tea and biscuits anyone?

[YKL]

Sadly am too far from London to join in the next Burger Club expedition, so am having to console myself with other forms of comfort food.

Which got me thinking about how a nice cup of tea always seems to fix things. But somehow I seem to have fallen out of the habit of having a biccie or two with my tea ... now how did that happen?

I remember the days when it was an honour thing to make your rich tea finger as saturated as possible without actually losing it in your mug, a time when I hunted for the best choc chip cookies where the choc bits would melt but the rest of the cookie stayed intact. and there were bourbons, custard creams, and my dad had a thing about wafer biscuits (can you even buy these anymore?!) .. but obviously not jammy dodgers since that would be sacrilege.

Pete Kay had an excellent sketch about how chocolate hob nobs were the SAS of tea biscuits since they were able to withstand repeated dunking in scalding hot tea, with not a crumb lost.

So am I only the one who's lost this habit? have we all moved to latte and biscotti? In fact I only have biscuits in nowadays to feed plumbers or builders etc - but even that doesn't seem to be the same as it used to be.

There may be another explanation - i.e. that actually a nice wedge of cake seems to be a better choice nowadays!

Any thoughts?

[Suzi Edwards]

i think you're right, we all have coffee now so the dunking has stopped. i was reading an article recently and it suggested that vienoisserie (coffee and cakes for those who aren't used to my spelling) is the new tea.

[Hallie]

How topical. I surfed on over to e-gullet while enjoying my post-lunch cup of coffee and biscotti. The proof is in the eating, as they say.

[Andy Lynes]

I still drink a lot of tea and we always have biscuits in for the kids. My favourites are chocolate covered rich tea and chocolate covered malted milk, both of which are ace for dunking. I've lots count of the times a rich tea finger ended up as a soggy mass in the bottom of the cup. I don't like Hobnobs, chocolate covered or not, I find them too heavy and a little over sweet. Pink wafer biscuits are also on my hit list, although caramel wafers are fantastic.

[Hallie]

Pink wafer biscuits are also on my hit list

I thought that I was the only person on earth with a hidden passion for these little things. They are pure comfort food - remind me of afternoons spent with my grandmother as a child (she used to stick them in vanilla ice cream).

When compared with all of the other posh biccies on the supermarket shelves, the Duchy originals and the scrummy chocolate LUs, I always feel slightly embarassed about putting them in my trolley.

Glad to know you are out there, Andy.

My name is Hallie and I'm a recovering pink wafer lover.

[tomweir]

I like ginger biscuits for tea. Yeah, ginger nuts but fancy ones too.

If they ever release chocolate covered ginger nuts, i am in trouble.

Coffee needs no dunking at all but a pastry on the side.

[Mrs Woman]

I will dunk anything (except things with dried fruit in, yeuck), but faves are the whole range of Fox's Crunch Creams, especially the Golden ones.

I must also confess to quite enjoying dipping my Kit Kat fingers into my tea - is this wrong???

[MobyP]

a nice cup of tea always seems to fix things.

I think this should be the legend of the UK and Ireland Forum.

Possibly a tattoo after your 500th post.

[YKL]

would be very pleasing and flattering to know that it could be a slogan for the forum - but could we promise to avoid all forms of novelty teapots?

still on subject of dunking, have a vague recollection of some trick that Natalie Umbruglia (if that's the right spelling) did on a Graham Norton show which involved a penguin biscuit (or something similar). Process was that it was bitten off at two opposing corners, and then when dunked, you sort of suck up the hot tea through the biscuit (like a straw) and then as the hot tea hits your tongue, you whip out the biscuit and cram it all in your mouth. Keep meaning to try this but again ... no biscuits in the house!

must go and experiment .....

[bishwells]

Its an Australian thing, called a Tim-Tam slam, using inferior Australian Penguins.

Lived there for 2 years and was constantly disgusted. It turns a perfectly decent biscuit dunking oppurtunity into the equivalent of sucking hot mud through a straw.

[curlywurlyfi]

Its an Australian thing, called a Tim-Tam slam, using inferior Australian Penguins.

Tim-Tams are vile. My (Australian) boss brought some back after Christmas and they appear to be coated in chocolate-coloured candlewax. She was so proud of them, I didn't have the heart to tell her that The Grocer on Elgin Crescent is stuffed full of them.

[Janice]

still on subject of dunking, have a vague recollection of some trick that Natalie Umbruglia (if that's the right spelling) did on a Graham Norton show which involved a penguin biscuit (or something similar). Process was that it was bitten off at two opposing corners, and then when dunked, you sort of suck up the hot tea through the biscuit (like a straw) and then as the hot tea hits your tongue, you whip out the biscuit and cram it all in your mouth

This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but when we were students we would all sit round the table after dinner and consume coffee and Cadbury's Chocolate Fingers in this fashion. Very enjoyable but not for polite society...

[foodie52]

Carr's Ginger Lemon Creams go great with tea. Even the soggy mess at the bottom tastes good.

I've dunked McVittie's Dark Chocolate Digestives since university. The dark ages... I recently thought about trying to calculate how many packets of those I have eaten in my lifetime but the task became too daunting.

[mongo_jones]

my morning ritual consists of catching up on egullet while dunking biscuits in a hot cup of black darjeeling tea. my biscuit of choice is an indian chocolate bourbon (made by brittania--the factory in calcutta was pretty close to my grandmother's house when i was a child and there's all kinds of sense-memory associations there). when my local indian store is out of it i make do happily enough with french toasted butter biscuits. i can't tell if it is the tea or the dunked biscuit that i enjoy more.

in addition to biscuits, tea takes well to dunkings of almost burnt toast with a little bit of butter on it. another childhood favorite tea accompaniment (though not dunked) was crisp, dark toast, slathered in butter and then given a liberal sprinkling of powdered sugar. as i think about it, this may partly explain my cholesterol count.