Tiffin

Today at work, we had an interesting discussion on the word ‘tiffin’. Because it was the last day of work for one of our colleagues, the boss bought some cakes and mini tarts for tea (it was right after my lunch break so I had to force myself to eat one piece just to be polite). So it was this chocolate cake thingy and it’s got bits of biscuits and cherry in it (yeah I know, I can never be a food magazine writer, seeing that I have such a boring way of describing delicious food). And we later found out that it was called ‘Chocolate Tiffin Stacker’. So I immediately thought, ‘that’s interesting’. Then we started asking each other what ‘tiffin’ actually means. And being Asian I of course immediately said “it’s a stainless steel carrier with two or three tiers of containers where you’d have a layer for rice, a layer for vegetable and a layer for meat”. But that doesn’t explain why those cakes were called ‘tiffin’. We then decided to google it and found some interesting results. ‘Tiffin’ is actually a word that was made popular in British India which meant ‘snack’ or ‘a light meal’. Hence you have tiffin carriers. However, the word ‘tiffin’ in the world of baking, is a kind of snack which mainly uses chocolate and broken biscuit bits as its main ingredients!! To some of you master baker out there you might have already known this but this is indeed new knowledge to me and I find it absolutely fascinating how you google something and find so many interesting results, some of which can be rubbish but at times when you’re lucky you stumble across some really interesting bits and pieces.

For some reason I felt very tired today after work. But if you'd asked me what i actually did at work today, i don't really know. perhaps looking up some articles, booking a room for a meeting, emailing to cancel a meeting, ermmm.... making tea... surely that should not take seven and a half hours?? hmmm... i definitely have to be more productive than that.

I think i'm going to watch a bit of telly now... the best way to unwind, in my opinion.