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Jaffa 'Cakes' & Biscuit Taxonomy

Are Jaffa Cakes Biscuits or Cakes?

  • Biscuits

    Votes: 5 23.8%

  • Cakes

    Votes: 9 42.9%

  • Both

    Votes: 6 28.6%

  • Neither

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Total voters
    21
Comfortably Numb said:
:yellowc: for bringing this up, reminding...

View attachment 15239
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clearly a cake. a delicious giant cake.

not wanting to go off topic but i just want to leave this here

giant-fancy-french-cakes_135611.jpg
 
I am not especially keen on Jaffa Cakes, that's my "hot take" for this thread. They are fine, no idea why people fetishize them so much though.
 
I've heard of Jaffa Cakes, never seen one in real life, though. Are they anything like McVities biscuits?

Edit - oops, I've just looked it up and see that McVities makes a lot of different kinds of biscuits, including Jaffa Cakes. I meant the fruit shortcake ones.
 
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Jaffa cakes are great and I'll tell you why: three tastes and, crucially, three textures: crisp chocolate, smooth jelly, slightly chewy sponge.

And they're biscuits for the same reason tomatoes are fruit: function. Airport security don't confiscate your glasses, because they're liquid. If somebody asked you whether you liked cakes, and you answered in the affirmative, and they brought out a packet of Jaffa Cakes, you'd think they were mad.

Jaffa Cakes: functionally biscuits.
 
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Yithian said:
Jaffa cakes are great and I'll tell you why: three tastes and, crucially, three textures: crisp chocolate, smooth jelly, slightly chewy sponge.

And they're biscuits for the same reason tomatoes are fruit: function. Airport security don't confiscate your glasses, because they're glass. If somebody asked you whether you liked cakes, and you answered in the affirmative, and they brought out a packet of Jaffa Cakes, you'd think they were mad.

Jaffa Cakes: functionally biscuits.
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I'm with you on the JC biscuit/cake taxonomy.
 
Ermintruder said:
Surely the demarcator for this eternal paradox is simple: cakes are soft when fresh, and become hard when stale. Conversely, biscuits are hard when fresh, and become soft when stale.
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I think this is the answer.
 
I was once assaulted with a Jaffa cake during an office battle.

A colleague (who I always suspected of being a closet ninja) was speeding past on a reversed castor chair, being pushed by that girl from accounts (they were both wearing small dustbins as helmets, so you know what I was dealing with).

He spun a standard (perhaps stale and hard) Jaffa cake towards me, with the slick flick of an olympic discus expert, and in Matrix slomo it weaved an inescapable path for my forehead.

I swear I saw it coming from over thirty feet away, but had no way to dodge it. It seemed to be lethally-aerodynamic, and it managed to oscillate up-down-up-down-up in a curving path, then did a full kinetic transfer of every iota of stored energy into my damn head. It was EVERY bit as painful as an airsoft pellet impact, and the Jaffa fell, dented, to the ground (as did I). My head hurt for DAYS (I was so angry, if I'd been able to catch my drive-by assassin, I'd've stapled them to the watercooler).

There's something oddly dangerous regarding the exact mass-to-size-to-shape combination of Jaffa cakes, especially if they've slightly dehydrated. I presume that the chocolate dimpling also acts like the surface of a golfball, adding to the flight endurance. You don't need shuriken throwing stars....just carry a bandolier of dried Jaffas.
 
Ermintruder said:
I was once assaulted with a Jaffa cake during an office battle.

A colleague (who I always suspected of being a closet ninja) was speeding past on a reversed castor chair, being pushed by that girl from accounts (they were both wearing small dustbins as helmets, so you know what I was dealing with).

He spun a standard (perhaps stale and hard) Jaffa cake towards me, with the slick flick of an olympic discus expert, and in Matrix slomo it weaved an inescapable path for my forehead.

I swear I saw it coming from over thirty feet away, but had no way to dodge it. It seemed to be lethally-aerodynamic, and it managed to oscillate up-down-up-down-up in a curving path, then did a full kinetic transfer of every iota of stored energy into my damn head. It was EVERY bit as painful as an airsoft pellet impact, and the Jaffa fell, dented, to the ground (as did I). My head hurt for DAYS (I was so angry, if I'd been able to catch my drive-by assassin, I'd've stapled them to the watercooler).

There's something oddly dangerous regarding the exact mass-to-size-to-shape combination of Jaffa cakes, especially if they've slightly dehydrated. I presume that the chocolate dimpling also acts like the surface of a golfball, adding to the flight endurance. You don't need shuriken throwing stars....just carry a bandolier of dried Jaffas.
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Office politics.
 
Pringles are not crisps (post #42) due to a 2008 ruling in the London High Court that they contain only 42% potato. Owners Proctor & Gamble were therefore exempted from paying VAT on the product.
Except that the ruling was reversed in the Court of Appeal in 2009 and Pringles became crisps again. New owners Kellog confirmed in 2012 that they were paying VAT on Pringles.
An aside: I search this on Google, but according to the EU Google is not a Search Engine. It does not visit every site, it has a Right to be Forgotten policy and will not list sites who have bots telling it not to. In fact there is no 'search engine' on the web that meets the current EU criterion for being defined as a search engine.
 
Bad Bungle said:
In fact there is no 'search engine' on the web that meets the current EU criterion for being defined as a search engine.
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This is astounding (nb I am being literal, and not sarcastic). One that surely must meet the required spec is the metasearchengine www.dogpile.com, since it searches search engines.

(And I understood that www.altavista.com was a really-real seach engine, because it used IIRC a 'non-trending algorithm'. Like AskJeeves, which is presumably no more)
 
Ermintruder said:
This is astounding (nb I am being literal, and not sarcastic). One that surely must meet the required spec is the metasearchengine www.dogpile.com, since it searches search engines.

(And I understood that www.altavista.com was a really-real seach engine, because it used IIRC a 'non-trending algorithm'. Like AskJeeves, which is presumably no more)
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OMG.... I grew up with altavista!

This maybe worth highlighting...

http://www.searchenginehistory
 
Comfortably Numb said:
Evidently more than one meaning, my good fellow... (News to me as well!).
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The jaffa = seedlesss (low sperm count) joke is taken from an old episode of Only Fools And Horses. Whether the writer John Sullivan made it up or had heard it in use before ive no idea but i remember at the time it was treated as a brilliant original line. Similarly with the description of an ugly person having "a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp"..i distinctly remember it being coined in OFAH but it has since somehow entered the national lexicon as if its an old and organically generated expression.
 
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