Best GBBO Quote

[cbtreks]

Not a quote from the Great British Bake Off but a quote about it: "Noel Fielding comes across as the strangely heartwarming result of a thought experiment that asked 'What if A.A. Milne wrote The Vampire Lestat?'". That made me grin from ear to ear because I hadn't thought of it that way before but it sounds right. (It's from a tongue-in-cheek

Comments

[gillo]

Biscuits are more or less by definition crunchy, and usually thin. American-style "cookies" are bigger and tend to be more chewy or soft, but they aren't really considered biscuits, more something halfway to a cake.

There was even a legal case about it a while back. In 1991 the makers of Jaffa Cakes demonstrated that they were cakes, and thus food, rather than biscuits, which were taxed at a slightly higher rate. Eire followed suit, and accepted that as their moisture content was greater than 12% they were cakes. Another reason for the ruling was The product hardens when stale, in the manner of a cake.

In effect, a biscuit softens when stale because it absorbs moisture, but cake hardens when stale because it loses moisture.

So Paul Hollywood is right in this instance. Not that he isn't also annoying.

[cbtreks]

Thanks for the information. I was thinking it was essentially a cultural difference and it sounds like that's the case. I vaguely remember reading about the Jaffa Cake thing long after it happened. It made me think of an older advertisement for Fig Newtons - "They're not cookies! They're cake and fruit!" What do you call American-style cookies in the UK?

Now I want both Jaffa Cakes and Fig Newtons!

[gillo]

Mostly "cookies"! That is, slightly soft, chewy and about three or four inches in diameter, though not an even circle. Biscuits are mostly cut out with cutters, or stamped, so they are a precise, regular shape and size. Cheese biscuits don't necessarily have cheese in them, BTW, but are mostly savoury and designed to be eaten with cheese or other savoury spreads/dips.

[cbtreks]

And that explains a comment I heard PH make once that "these are more a cookie than a biscuit" which I mentally filed away as odd but not something I was extremely curious about at the moment.

I just looked up the old Fig Newton commercials on YouTube because I got to wondering if it was Nabisco poking a little fun at the Jaffa Cake suit and now I think it was. They came out in 1991 and had a court room setting, in which it was determined that Newtons are fruit and cake.