July 24, 2008, 4:40 am | Biscuit breakthrough is spreading
Shocking but true!
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The pace of technological breakthrough remains unabated and hot on the heels of the iPhone and that stuff you can spray round your house to get rid of the smell of dogs and mackerel comes spreadable biscuits. If any of you have been feeling an unfulfilled void gnawing at you every time you go the cupboard to get something to spread on your toast, because none of it tastes like those little continental biscuits you sometimes get given with your coffee when on holiday in France then your anguish is at an end.
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A couple of years back when asked to take part in a Channel 4 program about the KitKat when it was at the peak of its derivative product madness, I was asked to speculate what they might do with it next. On the spur of the moment I said 'some kind of spread that you could put on your toast'. I was fairly pleased with that, but I really honestly didn't think that some crazed biscuit doctors would ever make this leap. If they did I was also mainly expecting it to be in a squirty tube a bit like Primula Cheese spread and not a really quite big jar.
Belgian biscuit baker Lotus well known for their Caramalised Biscuits and Speculoos has found a way turning biscuits into a spread. This seems to be grinding them up with some vegetable oil, sugar and emulsifier much in the way peanuts might find themselves ending up in peanut butter. The upshot of this is that it tastes almost exactly like Speculoos, just is peanut butter tastes just like peanuts.
Beyond breakfast I can see this new technology being put use in two important areas. The first as new form of biscuit adhesive for making advanced types of birthday cakes. In fact I reckon you could pull off a half decent Jabba the Hut's sail barge sticking on the window shutters with a jar of this stuff. The second and perhaps more obvious use is in the manned exploration of Mars. Biscuit crumbs in zero G during the 3 year round trip could prove quite a problem scuppering the no doubt endless opportunities for a nice float around and a cup of tea presented by 18 months in space. Lumps of this should be much better behaved in space.
Demand in Belgium for the product has been overwhelming, and if there is any of it spare Lotus UK will try and bring it to our supermarkets.
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| Biscuit of the Week Fox's Whipped Creams |  |
I've been trudging through some fairly dismal biscuits recently. Strictly I should have reviewed them and shared their bleak and un-stimulating selves with you, but really where's the fun in that? So two packs of McVities Organic Yumbles, which were Digestives and Hobnobs by another name, only much smaller and more expensive and in need of more packaging to make them seem bigger, passed by without comment. These were followed by a pack of Burton's Bingo acquired in the often left-field Morrisons biscuit aisle. They were a first and also a last for Wifey and I. A small and troubled dollop of 'chocolate' recumbent on a small slab of gritty biscuit which was more of an autopsy to find out what killed it than a snack. Sad too, as Nanny Nicey has lots of excellent Bingo stories, like the time a fight broke out and they had to get South Wales Police in to break it up. So like a ray of sunlight Fox's new range of Whipped Creams have arrived at NCOTAASD HQ to restore our faith in biscuit innovation.
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Your FeedbackHiromi Miura |
Dear Nicey,Wifey and YMOS
I understand that Nicey enjoys D I Y, and your latest wonderful review brought me to FOX's website featuring an adorable panda (danda ?)
So, I'd like to introduce you a Korean biscuit in the shape of a panda's face, suitable for DIY lovers.
It consists of a blue pouch of some panda-faced biscuits, a yellow pouch of biscuits for base, two tubes of filling such as chocolate and strawberry flavour, and a sheet of stickers (maybe a free gift).
Here, we are required to complete the panda-faced sandwich biscuits ourselves, instead of the sandwich machine of the biscuit factory of HAITAI, manufacturer. The back side of the box, we can see the building instructions with diagrams. As you guess, it is very difficult for me to read Korean without the dictionary. As a grown-up, I know how to build up sandwich biscuits, so I skipped reading such a manual and made mine.
However, after tasting all panda biscuits,I finally found that I should have enjoyed them after freezing for 10-20 minutes, because on seeing the instractions well later, I mamaged to read a Korean language meaning "freezer" and a figure of "10-20".
Anyway, I was happy to have a lovely time completing sandwich biscuits myself, and that the lukewarm ones were good.
Sad to say, I cannot read the product name written in Korean printed on the box, yet, although I tried to look the Korean words in the dictionary. Therefore, I would like to call this biscuit "Banda" (biscuit/panda) by borrowing the idea of danda (dog/panda).
