Tim Tams and being Australian ....
Papa Koala sent me a care package which arrived yesterday. The most important contents were the 3 packets of Original Flavoured Tim Tams.
Tim Tams are a chocolate biscuit made by Arnott's and are possibly Australia's favourite chocolate biscuit. A Tim Tam is made up of two layers of light chocolate biscuit, separated by a chocolate cream filling, and then coated in a thin layer of chocolate. The website is here.
Arnott's have developed variations of Tim Tams including Chewy Caramel, Mocha, Double Coat, Chilli Chocolate, Classic Dark Chocolate, Black Forest Fantasy and Creamy Truffle Temptation. They also released a smaller spherical version of the biscuit last year. For me, it's Original Flavoured Tim Tams or nothing.
I suppose it's a bit of a cliche to be an Australian overseas with a craving for Tim Tams but I'm not the only one. When I offered them around work, the London Guy at work stared down at it and said critically: "It's basically just a Penguin!"
This prompted me to do some research. In the UK, they have a similar style of biscuit by McVities called a Penguin - apparently these pre-date the Tim Tam by almost thirty years. There's even rivalry about the biscuits - 'Tim Tam vs Penguin' and 'Tim Tams just another second-rate Aussie ripoff!' are evidence of that.
Nonetheless, Australians over the world (myself included) do not like to accept substitutes. For me it's always been the Tim Tam or bust. Hong Kong has Tim Tams but they don't quite taste the same. There are 'pirated' Tim Tams in Beijing, but they are dark chocolate and taste foul. Everyone says you're supposed to eat a Tim Tam by biting off corners of the Tim Tam and then using it as a 'straw' to suck up a hot beverage - I never ate it that way.....
My brother rather likes Mint Slices. I'm not a fan - they make everything smell like mint .....
I have two packets of Tim Tams - I'll have to savour them.
The London Guy said that like all things, this 'Australian' thing was merely a pale shadow of the British original. He was also saying that the 'Australian Digger' (Aussie soldier) was just a myth - he was simply some bloke from Leeds and that it was bollocks to talk about Australian soldiers in World War I and World War II because they were simply first or second generation Brits and not 'Australian' as such ......
Then he and the Hong Kong Indian Girl at work tried to tell me that the British Empire had brought many good things to the world, that even in India that it had brought culture, civilisation, the English language and that kind of thing and if you compared places like Hong Kong to Mainland China you could definitely see the improving cultural influence that the British empire had had...... I said I wished that we'd had a proper revolution and overthrown the Brits like the Americans had ;) For the rest of the day, I called him Bloody Imperialist Bastard because he kept telling me my English was a corrupted form of British English and that I should be fetching coffee for him ;)
Who'd have thought that a humble little Tim Tam would have stirred up so much feeling? :)
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I love these funny pictures:
I especially liked this one. The caption read: "I don't like Tim Tams! I'm American - give me Oreos!!!!" :)
