McVitie's Digestives: Vanilla cheesecake creams

Product name: McVitie’s Digestives: Vanilla cheesecake creams
Purchase details: £0.59 for a 168g packet (Tesco Superstore)
Calories: 67 per biscuit
Country of origin: UK 

Cheesecake used to be my favourite dessert until I did the typical ‘me’ thing of eating too much of it! I do still enjoy it but I’m not as obsessed with it as I was. When I found these McVitie’s Digestives: Vanilla cheesecake creams, though, I was intrigued, particularly as the digestive base was part of the reason why I loved cheesecakes so much.

I really liked the colour scheme of these biscuits’ wrapper since it reflected the appearance of vanilla cheesecake and also featured cute baby blue stars which were just a nice touch. Each biscuit combined two smaller-than-normal McVitie’s Digestives with a ‘cheesecake inspired vanilla flavour cream filling’ inbetween. The Digestives were the usual mid-brown colour and, whilst relatively plain, managed to look appealing. However, the downsizing did mean that the imprinted image and wording on their surface didn’t look quite as neat as normal. The cream layer looked lovely and thick but was actually white rather than cream-coloured.

The biscuits emitted a mild smell but I could only detect the digestive aspect rather than the filling. The wheatmeal biscuits tasted as expected – slightly sweet but pretty plain. They were their normal, crunchy selves with miniature wheat flakes adding a bit of additional texture.

I thought the filling would be soft and, therefore, reflect a cheesecake’s texture to an extent. However, it was actually quite hard, and so the discs of cream could be removed from the biscuits without breakage. That said, they were soft to chew – they just didn’t have the creamy or fluffy texture I’d imagined. I didn’t find the filling to be very flavourful but, since 4.5% of these biscuits consisted of dried cream cheese, there was a cheesecakey tang which I found quite surprising. On the whole, the filling was sweet, but just not what I’d imagined it to taste like.

When eating the components together, as intended, I thought the filling would provide more moisture than it did. In reality, though, it wasn’t that noticeable. I just found it added a slight tang towards the end of each mouthful. Whilst this flavour wasn’t dissimilar to cheesecake, it did seem to be an afterthought, and the overall experience was certainly digestive-heavy. Of course, this was probably down to the sandwich biscuit design, resulting in the Digestives being twice as thick as normal.

I did still find this product enjoyable in the addictive way that Digestives tend to be, but it just wasn’t quite what I’d expected and I didn’t feel that the biscuits tasted that different. I did decide to try them dipped in tea too and, in doing so, found that more flavour was released from the filling since the biscuits softened but the cream didn’t, making it more noticeable in the mouth. The downside of this was that I don’t like soggy digestives!

I think the main reason that theses Vanilla cheesecake creams weren’t as realistic as I thought they might be was because it wasn’t really possible to get the proportions right – to have the cream, you need a sandwich design, and to have more cream than biscuit would mean a ridiculously deep filling. Maybe, then, I’m being a bit too critical but, as I say, these biscuits were still tasty.

Appearance: 7/10
Aroma: 6/10
Taste: 7/10
Texture: 7/10
Overall score: 6.75/10