Jaffa Cakes are officially now a biscuit(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Is a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit?
It’s the age-old question, and most of us will know the only acceptable answer is cake. After all, the clue is quite literally in the name.
However, if you’ve always wanted the classic orange-flavoured treat to be a biscuit, we’ve got some good news for you.
McVitie’s has just combined two of its most iconic products to create something very exciting.
That’s right, you can now buy Jaffa Cakes Digestives.
The new biscuits have launched in Sainsbury’s (Picture: Sainsbury’s)
The limited-edition biscuits have hit the shelves in Sainsbury’s supermarkets, priced at £2.25 for a 250g pack.
The product has a classic Digestives wheatmeal biscuit base, with an orange-flavour caramel on top and a milk chocolate flavour coating.
From this description, you can see there are a few big differences between the classic Jaffa Cakes and this new item.
For starters, Jaffa Cakes usually have a dark chocolate topping, while the filling is typically more jelly-like than caramel.
But these changes haven’t stopped shoppers racing to snap up the biscuits, with food blogger @johns_snackreviews rating them a respectable ‘8 out of 10’.
He said: ‘They’re identical to the Digestives caramel for texture. It’s a chewy, stretchy Jaffa caramel. They’re not soft jelly like a Jaffa Cake.
‘Definitely Jaffa flavour rather than a chocolate orange, though.’
He added: ‘Decent! Love the collab and think they should do more things like this.’
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In the comments, @pingalingo proclaimed: ‘These are incredible!!! Taste amazing! I love them.’
While @real_nayn thought: ‘These look epic.’
Others thought they’d pair perfectly with a cuppa and called them the biscuit of ‘dreams’, and on Facebook, Rhian Jablonski went as far as to say they could be ‘the number one biscuit’.
Is a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit?
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A few eagle-eyed fans noticed that the product description for the Jaffa Cake biscuits says the topping is ‘milk chocolate flavour’ instead of just ‘milk chocolate’.
This means the Digestives topping no longer contains the required level of cocoa solids to be legally described as chocolate.
For a product to be classified as chocolate in the UK and EU, it needs to contain a minimum of 20% cocoa solids (including cocoa butter) and 20% milk solids.
This is also the case with McVitie’s White Chocolate Digestives, which are now simply called White Digestives, and have ‘white chocolate flavour’ written on the back of the packet.
Cocoa butter has been completely removed from the White Digestive recipe. Instead, the formula now contains a mix of palm and shea fats.
Chocolate Digestive taste test:
Metro recently compared the iconic McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives to several supermarket own-brand versions and was surprised to find the elite branded biscuit didn’t come out on top in the taste test.
It was Marks & Spencer’s Milk Chocolate Digestives (£1.25 for 300g) that proved victorious, garnering an overall score of 86 out of 100.
They scored highly for their ‘satisfying crunch’ and ‘memorable flavour’, and proved especially popular with the team when it came to dunkability (a crucial factor for any biscuit lover), with a rating of 18 out of 20.
‘The chocolate got nice and melty, the biscuit softened just enough but still retained some bite,’ read one of the reviews.
The M&S biscuits won our Metro taste test (Picture: M&S)
In comparison, ‘the nation’s favourite milk chocolate biscuit’, McVitie’s, only scored 61 out of 100 in our test.
The branded biscuits, which were the most expensive of the bunch (priced at £2.25 for 266g), failed to wow the team, being described as tasting ‘a little bit stale’.
The appearance wasn’t very uniform, and there was a disappointing lack of chocolate on top, according to our reviewers. The texture was also deemed a tad too ‘crumbly’, meaning it almost ‘disintegrated into sand in the mouth’, which wasn’t too pleasant…
That said, McVitie’s scored pretty well for dunkability (16 out of a possible 20), so there’s always that.
Pladis, which owns McVities, said it started using an alternative to cocoa butter in its biscuits because of a ‘business continuity issue with [its] coating supplier’.
A spokesperson for Pladis previously told Metro: ‘As proud custodians of biscuits and snacks that have been loved for generations, it is crucial that we continue to deliver our high-quality products consistently.
‘Recently, due to a business continuity issue with our coating supplier, we have carefully crafted a new recipe for White Digestives.
‘Sensory testing with consumers showed the new recipe delivers the same great taste and texture as the original they know and love.’
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