Milkshake

 A milkshake is a sweet, cold beverage which is usually made from milk, ice cream, or iced milk, and flavorings or sweeteners such as butterscotch, caramel sauce, chocolate sauce, or fruit syrup. Outside the United States, milkshakes using ice cream or iced milk are sometimes called a thick milkshake or thick shake or in New England  a frappe, to differentiate them from thinner forms of flavored milk.
Full-service restaurants, soda fountains, and diners usually prepare and mix the shake "by hand" from scoops of ice cream and milk in a blender or drink mixer using a stainless steel cup. Many fast food outlets do not make shakes by hand with ice cream. Instead, they make shakes in automatic milkshake machines which freeze and serve a premade milkshake mixture consisting of milk, a sweetened flavoring agent, and a thickening agent. However, some fast food outlets still follow the traditional method, and some serve milkshakes which are prepared by blending soft-serve ice cream  with flavoring or syrups.
A milkshake can also be made by adding powder into fresh milk and stirring the powder into the milk. Milkshakes made in this way can come in a variety of flavors, including chocolate, caramel, strawberry, and banana.
Types
Hand-blended  
Hand-blended milkshakes are traditionally made from any flavor of ice cream; additional flavorings, such as chocolate syrup and/or malt syrup or malt powder, can be added prior to mixing. This allows a greater variety than is available in machine-made shakes. Some unusual milkshake recipes exclude ice cream.
Milkshake-like recipes which use a high proportion of fruit and no ice cream are usually called smoothies. When malted milk is added, a milkshake is called a malted milkshake, a malt shake, a malted, or simply a malt. An ice cream-based milkshake may be called a thick milkshake or thick shake in the United Kingdom or a frappe  in parts of New England and Canada. In Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts, coffee syrup or coffee-flavored ice cream is used to make the local "coffee frappe" shake. Milkshakes with added fruit called batido are popular in Latin America and in Miami's Cuban expatriate community. In Nicaragua, milkshakes are called leche malteada.
Some U.S. restaurants serve milkshakes with crumbled cookies, candy bar pieces, or alcoholic beverages. The grasshopper milkshake, for example, includes crumbled chocolate cookies, creme de menthe liqueur, and chocolate mint ice cream.
Milkshake machines  
Restaurants with the highest volume of traffic, such as McDonald's, often opt to use premade milkshake mixtures that are prepared in automatic milkshake machines. These machines are metallic cylinders with beaters that use refrigeration coils to freeze premade milkshake mixtures into a drinkable texture. The number of different flavors that restaurants with automatic milkshake machines can serve is limited by the number of different tanks in their milkshake machines, so such fast food restaurants usually offer fewer flavors of milkshakes.
The smallest automatic milkshake machines are counter-mounted appliances that can make a single milkshake flavor using a stainless steel tank. Large restaurants that wish to offer multiple flavors can either use floor-mounted multi-flavor machines with multiple 5 liter stainless steel barrels or use carbon dioxide-based machines that mix the flavors during dispensing. Some fast food restaurants use "thick milkshake" machines, which are single flavor machines with a stainless steel tank.
Soft serve mixed with syrup  
Some fast food restaurants such as Dairy Queen serve milkshakes which are prepared by blending soft-serve ice cream  with sweetened, flavored syrups such as chocolate syrup and fruit-flavored syrup.