All in the name of scientific enquiry

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:

  1. Fig roll (the best)
  2. Chocolate hob nob
  3. Ginger nut
  4. 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.

8 thoughts on “All in the name of scientific enquiry”

  1. Have you seen “How to dunk a doughnut: the science of everyday life” by Len Fisher? There’s a whole chapter on dunking. He concludes that the best way is to try and put the biscuit in horizontally (the biscuit, that is, not the dunker). There’s also a nice graph of tea penetration into various biscuits plotted against time. Perhaps not too surprising that gingernuts do rather better than hobnobs (though chocolate coating makes a difference). Over-lengthy hobnob dunking does, however, provide one with a sweet porridge to have for pudding when one’s finished the tea.

    Incidentally, the reason why cake goes hard while biscuits go soggy is simply that cake is cake and biscuits are biscuits. I seem to vaguely remember this coming up as some sort of legally-accepted definition (ie if something goes soft it’s a biscuit whereas if it goes hard it’s a cake) as part of a dispute into whether Jaffa cakes were really cakes or biscuits (something to do with how much VAT should be charged).

    Or I may have made it all up.

  2. Thanks very much for the book recommendation, Beardie. I was aware of the legal / semantic difference between cake and biscuit; it was the chemical / physical difference I was after. What (if anything) could you add to a biscuit or cake to make it behave like the other kind of thing?

    Update to the above: the same colleagues have now discovered that substituting cold water for tea means that a ginger nut is almost as good as a fig roll. Interesting…

Comments are closed.