Tuesday 22 March 2016

Biscuit Blog: Crawford's Shortcake

Crawford's Shortcake biscuits


It is important to distinguish shortcake biscuits from shortbread biscuits.  Shortcake biscuits are also pale in colour but have far more of a snap than shortbread which is typically very crumbly.  Shortcake have far less sugar on them, though as I have noted before the amount of sugar dusted on shortbread seems to be decreasing.  Shortcake biscuits have a less creamy taste than the shortbread but are have a rich flavour that is both different from a rich tea and from a malted milk; they are thicker than both of these.  When I was a boy these were popularly known as 'tractor biscuits' because the diagonal shape about the rim of the biscuits look like the patterns left in the mud by tractor tyres when they have been driven along an unsurfaced road.

These shortcakes from Crawfords are not bad.  They lack moreishness and unfortunately have a bit of a 'burn' in the taste which can sometimes happen with cheap versions of supposedly creamy biscuits, most often occurring in malted milks, though not among the recent batch I have sampled.  There is a snap to these but almost a sour aftertaste which feels wrong.  It is almost as if they have gone too far in trying to get the shortcake flavour.  However, unlike some biscuits I have tried recently, they actually taste along the lines of what they are supposed to be.

Rating:
*****

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