Snowballs aren't cakes, and that's a cold hard fact
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Version 0 of 1. Think a marshmallow covered in chocolate and coconut counts as a cake? Then balls – snowballs, to be precise – to you. Even if you're powerful and important. And especially if that power and import makes you a judge in the Scottish tax tribunal that, last week, was presented with a plate of "cakes" (including, incidentally, Jaffa Cakes) and asked to make a decision, worth £2.8m in tax rebates, about whether snowballs belonged there. About whether, in short, a snowball is a cake. This is a question that's been back and forth like a baker's elbow. Cakes, like caravans, bingo and cremation, are exempt from VAT. Different rulings have given snowballs exempt status, then shifted them to standard-rated. Last week's successful appeal, made by two Scottish snowball manufacturers to the first-tier tax tribunal in Edinburgh, took them back to cakehood, and thus exemption. Now if Lees and Tunnock's plough that £2.8m into making more tablet and caramel wafers, I don't begrudge them a penny. But the fact remains that a snowball – soft, fluffy marshmallow with a thin chocolate carapace sprinkled with coconut – ain't no cake. Judge Anne Scott and her sugar-addled colleagues did try. They took into account the circumstances of snowball consumption (perhaps at an office birthday celebration – she should try being freelance), the likeliness of wanting a cup of tea or coffee to go with one and the need for a plate or napkin to catch the bits. As with cakes, so with snowballs, they decided, and therefore they have "sufficient characteristics" to be considered cakes. Sadly, it is painfully clear that none of those appointed to sit in judgment on this most important of matters understands the true nature of a cake. As anyone who's ever creamed butter and sugar together, and many who haven't, will know, cakes involve sponge. They just do. It's how you'd pick them out of a lineup, how you'd know whether you were being pelted with fondant fancies (cake!) or bakewell tarts (pastry!); how, against many people's better judgment, Jaffa Cakes get away with it. If you made Jaffa Cakes bigger (which McVities apparently did, once) they'd be cakes with an orange topping. However big you make a snowball, it will never have sponge in it. It will always be a confection. Just like a scone will always be a scone, a meringue a meringue and a jam tart an initially promising but ultimately wodgy waste of time. Some retailers already agree with the Scottish ruling. I went snowball shopping, looking forward to the rasp and crack of the shell against the roof of my mouth, and the coma-inducing quality of a gobful of sweet, soft mallow (just because they're not cakes, doesn't mean they're not nice). The nearest I could find to a snowball was at Tesco, where I purchased a pack of 12 miniature, snow-white, domed, er, things that had been, perhaps rather defensively, labelled "snowball cakes". Someone had also taken the precaution of displaying them in the cake aisle. With a crunchy jam-topped base, marshmallow, white-chocolate-flavoured coating and coconut sprinkles, they'd be best described as a glorified biscuit. Even without the sugar, it's enough to give anyone a headache, but do you think the tribunal got it right? Are snowballs cakes in disguise, or do they have a hailstone's chance in hell of appearing in your cake tin? |