Biscuit Blog: Tesco Pink Panther Wafers

Tesco Pink Panther Wafers

I do not know if I expected to get a better pink wafer from Tesco.  The supermarket has a bit of a reputation for many of its own brand products lacking in flavour and so if you are looking for cheaper items you tend to be better off going to a cheaper store like Lidl or Aldi where the budget products taste better.  This product, however, clearly with the rights to the Pink Panther cartoon logo, even though that is not as prestigious as it would have been forty years ago, I thought would package a better product than the Lidl pink wafers I tried in January.  However, that was not to be the case.  For a start, like the Tower Gate ones from Lidl, these from Tescos are not pink at all, but orange in colour.  I do not know if the pink colourant is on the EU banned list these days, but these two sets of biscuits really lack vibrancy and more resemble packaging for parcels.

The most surprising think about this product was how sharp the snap is when you bite into it.  You expect a bit of a snap with a pink wafer rather than a crumble, but with these it is extreme.  The main problem after the colour is the taste.  Pink wafers should almost be painfully sweet, but these are almost plain.  I know they are termed 'vanilla' but that does not mean they should be lacking in sweetness.  Overall, these biscuits simply taste like those you might have stuck into an Italian ice cream, maybe even less flavoursome than those.  While I have struggled to find a creamy malted milk, getting anywhere near what a pink wafer should look or taste like appears even more remote.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tower Gate Pink Wafers

Tower Gate Pink Wafers

Perhaps this type of biscuit which has attracted most attention by name on television.  It features significantly in the first episode of the first series of  'Life on Mars' (2006) set in 1973.  A witness is being questioned and it is suggested that she might like some pink wafers.  A police officer is sent off to buy her some.  Pink wafers with their gaudy colouring and their very sweet flavour could almost seem to sum up the early 1970s. These biscuits have often featured in selection boxes but have always stood out among the various shades of brown that characterise most biscuits.

As you can imagine, having spotted these on another biscuit hunt in Lidl I was eager to give them ago.  These are under Lidl's own brand for biscuits and some other products, Tower Gate.  They were incredibly disappointing.  On the plus side they were as crunchy as promised without dissolving into powder as sometimes can be the case with pink wafers.  However, as you can see from the picture they were more a shade of orange rather than pink, that was despite the colour of the packet and even featuring a pink feline, presumably in reference to the pink panther cartoons.  The main problem was the flavour.  The biscuits were so lacking in the uber-sweetness you especially expect from a pink wafer that they could almost be deemed a savoury biscuit.  Indeed they tasted like a number of plain ice cream wafers sandwiched together.  The 'cream' was almost soggy in nature.  Certainly there was nothing of the pink wafer experience that I had anticipated.  However, I passed the packet to the teenager who lives in my house and he finished them off.

Perhaps I expected too much, but I was certainly let down by this product.

Rating:
*****

P.P. In the interests of balance, I must say that I have passed these biscuits on to a teenaged boy and he said that he really liked them and wondered if I had any more.  This suggests that at least one member of the younger generation has a taste for something that is not uncomfortably sweet and I guess this is why Lidl continues to sell them.