getbracknell - Reading Evening Post

Biscuits and tea are time-honoured partners in crime. On their own, each are very nice, together they are something amazing.

Way back someone else must have realised this and come up with the idea of submerging their biscuit in their tea then eating the resulting damp biscuit to discover a taste sensation.

Nowadays it has become something of an art. Everyone has their favourite biscuits to dunk and their favourite beverages to dunk them in.

Up until recently I was a bit traditional. I thought a ginger nut dipped in a mug of tea was as good as it gets. 

The ginger nut is a good, solid biscuit that can withstand a hearty dunk.

You can get them nicely soaked in tea and they still maintain a bit of rigidity and some of their own taste – unlike things like the rich tea or the inaccurately named ‘nice’ biscuit which become a tasteless paste if you so much as wave them at a brew. 

Anyway, a whole new world opened itself up to me the other day.

I’ll set the scene. It was a Sunday evening. I was full of roast dinner and apple crumble and letting Sunday night telly sap away at my brain (when will programmers realise that if they put something good on at exactly the time that everyone changes the channel as Songs of Praise starts they’ll have a captive audience?) and I started to get a little peckish.

I pottered through to the kitchen to see what I could find. In the cupboard I found a packet of delicious dark chocolate digestives. Unfortunately I had forgotten they were there and they had gone stale.

Disappointment turned to curiosity when I spotted a jug of cold custard on the side.

Boldly, in a similar vein to other pioneers like Neil Armstrong and Christopher Columbus I plunged my biscuit into the custard.

It was delicious.

It made me think that people should broaden their dunking horizons. It’s time to explore a world beyond tea, coffee and hot chocolate.

What about dunking a bourbon in a cherry yoghurt for a budget black forest gateaux? Or a caramel digestive into some banana angel delight for a banoffee pie on a shoestring?

The options are endless.

I’d like to hear about your dunking experiences – have you got any strange dunking habits? Have you ever made a grave mistake when dunking a biscuit like dipping a custard cream into a glass of red wine? Post below and let me know!