The mighty custard cream is one of the top tier snacks to be found in the biscuit tin - a nugget of gold amongst a sea of rich tea and digestives.
The popular sandwich biscuit sees two decorative ‘custard cream’ stamped biscuit pieces fused together with a vanilla flavoured filling.
These crunchy delights have been a cupboard must-have for over a century, having originated in the UK in 1908.
The Victorian biscuit features a baroque design which looks beautiful at afternoon tea - and they’re ideal for dunking into a cup of tea.
And as with most great things, they’ve had many makeovers over the years, with supermarkets creating other flavours of the classic - including strawberry, orange and chocolate (which is essentially a Bourbon, right?)
You might think that custard creams are pretty standardised, wouldn’t you? Price, look, shape, filling - it is what it is.
You’d be wrong to think so. In fact, I went to six different supermarkets in search of the best custard cream - and the worst.
Here’s what I thought of own-brand custard creams I bought from Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda, Aldi, Morrisons and M&S.
Sainsbury’s
A pack of bog-standard custard creams at Sainsbury’s will set you back 35p - but it’s not a double stacked packet like you’ll find in most supermarkets.
With just 16 biscuits in the yellow wrapper, each custard cream works out around 2.1p.
The biscuits themselves were golden, with a good crunch and a decent biscuit to filling ratio.
And upon dunking into my cuppa, they remained intact without leaving crumbs in my brew.
Tesco
Next up was Tesco, who’s 41p packet of custard creams contained 32 biscuits - costing 1.2p per portion.
These were much paler than the some of the other options, but were fairly filled with a creamy vanilla flavour that was extremely pleasant.
But on taking on the dunk-test, a bit did fall into my tea, leading me to believe these could be a little fragile.
Asda
Asda’s own brand custard creams matched Tesco on price, weight and number of biscuits - but one thing it didn’t match on was taste.
The 41 custard creams from Asda were a darker bake with a dry and cracker-like texture.
The vanilla filling didn’t taste very sweet, and the filling was unevenly distributed throughout the sandwiched snack.
I found these pretty disappointing, but honestly, they weren’t the worst from the list.
Aldi
I swear by a lot of Aldi dupes but their custard creams aren’t one of them.
They were some of the cheapest to buy at 31p, but I did notice something rather sneaky about their packaging.
Instead of stacking the biscuits on top of one another, the custard creams were stacked two deep - making it appear there were the same amount of biscuits as Tesco and Asda.
This pack contained 24 biscuits, so still 1.2p per biscuit, like Asda and Tesco.
And the number of biscuits wasn’t all they scrimped on - there wasn’t much filling in these, and they were quite biscuit-heavy. And the biscuit themselves didn’t taste very nice at all - more like a Rich Tea, which I don’t enjoy.
Morrisons
Morrisons stocked the priciest custard creams at 50p, but there were 34 biscuits in each of the transparent packs, making them 1.4p per biscuit.
These had a nice flavour, much more similar to the Tesco ones. They were not overly fragile despite there being the odd broken biscuit in the pack.
While they were very nice, Tesco pipped Morrisons on price.
M&S
The cheapest packet to buy on paper is those from M&S - which may come as a surprise.
That said, it’s the pack with the fewest biscuits, at just 12 per packet, making them the dearest per biscuit at 2.5p.
They were generously filled, sturdy, and still had a bit of crunch even after being dipped in my tea.
Overall, Aldi’s custard creams scored a big no from me, followed by Asda. M&S come in fourth place due to being pricy, and Sainsbury’s I’d give third place due to a nice flavour, but smaller packet sizes.
Tesco and Morrisons both had a creamy vanilla flavour, but Tesco just beat Morrisons on price - so for me, they’ve got the best supermarket custard creams.
