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Your e-Mails

Jenny Noël Iced Gems Review	Nicey, Very excited to see Earl Grey and Iced Gems making it on to the site in the same week. But you omitted to mention 2 key features of the Iced Gem: (1) At least half the biscuits lose their icing in transit. The bad news is that every other Gem you pull out of the bag is thereby reduced to an 1850's original and tastes desperate. The good news is that when you get to the bottom of the bag there is a cluster of loose icing 'crowns' to be devoured: a sweet-toothed dream. (2) I seem to remember that as a kid there was a definite protocol to eating Iced Gems - which basically consisted of biting the icing off the top, and throwing the biscuit away, or putting them back in the bag before offering them to your 'mate' in the playground. See point 1 really - the biscuit part just doesn't taste nice. But they wouldn't be the same if the biscuit suddenly became desirable in its own right - the whole point of it is to provide a platform for the pure sugar of the icing, and to conceal the teeth-rotting truth about Iced Gems from a nation of health-conscious Mums. You might want to check that the junior staff actually ate the biscuits....... a close look might reveal a stash of icing-denuded Gems under the sofa, or in the pot plant....! Happy Christmas! Jenny PS - saddened by the total lack of festive content on the site. How about reviewing a few seasonal assortment tins?
	Nicey replies: Excellent points on the Ice Gems, you are quite right, I was unconsciously creating a fluffy utopia where the tops and bottoms of iced gems where always attached. As for Christmas selection tins, I had to look at 5 or 6 the other week. I liked the McVities 'Baked to Perfection' because it has a superb retro oval tin with pictures of old 1930's tins on it. The biscuits are Boasters, Hobnobs and Shortbread. I've also popped up the yuletide Holly up on the site.
Adam Baldwin	wow i saw u on the news this morning while i was waiting for news on the beagle 2. i was just wondering which way do u think is the best way to eat a biscuit?
	Nicey replies: Sitting down with tea. Hoorah! for Beagle 2, being a British Space craft it should make itself a nice cuppa when it lands and a digestive or two before it starts work.
John Kirkpatrick	Like many of your readers, I have been scouring the supermarket shelves for the long forgotten (but much loved) Royal Scot biscuits of my childhood. Alas, without success.  Never to be savoured again, my mother's home made concoction of two Royal Scot biscuits sandwiched together with strawberry jam, white icing on the top and finished with a jelly sweet from some dolly mixtures on the top. Or so I thought.  On a conference trip a couple of years ago, I was surprised to see some Royal Scot biscuits amongst some custard creams, bourbons (61mm!), etc. being supplied at tea-break.  It was obvious that they had formed part of some prepacked selection of biscuits.  My unanswered question was - were Royal Scot biscuits still being produced or had some hotelier found a very old pack? Regards, John Kirkpatrick
	Nicey replies: Well if you look at our Missing In Action section you'll see that the Royal Scot has indeed been out of action for a long long time. I maybe wrong, but I suspect that you had a Round Shortie which in your excitement mistook for the Royal Scot. Of course the Royal Scot was a a good bit thinner a typical round shortie. United Biscuits who made the Royal Scot do make lots of selections like Rover, which find their way into just this sort of situation. The tracking down of the white cream filled Bourbon from civil service meetings to a Rover selection confirms this.
Kevin Sowerby	Nicey, I’ve been following with interest the thread of the elusive chocolate garibaldi.  I can assure you that the biscuit did exist – in both plain and milk chocolate form!  Many years ago in my youth, I had a weekend job at the local Waitrose supermarket, who stocked the cherished biscuit.  This was late 70’s/early 80’s.  The brand was ‘Chiltonian’, a brand that seems to have gone into obscurity, just like the biscuit.  The plain chocolate version was my particular favourite; I always think plain chocolate and dried fruit go together well.  The biscuit always worked better if kept in the fridge, just to keep the chocolate on the firm side.  It also made separating the next biscuit from the garibaldi strip a little easier and stopped your fingers getting covered in chocolate.  I’m now living in the States, where any good biscuits are hard to come by, although the Yanks do make some acceptable fig rolls (can’t eat a whole packet of those though!).  Like my fellow expat in search of the ‘Dundee’, my electric kettle also raises some eyebrows.  It was the last one in the store and the shopkeeper still gave me a discount to take it off his hands.  It takes ages to boil using this weak American electricity but it still makes nice cup of tea, with a British tea bag of course.  They don’t know what they’re missing! Keep up the good work, Kevin
Andy Price HobNob Review	Nicey, I was just sitting here in the US as a Scouser in exile, having a nice cup of tea and a sit down at work, when I came across Peter's email regarding Dundee biscuits. I remember them clearly as well from my childhood days in Liverpool, and they were gorgeous, huge, chocolatey biscuits! I can't remember the last time I had them, but now they've been mentioned, I remember with fondness their taste. In the US we can get some decent British biscuits (like chocolate McVitie's and Hob Nobs), but most of what is sold is sub-standard cookie-like efforts. It may be worth your while to take a visit to the US to see the state of the biscuit and tea situation; almost inevitably, you get offered "tea" in dodgy cups with the teabag still in it, and the milk (or, horrors, cream) on the side. The Americans are, by the way, fascinated by my electric kettle (you know, the type every house in the UK has!) ... they still use whistling kettles on top of the oven - how 19th century! Anyway, your site is great - a nice way to remember England, and I steer both English and non-English friends to it (for educational purposes, of course). Cheers, la! Andy Price
	Nicey replies: Yes we had a big discussion about electric kettles and America back in September. The conclusions were that even those electric kettles that did exist in the States weren't able to boil water as fast as our Brit kettles due to their weedy 120V electricity. Hoorah! for proper dangerous power supplies. This seemed to explain the barbarous practice of making tea in microwave ovens, prevalent in the US. As for dodgy American biscuits, Biscuit Enthusiast Mandy has just brought me back a packet of something with peanut butter in, from New York. I have to have a sneaking regard for the Americans ingenuity in getting rid of their mountains of surplus peanut butter. Perhaps anybody driving one of those odd looking Chrysler Roadsters around the UK might want to get the door panels off just in case the Yanks have stashed a few gallons of spare crunchy peanut butter in there.
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