When is a cake not a cake?

For many this may seem a somewhat irrelevant question. However, when you have declared at the start of the year that you would give up the 3 C's - Cake, Crisps and Chocoalte, the distinction can be extremely important.

As is often the wont, in UK offices, when a team-member has a birthday, they often buy cakes to celebrate.

This may appear, to the uninitiated, somewhat back to front, but hey who said that life makes sense?

Today, was young Debbie's birthday - well I say young, I think that she may now be 44, which according to the Evening Standard is the worst possible age to be - and she brought in some "cakes".


Oat, cranberry and yogurt clusters - which clearly sounded healthy?




Rocky roads - which I've been on a few of in my life, and...




...Jaffa cakes




It was at this point that the conversation - seemingly in an attempt to deprive me of any enjoyment, or food - turned to the difference between biscuits and cakes. This was partly due to my insistence that a Jaffa "cake" was not actually a cake at all, but a biscuit.

Such was the opposition to this view that I was forced to undertake some detailed research and did in fact establish (this is true!) that: -

Under UK law, no VAT is charged on biscuits and cakes — they are "zero rated".

Chocolate covered biscuits, however, are classed as luxury items and are subject to VAT at 17.5%.

McVitie's classed its Jaffa Cakes as cakes, but in 1991, this was challenged by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise in court. This may have been because Jaffa Cakes are about the same size and shape as some types of biscuit.

The question which had to be answered was what criteria should be used to class something as a cake or biscuit. McVitie's defended the classification of Jaffa Cakes as a cake by producing a giant Jaffa Cake to illustrate that their Jaffa Cakes were simply minicakes.

They also argued that the distinction between cakes and biscuits is simply that biscuits go soft when stale, whereas cakes go hard. It was demonstrated that Jaffa Cakes become hard when stale and McVitie's won the case.

The issue was revisited in an article entitled 'Are Jaffa Cakes really, biscuits?' published in the Journal of Unlikely Science (Volume 1, issue 7,2005).

The article attempted to classify biscuits via a scientific analysis of various features (size, shape, filling etc.) and determined that the Jaffa Cake should be regarded as a biscuit, or 'pseudobiscuit'.

Now I think that it is rare that the HM Customs and Excise ever get (or admit getting) anything wrong, and so I decided to side with them and declared the Jaffa cakes to be biscuits are proceeded to take one to eat....

...until I was reminded that even if they are a biscuit, they are a chocolate covered biscuit, and that I had also pledged to give chocolate up as well...

Mmmm..anybody got a carrot to munch?