The Malted Milk Misinterpretation

There are only two types of biscuit.

The ones that you actually want to eat, and the ones that you feel compelled to take by reason of social imperative when someone offers you a biscuit. In my case, and I suspect many other people's as well, the first category contains rather a lot of biscuits containing, or dipped in, or coated by, chocolate, to varying degrees. Some biscuits do seem to be little more than chocolate with a few grams of actual biscuit thrown in as added texture.

Malted Milk biscuits, fall, in my humble opinion, into the type where you are forced to take one because the biscuit barrel/jar/plate/tin contains nothing better. (There's another blog posting lurking on my fingers about the significance of something where there are lots of words for the same object or action or feeling, but that's another story...)

At this point in time, a colleague piped up with an opinion (It's that type of office...) as the proffering took place: "Malted Milks are surprisingly sturdy..."

So there I was, fresh cup of tea and Malted Milk biscuit in alternate hands, and I did that thing that my Mum told me never to do in polite society. I dunked the Malted Milk into the tea. At which point things happened very fast. What I pulled out of the tea a fraction of a second later was suddenly incomplete - about half of a Malted Milk. I realised that in a surprisingly short time, the biscuit's integrity had been compromised, and the missing half was now beneath the glossy, opaque brown surface of the milky tea, presumably going soggy.

The sturdiness seemed to be a hollow promise, replaced with the glum prospect of the last few gulps of tea being nothing more than biscuit soup. So I took my teaspoon, the result of a trip to "The Kitchen Shop" in Woodbridge, where I had bought a 'proper' knife, fork, spoon and teaspoon 'for use at work' unprepared for the shock when I got alarmingly little change from the note I presented for payment, and stirred vigorously in order to distribute the biscuit and thin the eventual soup as much as possible - maybe even to the point where I would not notice its passage.

So, no-one was more surprised than me (particularly because it was only myself who was drinking that particular cup of tea!) when I got to the bottom of the cup of tea and discovered the missing half of the Malted Milk, soggy, but otherwise unscathed by the experience of being enthusiastically stirred for some time with a decently heavy and solid teaspoon.

Truly, and deceptively, sturdy.

But still very unpleasant to drink!