A popular method of eating Tim Tams is to bite off a tiny bit of two opposite corners of the biscuit, and then use it as a straw to suck coffee or hot chocolate through.

Once the hot drink has reached your mouth, having melted the filling in its wake, you pop the whole yummy melty shebang in your gob.

Heavenly.

A Tim Tam is a biscuit, oblong, about 2 cm wide, 4 cm long, and 1 cm thick, or so, but don't take me up on that, it wasn't designed by Michelangelo and it's far too long since I had one, besides.

It's just two pieces of biscuits sandwiched together with chocolate cream, and chocolate all around the outside. (These days they also make variants: probably things like dark chocolate, coffee, mint, that sort of thing that you can do to the chocolate without violating it too much.)

Here is the important bit, to readers in the UK who haven't had a Tim Tam: the above description exactly fits the Penguin biscuit. Here is the difference: the Tim Tam is vastly more delicious (different proportion of cocoa butter? I don't know why) and no adult has ever got addicted to Penguins.

Tim Tams are probably the most delicious, moreish, shit-there-go-my-teeth-and-my-belly-but-who-cares biscuit ever invented, by anyone, ever. National chauvinism doesn't come into it here. All Britons who go there (or are privileged to partake of the food parcels that expatriate Australians in the UK regularly get sent to assuage their cravings), and who begin by observing that they look just like Penguins (except the wrapper is elegant, not vulgar), are converted and agree there is no comparison.

It can produce some odd conversations at Customs at Heathrow, if for some reason they flag you down.

"What's in these suitcases?"

"Chocolate biscuits."

"Chocolate biscuits and...?"

"No."

Tim tam facts:

The name "Tim-Tam" came from the name of a winning Horse in the Kentucky Derby.
Women are by far the biggest consumers of Tim tams.
Most Tim tams are consumed while watching TV in the evening.
Tim tams are, by a considerable margin, Arnott's most popular chocolate biscuit.
Around 30 million packs are sold each year - nearly 300 million biscuits, or two packs for every Australian.

Source:
The Melbourne Age, http://www.arnotts.com.au

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