My thanks to Liz Truss for having helped to negotiate the UK’s free trade agreement with Australia before she became Prime Minister.

We now have Tim Tam biscuits on our supermarket shelves.

Conservative trade ministers mentioned those sweet treats more than once at the despatch box as negotiations were going on a few years ago.

I tried the caramel variety of Tim Tams for the first time at the weekend. Gosh, they are sweet.

Tim Tams are similar to Penguins.

The caramel Tim Tam is essentially a chocolate-flavoured coated Bourbon biscuit with a ribbon of caramel running through the middle, with Bourbon cream (chocolate) on either side.

I have had four to date. They are very tasty and filling. Two are definitely enough at any one sitting. That said, I am not the world’s biggest consumer of sweets.

I have one question: the amount of caramel filling in the middle. Is it the same quantity as it was when Arnott’s, the manufacturer, first created it?

I say this because, in Boston’s Fenway Park (baseball), Hood’s dairy sells the Sports Bar, an ice cream confection which is comprised of two outer sides of vanilla with a chocolate stripe through the middle. In the 1980s, I was intrigued to watch one of my friends buy one every year and look at the size of the chocolate ice cream stripe. Every year, it got smaller.

Hence my curiosity about the caramel Tim Tam.

Some Australians use Tim Tams as dunkers in a technique known as the Tim Tam Slam.

First, let’s look at the name. I am old enough to remember Tim Tam as a Kentucky Derby winner.

It turns out that the biscuit’s creator named them after the horse.

Australia’s Channel 9’s kitchen page tells us (emphases mine):

Tim Tams were first created in 1958 by Arnott’s employee and food technologist Ian Norris.

Norris wanted to create a better chocolate biscuit, something that was completely different to anything on the market.

He named the biscuit after a horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1958, and the biscuits first appeared on supermarket shelves in 1964.

However, it wasn’t until 1983 that one of the most iconic Aussie traditions came along.

The Tim Tam slam was invented over 40 years ago now, and one in three Australians say they’ve participated in the sacred ritual.

Arnott’s create limited editions Down Under:

Even though they’ve been in production for 60 years now, the recipe has never changed.

The biscuits have remained consistently high quality and consistently delicious throughout their lifetime, however they have tried some whacky flavours over the years.

Some we wish we could bring back, like the dark choc espresso martini or the red velvet, whereas others, such as the turkish delight and the choc banana, we’re happy to leave in the past for now.

These days, Tim Tams are produced at the Arnott’s Huntingwood and Marleston bakeries.

On May 4, 2024, Xanthe Clay looked at chocolate-covered biscuits for The Telegraph, ‘Penguin versus Tim Tam and the chocolate-biscuit wannabes’, excerpted below:

Tim Tams, the Australian-made chocolate-coated sandwich bars (first created in 1964) that bear a remarkable resemblance to McVitie’s Penguins (invented in Glasgow some 30 years prior), have been available in this country from specialist shops – and even on the “foreign foods” shelves of some supermarkets – for a few years, but now they’ve gone mainstream with listings in Waitrose and Ocado. 

They have a legion of fans and a quick look at reviews online suggests that Australians wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything except a Tim Tam. Mind you, my expat mates are sniffy about the amount in each packet, since there are just nine biscuits (165g) in the British packets and a more generous 11 in 200g packs sold Down Under. The Australian price of $5 works out at about £2.58 currently, or £1.29 per 100g, while the British ones come in at £1.53 per 100g. Not an unreasonable markup given they’re actually made in Oz and have to be shipped all the way here. 

However, those TimTams are 50 per cent more expensive than a trusty Penguin (which is about £1.02 per 100g). Wowsers. Can they really be half as good again?

I used to eat Penguins regularly when I took my lunch to work in the early 1990s. They never melted.

However, the Tim Tam chocolate-flavoured coating melts immediately. You need a tissue or a paper napkin for your fingers. Is Australia’s version that melty, considering that their weather is much hotter than ours?

The article acknowledges that the UK has a tradition of chocolate covered biscuits of various varieties. The following were also staples in my lunch bag:

Clubs (plain chunky biscuit, thick coating), Rocky (oaty biscuit, thinner coating), even the venerable chewy Tunnocks caramel wafer, to name just three. But the appeal of Penguins, Tim Tams and their imitations is their sandwich structure: they’re essentially Bourbon creams covered in chocolate (Tim Tams with a noticeably strong vanilla/caramel flavour).

Club was my favourite because the chocolate coating was thicker.

Penguin had a well-known slogan in a television advert:

P-p-p-pick up a Penguin.

Xanthe Clay tried the Tim Tam Slam, giving us detailed instructions:

… a biscuit-dunking technique that involves biting off diagonally opposite corners and dipping the biscuit in tea with one of the nibbled corners barely submerged. The other corner is then quickly sucked, like a straw, until the tea has soaked through the biscuit. If you’ve got the technique right, when eaten the inside will be squelchy and soft and the chocolate coating just beginning to melt.

