12: Salted everything

Day twelve. The halfway mark. Let’s get weird.

In some ways, this one is pretty inevitable. The past few years, salted caramel has been eating the world. Salted caramel every single thing. No caramel has been left unsalted. Salted caramel toothpaste, salted caramel cup cakes, salted caramel earwax, everything. Even salt has been caramel flavoured. So of course, we get salted caramel in our mince pie.

These ones are so off-piste they deserve two photographs. Here they are, sitting in their lovely box.

Buttery and lavish, crumble topped salted caramel mince pies. With “festive spice”. Not a spice girl I remember. Tesco Finest again here. Possibly not their finest piece of work. Once more, a gentle cheer, for the pack of four. We’re in high risk territory, best not overstay our welcome.

Here he is, naked. The first shock is no pie tin. Normally you have a little aluminium foil tray to shuck. These chaps are just on a flat suspiciously biscuity base. The overall impression is something like a mini cheesecake.

This follows on when we bite into it. Salty, I guess? Really though, I’m mostly getting creamy. Is it caramel? I really couldn’t say. Winter spice though, is abundant. It’s not exactly helping. Mini cheesecake that’s been stored in a cupboard next to a cracked box of Christmas shake n’ vac perhaps. It really is a bit more like a topped biscuit than a pie.

It’s too strange to fully enjoy to be honest. And all the time I’m eating it I’m busy overthinking, trying to figure out what I’m eating and tasting so I can write about it. I’m left very confused. I do have another three in the box, but for once I’m not in too much of a hurry to finish these off.