A faultless dunk can make the difference between the perfect elevenses and a kind of satisfactory break, so let's start with some basic rules: In theory any hot drink will do, although in practice we are talking about tea, and not some fruit tea that's essentially hot sour squash. Coffee will do at a push, but if you're going down that route you're already looking at a substandard dunk. You'll also need a sizeable mug. Why give yourself the pain of dunking a biscuit, only to find that it is bigger than your mug? And then there's the final ingredient; timing. There is nothing more distressing than dunking for too long, only to watch your biscuit detach and go floating down to the bottom of the mug. Apart from anything else, the crumbs will ruin your tea. Ready? Good. Sit back, relax, and choose one (or all) of these ten brilliantly dunkable biscuits.
10. Shortbread
This is shortbread, not shortcake, people. Shortcake has its place in the world, but what it doesn't have is the dunkability of shortbread. The ideal shortbread shape is the finger, which can take far more dunks than the average biscuit and still have a solid centre. If you are someone who is continually over-dunking your biscuit, only to be left with a mouthful of flavourless sogginess at the bottom of your cup, this is definitely the choice for you. I personally am very fond of the sudden resistance of the solid biscuit in the middle after the soft dissolving outside. The shortbread is the strong but silent biscuit, appearing plain but with a surprisingly high sugar content that melts perfectly at a high tea temperature. A very welcome choice.
9. Digestive
The digestive may seem like a boring biscuit, but sometimes when it comes to tea or if you want to kid yourself that you are having a healthy snack plain is perfection. With digestives, it is always important to ensure that you don't buy sweetmeal, they are revolting. The digestive is a biscuit that will keep you on your toes. It cannot take too many dunks, so you need to make sure your timing is exactly right. In many ways it is a bit pathetic, unable to stand up to much heat or liquid, so you need to show it who's boss. Two, maximum three firm dunks before eating. There's an art to seeing how much tea your digestive can take before it cracks, much like a top interrogator. I bet Jack Bauer knows exactly what he's doing with a digestive.
8. Dark Chocolate Digestive
This is a personal favourite. You can have milk chocolate if you want to, but I don't know why you would. The biscuit is sweet enough to counteract the bitter edge of dark chocolate and again we are talking about a non-sweetmeal biscuit and dark chocolate is clearly the more sophisticated choice. It is the biscuit that says "I'm classy" without trying. Due to the extra chocolate fortification it is possible for the dark chocolate digestive to withstand a longer dunking than its plain counterpart, but not that long. In fact, you'll find a shorter dunk is preferable for the chocolate biscuit; just enough to get the chocolate melting without overly wetting the biscuit.
7. Jammy Dodgers
Perhaps a controversial choice, but I maintain that a Jammy Dodger is actually a brilliant biscuit for dunking. Too long has it been relegated to the children's party table. I prefer to dunk only the original version incidentally, the jam and custard versions don't work quite as well. With the Jammy Dodger you have two options. If you are someone who sees the jam as the highlight of the biscuit, you can dunk the outer edges and nibble them away, leaving you with a perfect jammy centre. However there is the more renegade approach, which basically involves dunking the whole thing, jam and all. I favour the latter method, mainly because the jam gets a bit of a fizz when it's been dunked. Whether it's the heat or the liquid (or even both) we're not sure, we're not biscuit scientists. It's a fantastic effect though.