Where have I been? — An Elegant Sufficiency

It was the 105th birthday of the WI - Womens Institute - last week and to mark the occasion, a recipe for a cake was published on the members’ website.

With a glut of apples falling from the tree quicker than we can eat them, any recipe with a new use for them is a good one right now and so I made a note of the ingredients for my shopping list. Unsurprisingly, I had most of them - the usual baking flour, sugar, eggs, butter and so on, but there were a couple of things which I needed to get: Biscoff Lotus biscuits and a jar of Biscoff spread.

I had an idea I’d seen these “coffee biscuits” in the supermarket, so wasn’t too worried about getting hold of them, but the spread? I guessed I’d find it with the jam, honey and peanut butter?

I really hadn’t bargained for noticing - after how long? - just how this product has taken over that corner of the shelves. Have I been shopping with my eyes closed? Is this something everyone else knew about whilst I carried on in blissful ignorance? Not only were there plain Biscoff biscuits as I thought, there were several flavours of Biscoff cream sandwich biscuits too, all lined up and taking more shelf space than the McVities Digestives! At first, I couldn’t find the plain and simple kind and was just about to give up and get a packet of the cream biscuits with a plan to separate them. But I turned the corner and yes, there was another shelf with the plain biscuits on - in two varieties of packaging! The first pack I picked up to put in my trolley felt a bit crinkly and a closer look revealed that it was a pack of individual packages; the sort you’d find on your coffee saucer in a cafe. I didn’t want all that extra plastic - just wanted a packet of ordinary biscuits please!! Thankfully, they were there on the shelf too.

I went straight over to the jams to find the spread, now with my eye in for the logo/branding and immediately spotted the red/ochre label - yet again, quite a large presence there amongst the nut butters, which made me wonder how I’ve never spotted it before. One jar went straight in the trolley.

The recipe proved fairly straighforward: a pretty standard cake with a layer of stewed apple, a toffee topping and finished with crunchy streusel crumble. Once the cake was in the oven and the apples quietly stewing on the hob, I began the toffee layer. Condensed milk, sugar AND golden syrup?! Good grief!! At this point, however, I discovered I’d bought the wrong variety of spread - “you mean there’s more than one?!” I noted that I had bought crunchy spread when I should have bought smooth. No wonder there’s so much Biscoff on the shelves - there’s so many different products!

That toffee layer is pretty deep too - but balanced by the unsweetened apple puree and therefore altogether yummy! The Biscoff spread makes it deeply caramelly as well and the crunch of Biscoff biscuits and crumbled shortbread on the top finish it off nicely.