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 |
Maddalena Feliciello |
Hello again,
Perhaps you'd care to try the following if ever in a similar dietary predicament to Ley and teatime is looming. The flour used is a ratio of 4:1:1 White Rice, Tapioca, Potato
Chocolate Kisses
4oz Golden Caster sugar (Billingtons) 4oz dairy Free Marg ("Pure" organic) 2 large egg yolks 7oz gf Flour mix 1oz cocoa powder 1 dessertspoon Xanthan gum 1 tsp gf baking powder 2 tsp Vanilla extract ½ bar Green & Blacks cooking chocolate
Beat the sugar, marg & vanilla till light and fluffy, beat egg yolks and stir in, sift in the dry ingredients and stir until well combined. Fit a medium star nozzle on a meringue bag and pipe small rosettes (about an inch in width) on to a well greased baking sheet.
Bake for 20 mins gas mk 4/180c.
Lift carefully onto a cooling rack with a spatula, these are quite fragile at first but will firm up when cold. Melt the chocolate in a basin over hot (not boiling) water and then dip the base of each ?kiss? into the chocolate and place up ended onto greaseproof paper to set.
Naturally these can be made with wheatflour, just omit the Xanthan gum.
Toodle-oo
M |
Nicey replies: Fantastic, a great service for all the biscuit challenged of the world |
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Thomas Newton |
Dear Sir,
I do not know how you feel about hybridised biscuit/confectionaries, but I would have to heartily recommend the practice of sucking tea through a Twixel.
My Girlfriend and I tried it last night for the first time, and it was rather splendid.
My apologies if this is not considering decorum.
Cheerio,
thomas |
Nicey replies: Yes, you are really discussing something on the very fringes of the biscuit time space continuum there. Its a confectionary matter really. |
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Catherine Ford |
I agree with whoever it was, possibly Oliver Snell, who mentioned the problems of defining chocolate bars and chocolate covered biscuits. I, too, treat such things as Kit Kats, Clubs, Breakaways, etc etc, as chocolate bars, not biscuits, as I have been brought up to see them in such a light after a similar experience of having one in my lunch box everyday at school. In fact I do recall being rather distressed one day, aged around 12, when one of my friends referred to my chocolate bar (I forget of which type) as a 'biscuit' and i insisted that it was a bar, upon which she told me that as it contained biscuit it must be a biscuit. But I ask you to question: is a wafer consisted a biscuit? For as Mr Snell correctly identified, a Twix contains a hard base made out of some form of baked biscuit, and yet is a chocolate bar, meanwhile a Kit Kat contains only wafer, and yet is considered by some to be a biscuit. I found your Venn diagr! am of biscuits useful, but still I feel it hasn't covered all areas, for example what about those pink wafer things? They surely aren't biscuits, and yet come in boxes of biscuits.....it all serves to make my little head spin. At this point we come to the conspiracy theory of biscuit manufacturers setting out to confuse us all, but that is another discussion entirely.
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Richard Fisher |
Dear Nicey
Tricky office problem for which we need your sage advice. One of the major pre-occupations at work is of course buscuits, as we work in a small village with no canteen or shop, buscuits have become a very major source of calories for many of us as we can't be arsed to make sandwiches in the morning of bring a nice healthy bit of fruit with us to the office. Attendance at internal meetings is excellent not because of the meetings but due to the availability of buscuits and we are forever inviting customers over for a chat at all hours of the day and night just to give us an excuse for "official biscuits". But enough background, now to the nub (or should that be nob of the problem).........
Outside of meetings there is, of course, a biscuit rota to which we all contribute and take it in turns to actually go out and buy a selection of goodies for the hordes......ahh I can see you are already ahead of me here, yes we are into the dangerous world of what your purchase of biscuits says about you in a public context.
We have no problem with those of us who buy the "value" packs as we are all pigs and are just looking for cheap sugar rushes, however one of our ilk insists on inflicting his poor taste in buscuits whenever it is his turn by always buying the wretched bourbon, a biscuit I have never seen the point of, which nobody else likes with the result that said person gets an unfair amount of buscuits 'cos they're the only one that likes them.
Despite public outcry he still insists on bying them so how do we stop him buying these frankly overated items whilst still getting him to buy his share?
Yours desperately
Fish |
Nicey replies: Yes Richard I see your problem. This is a much more common problem than you may think.
You are however in a good position at least this particular individual buy's his share rather than nothing at all, choosing to ponce all his biscuits from you. There are really only two ways out of this, persuade them to buy something different or grow to like Bourbons.
Lets take the first. A program of biscuit therapy and analysis. Expose them to other sorts of reasonably priced chocolate based biscuits and suggest they could buy them next time round. The Maryland Double Choc shouldn't be too much of a leap for them. This might break their buying cycle. Also try and find out what it is that is so compelling to them about the Bourbon, you may have to go back to early childhood memories here. Perhaps, they will recall another biscuit with similar emotional resonance, and they could get those next time.
Finally as you know I am fairly ambivalent towards the Bourbon myself, however, if you do have to eat them aim for a quality brand like Crawfords. We had some Elkes Bourbans last week and they were very poor. Maybe if you insisted on nice Bourbons you may grow to like them or they may find it too much hassle tracking them down, and choose something else.
Hope this helps. |
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Oliver Snell |
Nicey
All through my school days I used to take a packed lunch. This would
usually consist of a cheese roll (sometimes with pickle), a packet of
crisps, some raisins in a small plastic tub but always some form of wrapped chocolate covered item. I have never considered the likes of Penguins, Clubs, Trios, Breakaways, Viscount (mint or orange) and Kit Kats to be true biscuits - they feel too luxurious to qualify. I have seen references to these types of 'biscuits' on your site but surely an outer covering entirely of chocolate means that these should qualify as a subset of the Chocolate bar family. For example the Double Decker and Twix have a biscuit covered base but are never mentioned in the same breath as true biscuits - they are obviouslly chocolate bars.
What is your opinion on this and do any other people consider this to be
the case? Or do they have better things to do? |
Nicey replies: Good question.
This is a grey area and the Venn diagram we have created on our biscuits page attempts to show this as series of relationships rather than hard and fast boundaries. The biscuits you mention are all examples of 'Chocolate Covered Biscuits'.

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