Wendyl Wants to Know: Jelly Tip a tasty treat even if it is too sweet

Griffins Jelly Tip biscuit (limited edition) - $3.49 for 200g. Photo / Wendyl Nissen

Biscuit free of artificial flavours and colours but loaded with sugar.

I love a Jelly Tip ice-cream although I haven't eaten one for years because the raspberry red tip used to be full of artificial colours and preservatives.

These biscuits are all over the supermarkets as a limited edition along with chocolate and I wanted one immediately.

I bought them, assuming that I would write this column and consign them to the nearest rubbish bin, but as it turned out I could eat them, and I can now eat Jelly Tip ice-creams as well.

Ingredients

Sugar
These are high in sugar. Every 20g biscuit will give you 10.1g of sugar or just over two teaspoons.

Wheat flour
This will be normal flour you use to make biscuits at home.

Vegetable fat and oil (coconut and sunflower)
Nice to see the oils explained here. No palm oil, just coconut and sunflower.

Glucose syrup
This is another form of sugar.

Milk solids
These are what is left when the water is taken out of milk.

Cocoa butter
Essential ingredient of chocolate.

Cocoa mass
As above.

Apple puree
This will be in here most likely to provide sweetness but perhaps also texture.

Dextrose monohydrate
This is another name for glucose and it is often used in intravenous solutions to provide sugar.

Thickener (1442)
This is hydroxyl-propyl distarch phosphate (1442).

Stabiliser (pectin)
Pectin occurs naturally in fruit and is often added to jams to help them set. The pectin here will most likely be helping the jelly to remain stable in this biscuit.

Emulsifiers (soy lecithin, 476)
These are the naturally occurring soy lecithin and polyglycerol polyricin-oleate (476) which is produced from polyglycerol and castor oil.
Golden syrup
Another form of sugar.

Natural flavours
Nice to see natural flavours in here.

Condensed milk
This is the highly sweetened thick milk we can buy in cans.

Invert syrup
Yet another form of sugar.

Salt

Raising agent (450, baking soda)
These are diphosphates (450) and baking soda as you would use at home.

Natural colours (carmine, grape skin extract)
Carmine is a natural colour made by extracting the red colouring from insects. It is also called cochineal. Grape skin extract will be added in here to darken the red colour to more of a raspberry colour.

Very nice to see two natural colours here.

Acidity regulator (citric acid)
This is the naturally occurring citric acid.

My recommendation

The Jelly Tip ice-cream has been free of artificial flavours and colours since 2013, so that's very good news.

And these biscuits are free as well. But, and it's a very big but, you will get 400kj or 100 calories and just over two teaspoons of sugar if you eat one of these tiny 20g biscuits.

If you ate a whole 61g Jelly Tip ice-cream you would consume 634kj or 152 calories and just over four teaspoons of sugar.

So for my calories I think I'd rather eat the ice-cream than one little biscuit.

Having said that they do taste lovely, a lot like the ice-cream, and one little biscuit won't hurt for a treat.

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