Next up in our review series – Best and Worst Preston Takeaways According to Just Eat – is Kaspa’s, situated on the ring road in Preston city centre. It has a poor score of 3.79 out of 6, with customers complaining of cold food, rude and uninterested staff, and missed items.

My order arrived on time and was handed to me with a smile from the delivery driver. Two bags, one for the cold food and one for the hot. 

Inside a cardboard box was the item I was most looking forward to – the Choco-tella hazelnut chocolate spread waffle with strawberries. I’m not sure why they decided to call it Choco-tella when they could have gone full copycat with Notella, but at a cost of £7.75 I was expecting great things.

I remember the first time my family went abroad when I was about ten. My sister and I came across a waffle vendor outside a supermarket and the smell was so good that we blew our spending money on them. They were golden brown and fluffy, and the Nutella melted into a sauce that covered the waffle, our hands, our faces and an old French dog which turned out not to have rabies despite what Yvonne had told us about European animals.  

Kaspa’s offering was barely lukewarm, which meant that the choco-tella was sitting on top in a claggy quagmire. There was so much of it that it drowned out any slight taste that the soggy waffle might have had. The sharp strawberries countered a little of the overload of sweetness, but they were fighting a losing battle. The chocolate spread was so gluey that if someone fell into a vat of it they’d slowly sink down, to be discovered a thousand years later perfectly preserved, like a mammoth in a tar pit. 

I requested a tub of custard to accompany the waffle, and it was indistinguishable from the tinned type. Unremarkable to the point where it can only be described as kind of yellowish. 

I also ordered a peanut butter brownie stack for £5.85 with a scoop of ice cream for an extra £2.50, with the intention of presenting it to my daughter, Ground Zero, and her friend Vi as a surprise.

The surprise was definitely there, but it wasn’t as magical as I’d hoped. I opened the polystyrene box to see a dessert that looked like it had been thrown off a balcony. Did the person who packed it hate me? It looked personal, maybe they used to manage The Fleece.

Review: Penwortham pub leaves Blog Preston feeling Fleeced

And is it possible for just one layer of something to be “stacked”? I suppose if they didn’t specify what was in the stack they could argue that it was stacked on the carton, which was stacked on the table, which was stacked on the floor, which was stacked on whatever is under my house. Perhaps another mammoth in a Choco-tella pit. 

Anyway, it tasted quite nice, but was easily 70 per cent Choco-tella which wasn’t great as I already have a 1kg jar of its Italian cousin Nutella and a packet of crumpets in my cupboard, and that duo is hard to beat.   

The scoop of cherry gelato was still surprisingly solid, and got a thumbs up from Ground Zero and Vi, but was a bit of a skinny portion for £2.50. 

Lastly, and my biggest mistake of the evening, was a cherry Skittles milkshake with whipped cream, costing an eye-watering £7.15. Another grim surprise for my daughter and her friend, and one that won’t be bringing any boys to my yard, which was just as well because I was once again wearing a kaftan and some Christmas socks. The shake was an old person’s decision, based on: Young people like Skittles, young people like milkshake, what could be even more fun for them than a combination of the two? As it turns out, the answer is a taxi into town.

Despite the reviews I hoped that the desserts and milkshake would be good, especially as they were so pricey, but they were exceptionally poor. Considering there are so many excellent independent businesses in Preston making their own cakes and desserts for a fraction of the price, Kaspa’s need to pull their socks up. 

Have you ever seen a dog with rabies on a lead outside a French supermarket? Tell Yvonne not to be so daft in the comments below.