Byron Bay Butterbursts

When I heard that Byron Bay bakehouse had come up with a new line of biscuits, I was keen to try them after my last experience and gladly accepted an offer from Beyond the Bean to do so. Like the Byron Bay cookies before them, these butterbursts are meant for the cafe trade and come wrapped in pairs.

One of the first things I normally do when looking at a mass produced product is read the list of ingredients. I was a little disappointed to read rather a long list. It started off well enough with wheat flour, sugar and salted butter. It then went rather down hill with vegetable fat (vegetable oils, water, salt, E475, flavouring, colours: annatto, curcumin) I had to look this one up - polyglycerol esters of fatty acids - if that means anything to anyone???

Choc Hazelnut

At this point, I started to get a bit unhappy - why did these upmarket and what I had previously considered to be good quality products need the ubiquitous and highly dubious vegetable oil in them? When I read vegetable oil, I immediately think of unsustainable palm oil plantations, felled rainforests and rare orang utans. Given that they state their ingredients are ethically sourced, I would be interested to hear why the Byron Bay Cookie Company feel it's necessary to use this.

The vegetable oil aside, these make good eating for mass produced biscuits and taste almost as good as home made ones. These were smaller and thinner than the original Byron Bay Cookies and also crisper and firmer. Two out of three biscuits were very tasty and none of them were too sweet. They did, however, leave a bit of a greasy feel in the mouth - back to that vegetable fat again! I've subsequently noticed that a pack of two are on sale in the cafe at work for 60p and I've heard some quite positive comments.

Citrus Lemon

Choc Hazelnut - these had a good chocolatey flavour and generous quantities of hazelnuts were included which gave additional interest to the texture. A tasty biscuit.


Citrus Lemon - these had a buttery texture reminiscent of shortbread with a not overly powerful lemon taste of lemon. Real lemon juice is used although there is lemon flavouring as well. These were our favourite of the three; CT reckoned he could demolish a fair few of them.

Passionfruit - these were the ones I was most excited about eating - I adore passionfruit. Unfortunately, these were the ones I was most disappointed with. The first thing I noticed on opening the packet was a strong smell of passionfruit - too strong perhaps. Despite the addition of real fruit puree to the general ingredients used, I'm sorry to say they tasted artificial. I put this down to the passionfruit flavouring listed.