Sometimes you have to stare destiny in the face. My journalistic career hasn’t for the most part, required me to visit war zones, although the pubs of Ashton under Lyne on a Tuesday night in January are no bloody picnic.
Nor, despite having judged awards as prestigious as the UK’s Best Pub Sausage, and the Scampi Pub of the Year, have I ever succumbed to the ethical dilemma of taking payment in cash or kind in order to influence the result. Largely, I suspect, because no one was ever daft enough to think any of it mattered.
Some things have to be challenged, though. In the run-up to Christmas this year, retailer Marks & Spencer, itself a British institution, has taken it upon itself to reinvent, or at least revamp, two other British icons – the Custard Cream and the Bourbon Cream.
The M&S biscuit aisle currently offers two variants on each – namely, Extra Cream Custard Creams, Extra Cream Bourbon Creams, Outrageously Chocolatey Milk Chocolate Custard Creams, and Outrageously Chocolatey Milk Chocolate Bourbon Creams.
Until now, the idea that there might be something missing, or somehow wanting, in the originals has never occurred to me. The Custard Cream has been around since early in the last century, and while there may have been the occasional compromise on ingredients, it regularly makes it onto lists of the public’s favourite biscuits.
The Bourbon Cream is of a similar vintage, and while it appears to have no direct relation to the royal dynasty that ruled much of Europe, it could undoubtedly have stood in for cake in Marie Antoinette’s well-meaning but somewhat ill-judged dietary advice to the poor of Paris.
So, what do the new M&S variants bring to the party? Are they genuinely an improvement on the originals? Armed with a pack each of the McVitie’s tried-and-true originals, and the new arrivistes, I set to work.
McVitie’s Custard Cream. The biscuit itself is crisp and has a slight salty note, which helps to offset the sweet hit of the creamy filling, with has a rich, lingering mouthfeel that stops just short of being cloying, but definitely cries out for a slurp of tea. In my memory, these used to have a much more distinct vanilla flavour. It’s a decent biscuit, though.
M&S Extra Cream Custard Cream. Unlike the McVitie’s version, the ingredients for this do actually include milk, more exactly dried skimmed milk, which presumably is enough to make that “Extra Cream” descriptor a legit claim. The M&S biscuit is a bit sweeter than the McVitie’s original. The mouthfeel definitely justifies the promise of being extra creamy, but overall, you have to work hard to detect any specific notes of vanilla custard beneath a mouthful of very sweet biscuit.
M&S Chocolate Coated Custard Cream. I’m guessing this is the Extra Cream Custard Cream with an added layer of thick chocolate. The addition of milk chocolate makes it a very sweet biscuit – perhaps overly sweet. The biscuit inside delivers a satisfying crunch when you bite into it, but it’s hard to taste the biscuit over the dominant chocolate flavour. The cream filling puts up more of a fight, adding a custard note to the mix, but ultimately it’s the chocolate that does the heavy lifting, flavour-wise.
McVitie’s Bourbon Cream. Full disclosure, this was far and away my favourite childhood biscuit, and it doesn’t disappoint. The biscuit has a very satisfying crunch and delivers a distinct bitter chocolate note, making its less immediately sweet that many chocolate biscuits. The cream filling, although definitely sweet, still has a dark chocolate richness. I’d forgotten how much I like these.
M&S Extra Cream Bourbon Cream. The biscuit is more crumbly than the McVitie’s original, so there’s less of a snap when you bite into it. As with the M&S custard cream, the creaminess of the filling seems to have been achieved at the expense of some of the character of the McVitie’s original, in this case the more bitter chocolate notes.
M&S Chocolate Covered Bourbon Cream. As with the custard cream, this is presumably the Extra Cream Bourbon with an added layer of thick chocolate, and in this chocolate vs chocolate contest there was only going to be one winner. Much of the bitter chocolate flavour elements of the biscuit are inevitably muted by the thick milk chocolate coating. It’s undoubtedly a great chocolate biscuit, but is it still a Bourbon?
The two M&S chocolate coated creations both carry the strapline “more chocolate than biscuit”, and maybe that’s not the killer claim that somebody in the marketing department thought it was. They’re all about the thick milk chocolate coating, which raises the question of what the two classic biscuits bring to the party.
As for the M&S extra cream versions, they’re different enough to the McVitie’s originals to offer a choice. M&S makes some great luxury biscuits, and I have no doubt I’ll enjoy some this Christmas – but while biscuits come and go, the McVitie’s Custard Cream and Bourbon Cream are century-long survivors for a reason.
Sometimes you have to stare destiny in the face. Other times, though, it’s really just about eating biscuits.
