry flavouring. The obvious slap-dash totally believable because it's science and definitely has no flaws in what so every is this milky strawberry mix had no strawberries in it! How can I say that, I don't know, I don't know what the absorption spectra of strawberries looks like or milk for that matter, what I can say is those two traces are basically the same.

Overall:
I wasn't chuffed with this the cereal component left me bitter and disappointed, I'm not going to say it was the worst thing I've ever eaten, as I've once eaten at  Harvester, and it's probably not the worst cereal ever. I think my main issues was the lack of fulfilment of expectations, I pushed through the taste stirring vigorously hoping for some delicious pink fluid at the end of my venture, and it was taken away from me.
FOR THAT REASON, I give this cereal a

2/10

I'd like to add, it won some points mainly on pricing, it was £1.18 for the box, but to be fair, I wouldn't even recommend this to the poor.