Reading Nigel Slater's Eating For England made me crave Tunnock's Tea Cakes.
Nigels wonderful writing brought back fabulous memories of friends birthday parties. Not unlike Nigel Slater, I never ate these at home, they were something my parents would just not buy, despite my pleading.
For those of you who don't know about these little delightful mouthfuls the product consists of a small round shortbread biscuit covered with a half-dome of marshmallow which is then encased in a thin layer of milk or plain chocolate and wrapped in a distinctive red and silver foil paper for the more popular milk chocolate variety, with blue and gold wrapping for the plain.
What really sets the Tunnocks apart from its Tea Cake brethren is its marshmallow which is based on egg white rather than gelatine. This gives it a consistency somewhere between shaving foam and bath sealant. The process that places this stuff on the biscuit base and then covers it in chocolate must be a miracle of biscuit engineering given the super sticky nature of the mallow.
As Nigel points out half (if not more) the fun of eating a tea cake is the unveiling of it; painstaking peeling off the delicate foil, hoping the tea cake will be pure and unmarred, shame then that 99% of the time they are covered with hairline cracks, ah well that doesn't distract from the taste.
I'm off to sink my teeth in to one right now.
