Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (Tunnock's Teacakes)

Member Name: Joker25

Product:	Tunnock's Teacakes
Date:	27/07/09 (156 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely

Disadvantages: Deceitful. Probably calorific, too

As much as I hate to be the one to do this, I have to reveal that Tunnock's Tea Cakes are a fraudulent treat. Admittedly, not on a scale that's going to make Bernard Madoff (am I the only one who thinks newsreaders really aren't getting satisfactory pun value out of his surname?) concerned for his enduring criminal legacy, or anything. After all, how deceitful can a chocolate and mallow concoction really be? However, they do slightly pull the wool over the eyes of the unwitting consumer.

Tea cakes, you see, are bun-type things with currants in. Should you venture into Marks and Spencer's café of an afternoon they will rip you off royally for the privilege of having one toasted and buttered and served alongside a nice cup of tea. If you try to toast and butter a Tunnock's Tea Cake you will inflict toaster carnage of a kind not seen since my mother hit hers with a mallet in the misguided belief that a gentle tap would 'fix' it (it didn't so much 'fix' it as 'annihilate' it).

So, unlike Ronseal, TTC (I'm lazy. The bright ones will figure out what the acronym stands for. To those of you who haven't, I say this: you're special.) does not do exactly what it says on the oblong yellow and red box. Nor does it adhere to the values suggested by its supermarket shelf placement. For, invariably, TTC are to be found in the biscuit aisle. Now, whilst not wishing to precipitate another McVities Jaffa Cake-style court case, I think we all know what biscuits are. They're fairly flat baked bread things (unless you're American. In that case, what you know as biscuits are scones. Keep up). Sometimes they have chocolate on, sometimes not.

TTC are not biscuits. Mainly because they're about as flat as the average page 3 girl is intelligent. They are dome shaped in a way that suggests further page 3 girl comparisons, but from which I shall refrain on the grounds of decorum. The base of the dome is made of a soft, crumbly cookie above which a big dollop of really yummy mallow cheerfully resides. The whole thing is encased in a thin layer of quite tasty chocolate.

To be honest, the cookie and the chocolate bit are nice enough in a generic confectionary way, but real draw is the mallow. Now, lots of biscuits contain mallow; Wagon Wheels for one (yes, they ARE smaller than they used to be). However, the mallow in these tends to be more of a solid, sweet foam. The stuff inside TTCs is a very different matter indeed: smooth, pillowy and incredibly sweet, it more resembles unbaked meringue mixture than anything else.

As I mentioned earlier, TTCs are probably the only confectionary that lies right to your face (with the possible addition of Nice biscuits, I suppose, depending on how posh your pronunciation style is) but I am a magnanimous soul and quite prepared to forgive them this shameless nomenclatorial transgression on the strength of how nice the mallow bit is. It's so yummy, in fact, that I'm slightly baffled by people who eat them in the way they would a normal biscuit. To eat them properly, your options are thus:

1. bite off the chocolate dome in small bits. Scoop the mallow out with either clean index finger or tongue (depending on whether you're with polite company or not). Eat the biscuit.
2. poke a small hole in the chocolate dome and scoop out the mallow with your little finger. Bonus points are awarded if the dome remains intact. Then eat the empty chocolate dome and cookie base.
3. carefully bite off the chocolate base. Lick the mallow out of the now-inverted dome. This is my personal favourite, but also the most risky as, if the chocolate dome cracks, you'll end up wearing all the mallow down your front. Not, therefore, one that the amateur TTC eater should attempt unsupervised.


Some things you should NOT do with TTCs are thus:

1. run up to a friend and smash the partially unwrapped TTC against their forehead. Initially, it will be hilarious, but then, inevitably, you will be sad that you wasted one of your lovely TTCs.
2. put a hole in the chocolate dome and try to hoover up all the mallow with a straw, as I did when I was 5. It resulted in a minor choking incident in the days before the words 'Heimlich' and 'manoeuvre' were the companionable bedfellows that they are now.
3. put them, unprotected, in your bag. Individual TTCs are only covered with red and white tinfoil and thus will get squished within 5 minutes and become a veritable magnet for all the dust, fluff and bits of grit that are lurking in the bottom of your bag.


I can't imagine that, after reading this, you need any more persuasion to go and procure your very own box of ten. However, if you WERE utterly outraged by the 'not a biscuit, not a tea cake either' revelation, I tell you this: they're currently on offer for £1.19 in Tesco. That's a mega-saving of a whole 9p! What are you waiting for? Go!

Summary: Yummy mallowy treats