Log In. Contact us Sign up for newsletters. Log In Register now My account. Is a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit? Photo: Shutterstock. By Rhona Shennan. January 29, pm Updated September 28, am. Read more: Great British Bake Off: Why Jaffa Cakes are called Jaffa Cakes and other interesting facts The freshest exclusives and sharpest analysis, curated for your inbox Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing!
The controversy even reached the Great British Bake-off. He explained the criteria he assessed in coming to his conclusion, which are summarised below. He cited the ingredients, which showed that the sponge part of a Jaffa Cake was in fact cake. The texture was also important, he said.
The Jaffa Cake has the texture of a sponge cake, which the brittleness of the chocolate does not displace. But another crucial factor is what happens to a Jaffa Cake when it goes stale. Unlike a biscuit, which would usually go soft, the Jaffa Cake goes hard and brittle. The adjudication found that Jaffa cakes, while having features similar to both cakes and biscuits, fulfilled enough criteria to be considered cakes for VAT purposes.
Jaffa Cakes have been proven to be cakes in court, in order to keep their zero-rated VAT status. The court found that despite packaging and marketing similar to biscuits, they contained enough cake-like characteristics to be a cake, and not a biscuit. All the sources used in our checks are publicly available and the FFS fact-checking methodology can be viewed here. Want to suggest a fact check? Go to ideas. Username or Email Address. Remember Me. But Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many "family-resemblance" concepts, as he called them.
Family members can look alike without sharing a single characteristic. Some might have distinctive cheek bones, others a prominent nose, etc. Equally, some concepts can operate with overlapping similarities. Take the concept of "game".
Some games involve a ball, some don't. Some involve teams, some don't. Some are competitive, some are not. There is no characteristic that all games have in common. And there is no strict definition of "cake" or "biscuit" that compels us to place the Jaffa Cake under either category.
Or catch up later here. Another temptation is to believe that all that is at stake here is an arbitrary issue of semantics.
It is, the thought goes, a mere verbal convention whether one labels a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit. It has nothing to do with the real world. The distinction between statements that are true as a matter of convention or language "All triangles have three sides" , and those that make a claim about the empirical world " It is possible to eat 13 Jaffa Cakes in a minute " - is a longstanding one in philosophy.
But in the middle of the last century the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine disputed whether such a rigid distinction could be maintained - and Tim Crane agrees with him that it cannot. Well, it's a flat-bottomed Inuit canoe.
So have I told you something about the word, or have I told you something about the world? Well, I think you've learned something about both. But could Jaffa Cakes be neither cakes nor biscuits - and instead something in between? It may be interesting to compare Jaffa Cakes with people here, even though they differ in several ways - most Jaffa Cakes have no opinion about how they should be identified, for example, and most humans are not topped by a thin but scrumptious layer of chocolate.
Until recently, people have not been free to choose their gender, and have been restricted to being described as either male or female. More and more discoveries in science are undermining this binary mapping. It used to be thought that men were defined by their having a Y chromosome. Now we know that whether an embryo develops as a male depends upon a single gene: the SRY gene.
It's possible for a person with XY chromosomes to have the appearance of a woman if they are lacking this gene. Similarly, a person with XX chromosomes can have the appearance of a male if they carry this gene.
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