Your ViewsKeep your e-mails pouring in, it's good to know that there are lots of you out there with views and opinions. To help you work out what is what, are now little icons to help you see biscuit related themes. And now you can see at a glance which are the most contested subjects via this graph (requires Flash 6.0 plugin). Please keep your mails coming in to nicey@nicecupofteaandasitdown.com | If you like, you can use this search thingy to find stuff that matches with any of the icons you pick, or use the fantastic free text search, Yay! | Your e-Mails |
Shell |
Dear Nicey (hi Wifey too)
Your site is an acknowledged leader in all things dunkable, and I often refer to it when arguing the cake vs biscuit issue with workmates. Now a new one has arisen (issue that is, not workmate).
A Canadian has joined our team and is insisting on calling bisuits 'cookies'. Now we're not dim, we acknowledge that cookie is a valid word, but for a large (c4 inch diameter), soft, chocolate chip type of creation. Not a digestive or Oreo type affair.
Can you help? Are there international guidelines, a sort of biscuit convention or anything? Or is she just wrong?
Yours in anticipation
Shell |
Nicey replies: Well we should respect other peoples cultures and traditions just as we would ask them to respect ours. She can certainly carry on calling them cookies as is her cultural heritage. She should however understand that nobody will know what she is going on about, as they are called biscuits here, and that she will run the very real risk of being left out of sharing the really good biscuits if she can't call them by the correct name.
Our next door neighbour is Canadian and he frequently makes the effort to call biscuits biscuits. (Woo I just wrote biscuits twice!) |
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Richard Chenevix-Trench |
Recently I had a great need to investigate ‘langue de chat’ biscuits, due to their allegedly superior dunking qualities. My dear friend swears she searches Fulham for these delicacies. Whilst searching for info under your biscuit section, I was surprised to see that biscuits, even for advanced level gourmands, always came in packets. Is that to insulate them in the North? I have a great love of biscuits in tins, and of course they are pretty and reusable tins. The spying of biscuit tins on upper shelves must surely warm the heart of the average advanced biscuit fancier?
Richard in Shad Thames London |
Nicey replies: I'm doing my utmost to empathise but not really making it. So your basic concern is that posh French biscuits should really be available only in tins? However, I certainly follow your basic premise that biscuit tins are a good thing, and it gives my a good excuse to use our biscuit tin icon. |
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Marion Banks-Wilkinson |
Well done Nicey, you got a mutation in your welsh greeting, the hardest thing to master apparently. They don't do half days on St David's day anymore as most of the children wouldn't turn up at all. Sadly dressing up ends when they go up to Juniors now. Infants and nursery age only, although you can buy the whole costume at Tesco or Asda these days, boys either wear Rugby jeseys or a bought Boys version costume of waistcoat and muffler with a Dai cap. very cute!
On the day itself they are trying to get parades and so on going ala St Patricks Day, but a bit feeble so far. Also there are regular requests for it to be a National Holiday, so far unsuccesful. And the fake cream mix is Dream topping , excellent on trifle or my speciallity Butterfly cakes topped with a piece of fresh strawberry.
Noswith da, butty love Marion |
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Nicky Bramley
Ginger Nut Review |
Nicey, Wifey, YMOS,
Two trips down memory lane after reading your site this morning:
Hiromi Miura's description of her biscuit-cake brought wonderful memories flooding back of my early courting days 25 years ago, when my Geordie boyfriend's mother used to make a very similar concoction out of ginger biscuits and a powdered fake whipping cream that you added to milk - neither I nor my Geordie (now) husband can remember the name of the weird stuff that encased the ginger biscuits. My (now) mother-in-law's other two puddings were arctic roll with evaporated milk, and tinned fruit salad with the very same evaporated milk. Culinary madness.
More nostalgia when I saw that you'd made welsh cakes. As my mother is Welsh I know that one welsh cake is never enough, and they definitely taste better with a big slather of butter on top, so I fear for your diet … If you ever need help to finish off a big pile of just-off-the-griddle welsh cakes, I'd be very happy to oblige.
Nicky |
Nicey replies: Morning Nicky,
I think the stuff was called Instant Whip, which must have harnessed the same sort of alchemy as Angel Delight to turn base cold milk into puddings, using nothing more than a whisk.
We shouldn't forget Sue's original message that prompted all this Welsh cake making. |
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Lindsey Sykes |
Dear Nicey
I wondered whether, in time of reduced calorific intake you have considered the caramel snack a jack. OK, these are not real biscuits as we know them, but, when needs must, a jumbo carmel snack a jack is, I find, an acceptable alternative. Although it is not truly of dunkable quality, I have found it does dunk fairly well into a slightly cooled down cuppa (you have to snap it in half first because its, well, jumbo, and you can only let it soak for about 7 - 9 seconds or risk disintegration, but at only 51 calories for the size and sweet taste of it I think it well worth a visit. I prefer not to dunk mine nowadays, instead I enjoy it with a lovely cup of spicey tea and topped with some sliced banana (the snack a jack that is).
With regards to Wifey and YMOS,
Best wishes,
Lindsay Sykes |
Nicey replies: I'm not sure under which circumstances I would find myself getting aquatinted with such items. It would have to be properly introduced I think as otherwise it seem that I had arrived there out of desperation, which obviously would be a bit undignified (no aspersions cast over your enjoyment of said items ). |
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