Custard Creams

The Custard Cream is one of the best looking biscuits out there. Indeed, growing up and peering in to the biscuit tin, it was always of particular interest with its baroque-looking design immediately setting it apart from everything else. I imagined it as some sort of extremely tasty relic from a bygone era. In recent times, I have come to understand that the designs are in fact of Victorian origin - yet another one for the pub quiz!

Taste-wise, if you let your inner Cookie Monster out and dive straight in, a combination of softness and crunch will be delivered to your taste buds as you munch your way through two relatively thick crumbly biscuit layers and a delicious vanilla-flavoured cream centre. Alternatively, for those more patience, a twisting action can be used to dislodge one of the biscuit layers for nibbling before moving on to the cream filling which can be enjoyed by itself by either licking at it - developing those vanilla flavours slowly and steadily - or by whipping it off in one - getting a full-on vanilla hit. Finally, for all the die-hard dunkers out there, you'll find that the Custard Cream has a decent dunking tolerance and, once dunked, has a much sweeter, richer flavour - albeit without the same crunch.

Other things worthy of note are that, in 2007, TRUfree conducted a survey of 7,000 people and found out that the Custard Cream obliterated its competition with nine out of ten people voting it their favourite. On the back of this success the Custard Cream entered the Oxford English Dictionary under the definition of "noun, biscuit with vanilla-flavoured cream filling". Furthermore, its biscuit ranking was bolstered earlier this year when OnePoll.com conducted a survey of 6,000 people to find out the nation's favourite biscuit and the Custard Cream came out number one. All in all, not bad going for a biscuit that has been with us since time dot.