Thank you for reading,
Sincerely,
Hiromi Miura (Seoul Korea).
Fox's Whipped Creams Review |
| Nicey replies: Hello Special Biscuit Correspondent Miura,
They look like really good fun for YMOS parties and such. Perhaps the biscuits become super-conductive at low temperatures allowing them to hover in magnetic fields, perhaps that's what the Koreans are getting at.
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| Nice News | |
Custard Cream makes the OEDThursday 3 Jul 2008 Reporter: Nicey |
 |  | It seems that after more than a hundred years the Custard Cream biscuit has finally made it into the the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Whilst we are thrilled for the Custard Cream we can't help but feel that once again the OED is being dragged inexorably into the world of internet rumours, half truths and hastily cobbled together media reports of which this very item almost certainly contributes towards. | Last year's survey by wheat free specialist biscuit baker Trufree proclaimed the Custard Cream as the favourite in their limited range of products. Catering for coeliacs, 9 out of 10 people surveyed preferred Trufree's Custard Creams. This has been widely misinterpreted so many times through out the media as applying to all biscuits available in the UK that it has now acquired almost 'urban legend' status. It's a few simple media hyperbole away from 'The custard cream was voted the nations favourite biscuit last year' when in fact its the chocolate digestive. Having a page on Wikipeadia compound it by saying it won the non-existent "UK Biscuit of the Year Award" 12 times does little to help either, and even this gets misquoted as 13 times.
So it appears in a what must be a slow year for new words the authors of the OED have fallen for all this babble and rather embarrassingly called up the old timer who they've over looked since the reign of Queen Victoria. Far be it for us to denigrate the OEDs sources but when it appears that the jolly banter of the internet which we are proud to be a part of is evidently affecting their judgement you do start to wonder about the the overall integrity of information held within. Plus their Jaffa Cake definition is woeful too.
Personally I've never been keen on dictionaries in general. They are always promoted by people who are clever at spelling but colossally stupid at simple logic. Saying such glib things as 'if you can't spell the word look it up in the dictionary', a statement which contains two logical errors. First if I can't spell it correctly how am I supposed to realise this? As far as I'm concerned it's spelt perfectly. Secondly how am I supposed to find a word that I can't spell? You need to know which letters and where they go in-order to find it, with Dictionarys being organised that way you know. |
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Biscuits are crucial in business Monday 2 Jun 2008
Nuclear war could have led to weak tea Monday 5 May 2008
World's longest sofa comes to Harrods Tuesday 29 Apr 2008
Fig Roll Crisis goes mainstream Tuesday 22 Apr 2008
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| Boreda blant
As my Welsh teacher used to say. Of course I had no idea what she was going on about as my family were all from Essex. Yesterday being St David's day we decided to give Sue Northcotts traditional handed down Welsh Cake recipe a go, and here are the results, with supporting daffodil and leek.
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Made with currants, and butter again
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| Having been raised in Wales, although being English, I really did appreciate the celebration of the Welsh patron saint's day, as it was basically a jolly. In primary school the girls would come dressed in traditional welsh dress, being a long skirt knitted shawl over their shoulders and mad Welsh hat, think Witches hat with the point chopped off. They would also have a daffodil pinned to them.
The boys too came in traditional welsh dress, which was possibly what ever you normally wear with a leek pinned to you. Unlike the Prince of Wales's leek yesterday when he was on the telly, a small delicate affair, most were full size vegetables requiring a couple of safety pins and a bit of string to secure them to the child. Many boys would start eating their leek raw before morning break giving them an authentic welsh dragon breath by lunch time. Some of the boys who had the more feminine daffodils attached to them would eat them too in displays of male pride/stupidity.
By far and away the best thing about St David's day was that it was half day at school. Even now well in to my forties I find that a March 1st that falls on a weekend seems like lost opportunity. I feel that somehow I've missed out on my afternoon off. It was several years into my working life before I could fully stop my self going home at lunch time on St David's day.
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| Somebody somewhere thinks you would like a cake
Well its February 14th and the romantic ones amongst us are no doubt planning something wonderful for their special love tonight. Here at NCOTAASD HQ the YMOS and myself see this as a perfect opportunity to bake some cakes whilst Wifey is out earning a crust. It may appear that this is merely a way of circumventing my diet, but it passes as romance here - right!
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Made with Love.. and butter and quite a lot of sugar too
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