Milk chocolate digestives
McVitie’s
Milk Chocolate Digestives
300g, £1.50, ocado.com
A slight caramelised sugar flavour. You can taste the grain. The best chocolate coating of the bunch. A classic.
★★★
Fortnum & Mason
Piccadilly Clotted Cream Digestive
200g, £7.25, fortnumandmason.com
Weird. A chocolate-dipped cookie with not much chocolate flavour. Disappointing.
★
Tower Gate
Milk Chocolate Digestives
400g, 59p, lidl.co.uk
You instantly get that familiar digestive taste. It’s not very sweet at all. A crisp biscuit. The chocolate isn’t good quality and it’s a bit stingy.
★
Essential Waitrose
Milk Chocolate Digestive Biscuits
400g, £1.15, waitrose.com
It just tastes like fat, sugar and preservatives, but there’s a familiar wholesome flavour. Nothing to the chocolate coating.
★
Shortbread
Tesco Finest
Shortbread Fingers
165g, £1.29, tesco.com
Good crumble. A buttery taste that is more genuine - like real butter. It feels more rustic and homemade. Melt in the mouth.
★★★
Lottie Shaw’s
Seriously Good All Butter Shortbread Biscuits
375g, £3.95, ocado.com
Really buttery. Could be thicker. A bit more ‘stick in your teeth’ than it should be.
★★
Taste the Difference
Highland Shortbread Fingers
200g, £1.75, sainsburys.co.uk
Nice crunch. Tastes a bit like cookie dough or something, it hasn’t got a particularly rich buttery shortbread flavour. It doesn’t stand out.
★
Bettys
Yorkshire Shortbread Box
220g, £4.25, bettys.co.uk
I don’t like the look of this at all, it looks a bit cheap. There’s nothing really good to say about it. It’s fine, it’s short.
★
Triple chocolate cookies
Marks & Spencer
Triple Belgian Chocolate Chunk Cookies
225g, £2, marksandspencer.com
Looks appealing. Not too sweet, crumbly and buttery. Quite generous with chocolate chunks.
★★★
Prewetts
Rich Triple Chocolate Cookies
150g, £2.29, ocado.com
A really soft texture, but not in an American cookie kind of way. It has a richer flavour, you can definitely taste all three chocolates.
★★★
Harrods
All Butter Triple Chocolate Biscuits
250g, £9.95, harrods.com
Really short, a crumbly cookie. Not very chocolatey. There’s a slight gingery flavour? It could just be the brown sugar.
★★
Waitrose
Seriously Chocolatey Triple Chocolate Biscuits
125g, £2.29, waitrose.com
The taste is of cheap milk chocolate from the dip and then there’s this pretty boring flavourless cookie.
★
Ginger biscuits
Kent & Fraser
Spicy Ginger Crunchy Cookies
125g, £2.39, ocado.com
A really good ginger nut. Super gingery, almost spicy. Crisp and crunchy. Innocuous, very elegant - you can tell it’s going to be good.
★★★★
The East India Company
Ginger Nut Sweet Biscuits
150g, £5.99, selfridges.com
Slight molasses flavour, not very gingery. A bit more like the German lebkuchen - without all the spices, but with the same kind of warmth.
★★
Belmont
Ginger Nuts
300g, 25p, aldi.co.uk
A buttery, crunchy cookie. There’s a tiny bit of ginger at the very end but not much. Really simple, dead sweet. Good for a kid.
★
Fox’s
Crinkle Crunch Ginger
200g, 99p, tesco.com
There’s a ginger flavour that lingers, a little hot. A throwaway snack cookie - nothing special. Not particularly enticing, and it’s very thin.
★
Oaty biscuits
Taste the Difference
Oat & Treacle Cookies
200g, £1.75, sainsburys.co.uk
Delicious. A buttery, caramelised brown sugar flavour. Quite porridgey - it has that soaked oat flavour and texture, but it’s still crunchy.
★★★
McVitie’s
Hobnobs
300g, £1.19, ocado.com
The English standard. It tastes a bit wholesome, good oaty flavour. A tiny bit of salt - an essential part of a good biscuit.
★★
Harrods
Heritage Oat Biscuit Tin
200g, £8.50, harrods.com
Definitely the oatiest. Looks homemade, very pale. There’s a nice oaty taste but it comes after a lot of sugar and fat.
★★
Selfridges Selection
Honey & Oat Biscuits
190g, £3.99, selfridges.com
The strong flavour is of fat - grease and butter. Quite thin. Not particularly oaty or flavourful, just overwhelmingly buttery.
★
Dark chocolate florentines
Fortnum & Mason
Dark Chocolate Piccoli Florentine
150g, £7.25, fortnumandmason.com
A long chew. Quite cloying and sweet, but the nuts and dark chocolate balance it out. Decadent, you might have one in the evening.
★★★
Bettys
Florentines
200g, £11.95, bettys.co.uk
Simple. I like that it’s not so sugary. Not much of a chocolate flavour, it tastes like candied fruits.
★★★
Fudge’s
Decadent Dark Chocolate Florentines
Approx 120g, £2.55, ocado.com
Not so sophisticated. The overwhelming flavour is of Christmassy fruitcake, which I kind of like.
★★
Prestat
Artisan Chocolate Florentines
225g, £9.95, prestat.co.uk
A very buttery Florentine. More like a biscuit, not so chewy and rich. Much stingier on the nuts - they’re sliced really thin.
★★