Warm, squidgy and gooey, the result is a sort of Pot-Noodle-level chocolate fondant pudding. It’s not elegant but trust me, this one really has to be tried. No joke.

She gave both Tim Tams and Penguins four stars:

Tim Tam Original

£2.50 for nine at Waitrose (£1.53/100g)

2cm shorter than a Penguin but slightly thicker. Well flavoured, with a caramel vanilla note, although the chocolate (actually chocolate-flavoured coating, according to the wrapper) melts easily. Very sweet.

Penguin Original

£1.75 for seven at Tesco (£1.02/100g)

A tad longer than most of the own-label bars, and has a slightly lower chocolate percentage. The biscuit is crunchy and more malty than chocolatey but has a pleasingly rounded flavour. The joke still tickles.

If I were to choose between the two, I would opt ever so slightly for Penguin, because the biscuit has more crunch.

Supermarket own brands now have superbly close imitations of Penguin and Tim Tam.

Xanthe Clay gave the M&S creation four stars:

M&S Food Milk Chocolate Coated Bourbon Creams

£2.50 for six at Ocado (£1.54/100g)

Squat little bars with a much thicker coating than the other supermarket versions; they are more than 50 per cent chocolate. A crisp and mild flavoured biscuit, though palate-buzzingly sweet overall.

However, she awarded five stars — full marks — to Aldi’s version:

Aldi Specially Selected Milk Chocolate Just Divine

£1.79 for 11 (90p/100g)

There’s been a run on these Tim Tam imitations since their launch in March and no wonder: they taste far more chocolatey than the Aussie version and use real Belgian chocolate. Look at that price, too. A win.

Not being an Aldi shopper — they don’t deliver — I’ll have to wait to try their Just Divine biscuits.

On the topic of biscuits, February 9 is the UK’s National Biscuit Day. The Telegraph‘s Andrew Baker gave us the story in ‘Telegraph readers’ favourite (and least favourite) biscuit revealed’:

This week we asked our readers to vote for their favourite biscuit – and their least favourite. The response was tremendous: there were over 116,000 votes. The numbers don’t lie. But beyond the bare statistics was an outpouring of affection for your favourites, and startlingly visceral expressions of disdain for the villains.

There were also, predictably, arguments about our rules of engagement and definitions of what a biscuit really is (and really isn’t) …

We took each biscuit’s positive score, the number of readers who had indicated it was their favourite, and subtracted its negative score, the number of readers who indicated it was their least favourite, to give us a total score for each candidate.

The chocolate-covered digestive came first and shortbread a rather distant second:

The Telegraph readers’ favourite biscuit is the chocolate digestive, an old-school classic that is not so basic as to be boring or so sophisticated as to be pretentious. It exists in a state of perfect biscuitty equilibrium. It is, as reader Jillian Ross pointed out in the The Telegraph comments section, “the democratic everyday choice”.

In second place, some way behind the winner, was shortbread, described by us, perhaps unfairly, as “one of the few genuinely tasty things to have come from Scotland”, and by reader Janette Graham-Walker as “heavenly”.

Well, Britons do love chocolate.

Taking third place was a biscuit that borrows something from both the top two — the chocolate finger, which is a chocolate covered shortbread, essentially:

The final podium spot went to the chocolate finger, not a tremendously exciting biscuit in itself but, judging by the frequency of the word “cheeky” in the comments, regarded as excitingly transgressive by some of you.

I was disconcerted to read that my favourite American biscuit, Oreo, was at the bottom, garnering nasty commentary, such as this:

… our poll revealed truly startling levels of dislike for the Oreo, bottom of our league with many more negative votes than positive, and a sheaf of shirty comments of which Robert T’s remark is typical: “Ghastly American import.

“If we ever reach a free trade agreement with the US, I’ll campaign for these to be excluded.” Elizabeth Fletcher noted that the unfortunate cookie has a “pitiful” appearance, “like a biscuit that could not afford a coating of chocolate”.

For me, that’s the magic of the original Oreo: not too sweet, certainly not bland and most satisfying. It’s the perfect balance. Nabisco has made them for well over a century and, from the 1990s, makes limited editions and seasonal varieties.

Telegraph readers also disliked pink wafers, the delicate ice cream-cone type of biscuit filled with fruit-flavoured cream. I love those. They remind me of my childhood.

Some readers did not like that their favourites had been excluded. The article explains why:

“Where are the Jaffa Cakes?” many wailed, though we had been careful to point out that they are cakes (the clue is in the name); others bemoaned the absence of fig rolls (once again, too cakey); Tim Tams and Anzac biscuits were frequently praised, but both are very much easier to obtain Down Under than in the UK; Wagon Wheels, Club and Tunnock’s wafers all had their boosters, but are sold separately wrapped and are thus we decided, snacks rather than biscuits.

Well, Tim Tams are very much here in the UK — right now — as are their British imitators.

Do try them and see what the fuss is about.

Will I buy them again? It depends on what the dark chocolate ones taste like.