I don't know about you, but I'm quite a big fan of The Apprentice and have been closely following the show this year. Unlike in the previous series of The Apprentice where the candidates were fighting for the chance to win a highly paid job with Sir Alan Sugar, this year the prize is £250,000 that will be invested into their own business.
Nine weeks into the show, there are now only 6 candidates left out of the 16 that applied and it's certainly getting very tense!

In the ninth episode which was aired last week, the task was to make, brand and pitch a new type of biscuit. This of course, highly interested me and I was very intreged as to what biscuits the teams would come up with!

Team Logic decided on a biscuit within a biscuit (Tom's idea) that was half coated in chocolate, designed to 'snap and share'. For the centre of the biscuit they chose a 'buttercrisp' (which I'm assuming is a general butter biscuit) and for the outer biscuit, a classic digestive. They decided on the name 'Bix-Mix' due to the mix of two different biscuits combined into one.

Team Venture decided to aim their product at children and developed a flapjack-like biscuit, topped with a chocolate star, which they appropriately named 'Special Stars'. Project manager Helen was concerned that the biscuit would be too sweet, but my sweet tooth would certainly disagree with that!

After watching this episode, I decided to have a go at making the two types of biscuit myself. Here are the end results!

For the 'Special Star' biscuits I used a recipe from Leith's Baking Bible for chocolate oaties. This was a really simple biscuit to make-just butter, sugar and oats! The hard part was making the chocolate stars- unfortunately they turned out to be quite messy so I didn't get round to making that many!


For Team Logic's 'Bix-Mix' biscuits I found a recipe for disgestives from one of my mums old Readers Digest books, and for the butter crisp centre I used a simple butter biscuit recipe. I'm quite happy with how these biscuits turned out, and they snap in half very nicely!

It was Team Venture that won in the end with their Special Star biscuits gaining a place on Asda's shelves. Personally I prefer team Logic's biscuits as I like the idea of having two types of biscuit made into one. However, I do agree with Sir Alan that this is not exactly an upmarket biscuit and maybe if the ingredients had been more 'luxury' then they would have had a better chance of winning!