As many of you know, I love food and I love to travel the world and few things are better to me than sampling the culinary delights of the culture I'm visiting. Whether it's sipping the local tea and eating quinoa soup sat on a mountain top high in the Peruvian Andes whilst watching the sun rise over the Incan Sacred Valley to sitting on the banks of the Nile eating a felafel bought from a local street vendor in Aswan, I love to try the local food and drink and then write a review to tell you all about it.

On my latest sojourn, I stayed a little closer to home and holidayed in the Welsh borders. Whilst I was gathering provisions for my epic hike up Pen y Fan, I happened upon a local delicacy that is carefully crafted in the nearby town of Cwmbran (a name evocating mystery and exoticism - it means valley of the crows). Never one to shy away from new foods, I stocked up on them figuring that if I didn't like them, I could always give them as a present to people I secretly hate. I mean everyone knows that "local delicacy" means "horrible tasting food to persuade gullible tourists to eat as a practical joke" don't they? Plus they were on special offer of two packs of eight biscuits for 99p, which I reckoned was a bargain.

So anyway, I figured I should share the mystery and the exoticism with you. I'd like to pretend it's because I'm nice but in all honestly, I'm getting a bit fed up of people thinking I'm pretentious for liking things like quinoa or felafel and the more I spread around the local delights that I've found, the less chance I have of being told yet again that I'm irredeemably middle class. So *drumroll* - I'd like to introduce you all to a novel culinary delight that I'm certain none of you will ever have heard of before. It's a baked epicurean delight that goes by the quirky name of the Jammie Dodger.

===What is a Jammie dodger?===
A Jammie Dodger is a form of biscuit. Biscuit is a kind of sweet baked product, a little bit like a hard cake and similar to an American cookie.

The name "biscuit" comes originally from the latin and means "Twice cooked". This refers to the original process of making these so-called biscuits which featured two distinct cooking phases and enhanced the preservation potential.

However, modern day biscuits are seldom cooked more than once unless they've gone a bit stale and you want to pep them up a bit. Or, of course, you want to serve them to guests and pass them off as "home made, fresh out of the oven, take care not to burn your mouth!" If you want to try this, my personal tip to you is: try bashing them a bit around the edges to give them that home-made oddly-shaped-blob look, it looks far less like a mass-produced item that way.

I really liked the way that the alternative spelling of the word "Jammy" gave it a quaint almost rustic feel to it because nothing says home made quite like unusual alternative spellings now does it? Again, it gives it a personal touch that I feel is sadly missing from so many mass-produced products.

===The product===
The biscuits are a delightful golden brown in colour, about an inch and a half across, circular in shape and two of them are sandwiched together with a jammy middle between them. This jam fuses them with the strength of superglue and will mean your children can never do that gross thing where you eat one biscuit then the other then finally finish off with the filling in the middle. Or, er, so I've heard. Because I'd never do that.

The upper biscuit has a heart shaped hole in through which you can see the red jam, which means that they would be an ideal valentines day present. Assuming of course that you haven't taken your beloved on a gastronomy holiday near Cwmbran! Because after all, it wouldn't be very special once they found out you got 16 biscuits for a quid on special offer and scoffed the other fifteen now would it? In order to subtly find out if they are well travelled enough to have heard of them, my advice is: find out if by asking them whether they prefer seaweed raw, as laver bread (a Welsh delicacy, see, just like these...) or in sushi? Can't fail as a pickup line, I'm telling you.

The biscuits are shortcake in style and quite reminiscent of rustic highland all-butter shortbread in both texture (crumbly) and taste (apart from the lack of buttery taste). I found them to be quite good taste-wise, but I had to try quite a few of them just to be sure. Sadly, I ate the whole pack far too quickly to let anyone else try any, so had to go back and get some more.

