WHEN Stuart Payne set up a website devoted to the gourmet pleasures of tea and biscuits, he should not have been surprised that it would become the McVitie’s chocolate digestive of the internet.

Mr Payne, 40, an IT consultant from Cambridge, started www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com as something of a joke, with the mission statement: “Well, I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh, and some cake would be nice as well.”

But he now takes his biscuits seriously, as does a nation which munched its way through 504,000 tonnes of them last year.

He reviews packets of biscuits as though they were fine wines, pits Old World favourites against New World imitators and has combed the world for exotic accompaniments to a cup of PG Tips — which, in his view, should be made with one pyramid teabag to two mugs. Dozens of brands have appeared in his “biscuit of the week” feature, from Hobnobs to Jammie Dodgers. McVitie’s milk chocolate digestives, Britain’s most popular biscuit, he regards as “a figurehead for the entire chocolate biscuit world”, while Tunnock’s marshmallow teacakes are the best of their kind despite having a consistency “somewhere between shaving foam and bath sealant”.

Among biscuit nibblers, the great dilemma is whether to dunk or not to dunk. Rich Tea are the best for dunking, Mr Payne advises, but chocolate, on the other hand, is “disgusting when dunked”. There are those, he admits, who regard it as bad taste to dunk at all.

Friends send Mr Payne foreign biscuits for scrutiny on his website, which has had 250,000 visitors in two years. He approves of Mikado, a French product which looks like a thin breadstick dipped in milk chocolate, but is less keen on a Uruguayan biscuit which he describes as “like some sort of inflatable vinyl burger”.

Mr Payne confesses that his own favourite is McVitie’s Abbey Crunch, a groundbreaking biscuit in its day which led to the development of the Hobnob.

Payne's top five

1. Abbey Crunch
2. Fig Roll
3. Custard Cream
4. Malted Milk
5. Garibaldi

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