Mr Ristretto serves up monster shakes in Easter bunnies with hot cross buns

NOT content with serving up the regular sugar-filled monster milkshakes, this Lilydale cafe has upped its game in time for Easter. But have they gone too far with their new shake creations?

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NOT content with serving up the regular sugar-filled monster milkshakes, Lilydale’s Mr Ristretto has upped its game in time for Easter.

Cafe owner Corey Williams doesn’t do shakes by halves, so after only offering the Easter-themed shakes for a week last year (and selling about 200 of them in that time), he knew he had to bring them back.

Mr Ristretto owner Corey Williams with The Beachcomber Health Smoothie and one of the Easter shakes. Picture: Janine Eastgate

“There’s two major things that you want to see at Easter time — one is plenty of Easter eggs and the other is a nice tray of hot cross buns, so what we’ve done is we’ve chucked a hot cross bun dessert burger on top of an Easter bunny milkshake,” Mr Williams said.

“It was probably the only way we could elevate the level of the Easter shake from last year to make it more Easter-y.

“There’s a lot more goodness, a lot more sugar, and a lot more drama for the Instagram account — it’s going to light up social media.”

The Crunchie shake in all its glory. Picture: Janine Eastgate

The Beachcomber Health Smoothie, coming to the menu soon, is a healthier beverage option. Picture: Janine Eastgate

As well as the hot cross bun and Easter eggs, there’s the chocolate milkshake in the bunny, plus chocolate biscuits and Persian fairy floss.

And for people who might be nursing a chocolate hangover after Easter, the cafe has the solution to that, with a range of fruit salad monster shakes on the horizon.

“A lot of people are knocking out chocolate milkshakes and pressing Tim Tams into the ice cream on top, and everyone's trying to reinvent that, so we are reinventing it again with this healthier alternative,” he said.

The fruit salad shakes, which Mr Williams describes as “essentially fruit salad with a smoothie”, feature “at least eight different types of fruit”, whatever is fresh and in season, finished off with passionfruit sorbet and pulp “for theatre”.

“We don’t cater to everybody who comes in, we physically can’t do it, but we appreciate that we are who we are with our milkshakes and if we can reach out to a wider audience, it opens us up to be a bit more versatile,” he said.

That versatility is what pushes Mr Williams to constantly think about new products.

“We’ve found ourselves a pocket in the market where we can specialise in doing things like that — we found a hole in the market and we filled it,” he said.

“We experiment and play around — you’ve got to keep moving forward and evolving, otherwise people catch you.”