Starbucks Strawberries & Cream Frappuccino Blended Beverage

The Starbucks Strawberries and Cream Frappuccino costs £5.80 for a Tall and carries 331 calories in a Grande with no caffeine. Frappuccino creme syrup, strawberry sauce, milk and ice are blended and topped with whipped cream.

It is the lightest of the four cream Frappuccinos and the one that tastes most like the thing it is named after. Strawberry sauce carries an acidity that chocolate and caramel do not, and that sharpness cuts the dairy in a way the other cream blends have no answer to. The colour comes out pale pink rather than the deep red of the sauce, because the milk dilutes it, and the finished drink reads closer to a strawberry milkshake than to fruit.

Zero caffeine across every size. Sugar is 37.5g in a Grande out of 39g of carbohydrate, and fat is 17g with 11.7g saturated. Calories run 245 in a Tall, 331 in a Grande and 364 in a Venti, which puts a Grande here 56 calories below the cookies and cream version.

Acidity also changes how it behaves as it melts. Fruit acid keeps the flavour recognisable well past the point where the blend has thinned, so this is the cream Frappuccino that survives being left standing with the most of itself intact. A chocolate blend in the same state tastes like cold milk; this one still tastes of strawberry.

The pale pink colour is a fair guide to the recipe. Strawberry sauce goes into a lot of milk, so the deep red of the sauce dilutes to something much softer, and a drink that comes out bright red has had considerably more sauce than the standard build. Neither is wrong, but the colour tells you roughly where the sugar has landed before you taste it.

A Tall without cream is close to 170 and is the order that makes sense for a child. Half the strawberry sauce takes roughly 9g of sugar off and leaves the drink recognisable, since the creme syrup carries the body. The Chocolate Cream Frappuccino is the chocolate equivalent, and the Pink Coconut Refresha is the far lighter strawberry option at 121 calories in a Grande.