Biscuit of the Week #1: Wagon Wheels

Name: Wagon Wheels

Producer: Burton's Foods

Slogan: "You've got to grin to get it in!"

This is the first in an ongoing series of reviews to be published weekly (or thereabouts) in which I will explore the biscuit I have bought to go with my tea for the preceding week.

The first biscuit in the Biscuit of the Week series, Burton’s “Wagon Wheels” are billed as “delicious mallow biscuit covered with a chocolate flavored coating.” While undoubtedly delicious, Wagon Wheels are an odd combination of lackluster ingredients coming together to make something interesting enough to be a more-than-enjoyable teatime accompaniment.

Burton’s Wagon Wheels have the distinct appeal that many basic digestive biscuits and tea cookies lack…a shockingly bright wrapper with pictures on! In this case, the wrapper is a bright tomato red with a cartoon of a cowboy driving his team of two horses pulling the stagecoach so fast through a desert landscape that motion lines streak from the wheels. Given the Wagon Wheel’s popularity and staying power (originally produced in the 1940s, relaunched in 2002), I would say the Wild West is the way to go!



The first ingredient you see when you confront the Wagon Wheel itself is the chocolate coating or, as Burton’s worryingly describes it, “chocolate flavored coating.” To be honest, I couldn’t really tell you if the coating is chocolate flavored or not. The layer is so thin as to be practically non-existent: a mere veil of chocolate to add nothing more than a strange ripply texture to the whole thing.



Next up, the biscuits. Again, I find it difficult to describe the undeniable appeal of a cookie that is made of such independently non-descript ingredients. In this case, the biscuit layers of the Wagon Wheel make an overall impression of…well…nothing. On their own, they are a bit bland and a bit stale and give only a very slight crunch to the assemblage.

The final component of the Wagon Wheel, the marshmallow center, is possibly the most enigmatic. Like the “chocolate flavored coating,” the mallow is in a very thin layer in the center. It fulfills the basic requirements of mallow in that it’s spongy and sticky, but it does not have a flavor that really stands out when given the entirety of the cookie. Instead it seems meant only to give a bit of cushion between the biscuit layers and a bit of bounce to your bite.



While the description of the individual components of this biscuit is surely an exercise in futility and ultimately paints an unappetizing image of the Wagon Wheel as a whole, to eat a Wagon Wheel is to understand. Something happens when those three bland ingredients come crashing together and an entirely new biscuit of deliciousness rises from the wreckage. The lurid red packaging of the biscuit proudly proclaims “You’ve got to grin to get it in” and the biscuit is indeed as large as the mouth of my favorite tea mug. But even if the Wagon Wheel were smaller (perhaps along the lines of a Wheelbarrow Wheel or something?), I’d still be grinning at how a biscuit that should by all rights be absolutely dreadful can taste so delicious.

(Below, a clip from a sketch by comediennes French and Saunders. In it, Jennifer is eating a Wagon Wheel. Now, my Wagon Wheels are most definitely not that large, but debate rages on among biscuit aficionados over how much smaller the cookies have become over the years.)