Party ring
Type | Biscuit |
---|---|
Main ingredients | Flour, sugar, icing, carob gum, food colouring |
Cookbook: Party ring Media: Party ring |
The party ring is a British biscuit first made by Fox's Biscuits in 1983. It is a circular biscuit with a central finger-sized hole. On top of this is a layer of hard coloured icing with "wiggly" lines in a different colour. The original five colour combinations were:
- Orange icing with white lines
- Pink icing with white lines
- Pink icing with yellow lines
- Purple icing with yellow lines
- Yellow icing with pink lines
Party rings were a product of the 1980s fashion for the newly developed chemical food dye system that enabled more lavish colours to be incorporated into the manufacture of biscuits. This made them a very popular choice for children's parties.
More recently, Party Rings have adopted softer, paler colours, through the use of different colourings.
The crisp, hard sheen on the icing is because of the use of carob bean gum — the carob, or locust bean, is also sometimes used as a chocolate substitute.
A standard pack of party rings consists of a long plastic tray containing five biscuit wells, each holding four biscuits of the same pattern, making twenty biscuits per pack.
They have also started producing party footballs which are in the same design as party rings but without the hole in the middle and a football pattern design on the biscuit.
Halloween edition
In 2008, a Halloween edition in an orange and black plastic tub was produced. It contained the following two Halloween-themed colour variations:
- Orange icing with black lines
- Black icing with orange lines
Mini Party Rings Mini Bags
Fox's also produce Mini Party Rings Mini Bags. These consist of a plastic wrapper, containing 6 smaller packets of 100g 'mini Party Rings', which are smaller versions of the original biscuits.