I stumbled across a group of colleagues in the kitchen at work, who were pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. They had raided the biscuit cupboard and taken out several different packets of biscuit, and then were saying things like “I think I could do 15 seconds with this custard cream”. This was often greeted with noises of disbelief, so the first person had to demonstrate by dunking the biscuit in question in their tea for that long. The thing was timed properly on watches, but the results sometimes contested due to how much of the biscuit was in/out of the drink, how hot it was, if white/black tea mattered etc.
In case the brand of tea or hardness of water etc. influence things, I won’t give the detailed results, but my theory is that the relative positions should be constant across the country. The order is:
- Fig roll (the best)
- Chocolate hob nob
- Ginger nut
- Custard cream / bourbon equally hopeless
Not tested: rich tea, digestive (too boring).
There was some call for fig rolls to be disqualified due to excessive fruit content. There was also discussion about quite why the custard cream and bourbon were so poor. My theory is that the sandwich nature means that the tea has twice the surface area on which to attack the biscuit and make it soggy (assuming it has dissolved the cream filling away). There was also discussion about why cake goes hard when you leave it but biscuits go soggy - is it the egg in the cake?
I don’t think this is something we should leave to the experts.