Comments on: All in the name of scientific enquiry

By: Alison

Alison — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:27:03 +0000

Cakes have eggs? Jaffa cakes do (well, Lidl’s fake Jaffa cakes do) so I am taking that as proof they are cakes.

By: penny thoyts

penny thoyts — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:59:13 +0000

wonderful. My kind of science.

By: jan

jan — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:56:26 +0000

So it’s not exactly the _working_ in an office that you miss then, Em?

By: Em

Em — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:01:12 +0000

this is why I miss working in an office sometimes. (though not often I have to admit).

By: katy

katy — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:46:30 +0000

Oh, and the answer: http://www.robertprice.co.uk/robblog/archive/2003/6/Why_Do_Stale_Biscuits_Go_Soft_.shtml

By: katy

katy — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:43:46 +0000

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes I particularly like the comparison with George Bush
http://kerroncross.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html You didn’t make it up!

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:48:39 +0000

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…

By: Beardie

Beardie — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:36:17 +0000

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.