A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down (Nicey and Wifey)

I read this book recently, having found it in a charity shop in Finsbury Park. It's the book of the A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down website. It's good fun and included lots of familiar biscuits and some I'd never heard of (a Bath Oliver?)

However, there are some glaring omissions: Rich Osborne (a buttery rich tea effort, also known as the Butter Osborne depending on who made it), Nice (a shortcake effort with sugar topping), Golden Crunch, Gypsy Creams and the white-creamed bourbon variants found in selection boxes (the book only mentioned the brown-creamed variety). Lemon Puffs got only a passing mention and their less common orange Puff brethren were missed altogether. What about Maryland Cookies and their generic choc chip cookie cousins?

Somewhat rarer so their omission is understandable were ginger thins and the now discontinued Gingerella. For those who don't recognise them, ginger thins were thin ginger bikkies the dimensions of a Rich Tea finger while the Gingerella was a round version. The All Butter biscuit is in the book, but not the delicious Almond Biscuit from the same stable.

Club biscuits got a mention, but not the various flavours (orange, mint and the fruit shortcake club in the purple wrapper). The Gold bar (the offspring of a love affair between a Club and a Caramac) was missing too. How about the plain chocolate Tunnocks caramel wafer, United or Rocky Bar - all good choccy-covered biscuit bars.

On the other hand, I found out what happened to the Puffin Bar and I'm guessing the Pelican Bar was voluntarily withdrawn when Puffins were deemed to be too close in name and logo to the Penguin. It was common wisdom among kids of my time that green Penguins were mint Penguins, blue were vanilla and red were strawberry, but you had to really concentrate to taste these (yellow Penguins didn't exist back then).

Maybe Nicey and Wifey are saving these for a sequel? Perhaps "A Nice Cup of Cha and a Bikkie" or "A Nice Cup of Coffee and a Cookie"

When I was a kid, we got a gift of some catering-size boxes of Jacobs Munchmallows (a bit like Tunnocks teacakes) from a family friend. For weeks on end, my sisters and I got 2 Munchmallows in our lunchboxes and the darn things made an appearance at weekend teatimes. It seemed to take forever to get through them. At first we brought them home uneaten, only for them to reappear the next day. Eventually we swapped them with school-friends or just gave them away. To this day I don't like marshmallow-based teacakes or marshmallow-topped biscuits.