===Nutrition===
Each biscuit contains 83kcal, 1g protein, 13.4g carbohydrates, 6.8g sugar, 2.8g fat (1.3g saturated), 0.3g fibre and a trace of salt. Which makes them ideal hiking food you'd suppose. However, they turned out to be a bit rubbish for that because they were really crumbly and once the pack was opened at one end, it split along the length and they all fell out and fell apart all over the inside of my backpack. Which did have the advantage that for a fortnight afterwards I could have a snack just by sucking the crumbs out of my pullover.

===Ingredients===
It contains wheat flour, raspberry flavoured plum jam (seriously, what is this? Are they easily confused or something? Isn't regular plum jam good enough?): glucose-fructose syrup, plums, sugar, glycerol, citric acid, sodium citrate, pectin, anthocyanins, flavouring, sugar, vegetable oil, golden syrup, ammonium hydrogen carbonate, sodium hydrogen carbonate and salt.

===Will it kill me?===
It's a biscuit. You can never trust a biscuit. They could kill you stone dead with death in many deadly and fatal ways. For instance, you may choke on it. Or die if someone dropped a tonne of them onto you. Or if you eat too many of them and rupture your innards. Or if you eat too many and put on weight then asphyxiate when you try to fit into that perfect outfit. So just to be safe, I recommend that if you accidentally buy some biscuits, you'd better let me try them first just to be sure. If I die, don't eat them. If it's a borderline case and I'm not sure whether or not it's delayed-action fatal, I'll eat a few of them and get back to you a few days later and tell you if it's safe to buy another pack (what, you don't think there will be any left by then do you?).

I checked the label of the Jammie Dodgers closely and saw the magic words "May contain milk". Hurrah and huzzah, the magic disclaimer that's so vague it's meaningless: May contain. Which to me means "Omnomnomscoff *cross fingers*". As those of you who just need to be a bit careful know, that often just means it's a posterior-covering maneuver so the manufacturers don't get sued - it's often put on products that have never seen a cow in its life but are made on the same production line as buttery good baked delights (which probably also don't have any butter because it's too expensive). Or possibly the factory is run by our bovine friends, who knows? Either which way I figured I'd risk it because it's just "May" not "Does". Just don't tell my asthma specialist or she'd tell me off because she doesn't think that eating something really nice then having my inhaler is a valid lifestyle choice that should be supported by the NHS. Some people, eh?

Coeliacs: you are out of luck. Like usual. It's got gluten and wheat, so it'll kill you. Don't eat it!

Also, sorry, but you aren't going to like the next bit where I tell you about the happy dance that I did when I found it was a gluten-y product without big lumps of cow juice in! Hooray! Not eating dairy means I should have more sympathy for your plight I know. But I like gluteny food (as do you I bet) and your gluten free food is just grim, tastes like they replaced the flour with grit and then they charge you 50 quid for the privilege. So, sorry about that. I know I should show more solidarity, but instead my mouth is too full of jammie dodgers.

Plus you know I wouldn't mind (each to their own and all), it's just that us dairy-free types end up with your GF food too, if we get anything at all. Supermarkets really like to share the pain and to kill two birds with one stone and foist us non-dairy people off with a couple of the fouler tasting gluten-free brands and whack good old whey powder in everything else because it's cheap and it's fun to poison naive asthmatics. So, yeah, I'm prejudiced against GF food because I don't want to have to eat it just to get something with no dairy in.

===Conclusion===
If ever you find yourself in Wales or the nearby regions, I do strongly recommend that you try this local delicacy. Its taste is coupled perfectly with its low price.

===Edit===
Hmmm, what's that you say, you heard of these already? They're not really a local delicacy? I was tricked into buying factory baked biscuits that are actually available in nearly every shop in the country you say?

Oh.

Sheesh, do you mean to say that I've wasted my time and my effort buying packs of them just to help with your education? And I went to the trouble of eating them (at great personal risk I'll have you know) and it was all for nothing? Honestly, the things I have to do in the name of writing a review. I'm gutted I tell you. Devastated. Can we just perhaps pretend that you haven't heard of them?