It’s been a good week for ... clarification
The good people at Quorn are an honest bunch. They don’t pretend that their sausage rolls contain sausage. No, the meat substitute company prides itself in making sausage rolls entirely from vegetarian pastry and meat substitute.
After that, it seems their packaging gets a little hazy. It’s a numbers thing. One sharp-eyed consumer expressed his dismay on Twitter when a pack of 12 of their finest meat substitute sausage rolls actually amounted to just the three. A helpful asterisk and some mighty small print explained that the thrifty three could amount to "12 mini rolls when cut into 4s".
A loaves and fishes moment if ever there was one. Dan Douglas’s Twitter complaint has now been shared tens of thousands of times.
Now, Quorn has decided to roll out new packaging. A company spokesperson said: "Having seen the comments from consumers ... we agree that the product descriptor has the potential to cause confusion. We therefore plan to change the descriptor when we next print the packaging in the New Year."
A grand Ne’erday resolution: eat only one sausage roll and not four. Just make sure it’s a big one.
It’s been a bad week for ... cake
It’s that time of year again when I’m gearing up for my annual baking disaster. Previous Christmas cake calamities include the time the royal icing set so hard it had to be cracked off with a hammer. Then there was day the oven packed in midway through the five-hour baking ritual, requiring the half-baked cake to be finished off in the microwave (not ideal, but still edible).
But I haven’t poisoned anyone. To my knowledge. Yet.
However, there are hidden dangers everywhere.
Health watchdogs have warned that home bakers should avoid licking the mixing bowl because uncooked flour can carry dangerous bugs such as E.coli.
The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) has issued a warning over eating raw flour, citing historical outbreaks of Salmonella and E.coli in the US and New Zealand.
“We do not advise eating uncooked flour or products," say the FSA. "Adequate cooking will ensure any harmful bacteria are killed.”
Does that include emergency microwave baking? Perhaps I won’t fret too much about my cake. After all, breaching the icing may be an insurmountable task; broken are teeth more of a health issue.
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