Biscuit Blog: Belmont All Butter Scottish Shortbread Fingers

Belmont All Butter Scottish Shortbread Fingers

I must apologise for the photo in this posting, the light level was lower than I realised even though I have always lived in unfortunately gloomy houses.  As seems typical with Belmont, the ordinary biscuit brand from Aldi, they have gone for a lengthy title.  These went into a head-to-head with the Lidl equivalent for a taste test by two members of my house and came off slightly worse.  They crumble easily, a trait common for shortbread, but the full biscuit lacks 'bulk' when bitten, it seems too dry.  There is no visible sugar, but the butteriness that you would hope for given the title also seems absent so it comes off as very plain biscuit with only a little of creamy after taste.  The Lidl version just wins out for having better structural integrity and some more of that creamy flavour that you look for in shortbread.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Co-operative All Butter Shortbread Fingers

Co-operative All Butter Shortbread Fingers

These were a pleasant surprise,  They are in Co-op's 'Loved' range but they tasted much better than I had expected.  The packet, as is common with shortbread, is short, but the biscuits themselves are very creamy in flavour.  They have a firm snap without being too brittle; you expect shortbread to have some crumble but not to disintegrate, so these strike just the right balance.  There is no sugar covering on these as you find on some shortbread, but actually, in this case, it allows the core flavour of the biscuit to come out clearly.  Very moreish.  As you can gather, I was very pleased with these.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Tesco Scottish All Butter Shortbread Fingers

Tesco Scottish All Butter Shortbread Fingers

These biscuit have the longest packet name of any I have tasted so far for this blog.  I think, at present, my baseline for judging shortbread fingers are those produced by Walker's,  I tend to get them in packets of two at work.  These do not reach the level of those.  However, they are better than a number of the biscuits I have recently bought from Tesco.  They are sprinkled with sugar which used to be traditional with shortbread, but it is not ridiculously the case.  They have a decent crumble which is good for shortbread.  Some tourist brands go far too far and they are breaking up before you can even get them to your mouth and these certainly do not do that and they also do not snap which would be wrong for shortbread.  They have a hint of the butteriness that is promised, but it does not go far enough.  It is this final element which lets them down.  These are reasonable biscuits for having with coffee or tea and with a little work could be really decent shortbread biscuits.  I would cut down the sugar and raise the creaminess of the taste in order to get there.

Rating:
*****

Biscuit Blog: Crawford's Shortcake

Crawford's Shortcake biscuits

It is important to distinguish shortcake biscuits from shortbread biscuits.  Shortcake biscuits are also pale in colour but have far more of a snap than shortbread which is typically very crumbly.  Shortcake have far less sugar on them, though as I have noted before the amount of sugar dusted on shortbread seems to be decreasing.  Shortcake biscuits have a less creamy taste than the shortbread but are have a rich flavour that is both different from a rich tea and from a malted milk; they are thicker than both of these.  When I was a boy these were popularly known as 'tractor biscuits' because the diagonal shape about the rim of the biscuits look like the patterns left in the mud by tractor tyres when they have been driven along an unsurfaced road.

These shortcakes from Crawfords are not bad.  They lack moreishness and unfortunately have a bit of a 'burn' in the taste which can sometimes happen with cheap versions of supposedly creamy biscuits, most often occurring in malted milks, though not among the recent batch I have sampled.  There is a snap to these but almost a sour aftertaste which feels wrong.  It is almost as if they have gone too far in trying to get the shortcake flavour.  However, unlike some biscuits I have tried recently, they actually taste along the lines of what they are supposed to be.

Rating:

*****

Biscuit Blog: Tower Gate Classic Shortbread Rounds

Tower Gate Classic Shortbread Rounds

After the disappointment of the pink wafers last month I did consider abandoning Lidl for another store.  Once I have exhausted Lidl's range of biscuits, I will move on, have no fear.  However, it does mean changing where I go on my way home from work.  Roadworks in my neighbourhood meaning reaching Asda is far harder than usual.  Anyway, after sampling this posting's biscuit, I realised that some good could still be found in Lidl's biscuit aisle.

I have noticed recently that there has been an abandonment of putting loads of white sugar on shortbread biscuits.  Too often you cannot really savour a shortbread biscuit because all it is proving to be is a vehicle for delivering loads of plain sugar into your mouth.  The move away from this approach is something I approve of and was pleased to find when I tried these shortbread rounds.  I imagine the word 'rounds' has been added because a lot of shortbread is either segments of a circle, so triangular in nature or these days is in the form of bars of shortbread.  As with the Deluxe Stem Ginger biscuits of January: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/biscuit-blog-deluxe-stem-ginger-butter.html there still seems to be the Scottish connection - the same saltire is found on  the box of these rounds.

All of this is fine, you might say, but what do they taste like?  I must say I was very pleased.  They managed to have that buttery flavour that I had been seeking in the Deluxe Stem Ginger but without crumbling or melting away as the old fashioned shortbreads tended to do or go into chunks like some modern ones do.  Thus, they have a very nice shortbread flavour but are still a proper biscuit. It is ironic that these are deemed 'classic' when in fact they fortunately have moved away from the overly crumbly shortbread that once dominated.  I feel Tower Gate has done very well with these.  That is one of the issue of an umbrella brand name used by a discounted store, that underneath it the quality can vary quite considerably.  I only mark them down to four for a little bitter after taste.  In general, however, these are good quality biscuits.  It is a shame there are only nine per pack as otherwise they would be an excellent general biscuit to have in your larder.

Rating:
*****