The Biscuiteer: Arnott’s Iced VoVo
Iced VoVo
Manufactured by: Arnott’s
Back when I was a cultural studies postgraduate student, there was some speculation about the decision to purchase Iced VoVos as catering for the postgrad seminar series. One student – let’s call him Alex, because that was his name – protested that they resembled vaginas, adding that the name “VoVo” sounded like a euphemism for female genitalia.
This story is what cultural studies academics would call “a contested site”, because Alex later denied ever having said such a thing. But despite its possibly apocryphal nature, since then I have never been able to think about Iced VoVos without thinking about vadges.
Arnott’s first produced the Iced VoVo in 1906 and describes it variously as “sweet and interesting” and “a symphony in pink”. It consists of two strips of pink fondant icing atop a plain sweet biscuit, a strip of strawberry jam running down the middle, and the entire thing dusted with desiccated coconut. The back of the biscuit has a fancy moulded design on it.
The Iced VoVo has an iconic place in Australian culture. Growing up, I always thought of it as an old ladies’ biscuit, the sort you might break out at a CWA meeting if all the sponge cake was gone. As a child, Crikey journalist Eleri Harris wanted to call her firstborn child Iced Vo-Vo. “I thought it was the most beautiful sounding name in the world… hmm. Good thing I grew up,” she says.
"A symphony in pink"
In a turn of events that doesn’t exactly counteract the biscuit’s prissy reputation, Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election victory speech famously enshrined it as the ultimate in bureaucratic party foods.
“Friends, tomorrow, the work begins,” Rudd said. “You can have a strong cup of tea if you want, even an Iced VoVo on the way through. But the celebration stops there.”
You might also remember a brouhaha earlier this year when doughnut chain Krispy Kreme created the “Iced Dough-Vo”, a jam-filled doughnut with pink coconut-sprinkled icing. At first the company was defiant in the face of legal action from Arnott’s.
“The word iced is pretty well used, and the word dough I don’t think has got anything to do with what Arnott’s do, and the word vo, I’m not sure what it means, but it goes well with dough,” Krispy Kreme CEO John McGuigan told The Australian.
However, eventually the company agreed to rename the doughnut – a move that had some grumbling the entire episode was a marketing stunt. Which is what people tend to grumble when fast-moving consumer goods make the news.
Perhaps it’s the coconut, but the Iced VoVo is actually much less soft and fluffy than it appears at first glance. The jam is of the hardened, almost toffee-like biscuit consistency, and the icing may look like marshmallows but it is also quite hard. Biting into the biscuit, it’s very slightly chewy to the teeth, but mostly crisp and crunchy.
Dipping it into a cup of tea leaves you at risk of having the coconut detach and float on the surface, but the rest of the ingredients stand up very well to dunking. It actually increases the softness of the biscuit and makes it more enjoyable to chew.
Because it’s also quite a small biscuit, it’s gone in several bites, leaving only the impression of something light, sweet and texturally pleasing. The description “sweet and interesting” is surprisingly apt! The VoVo is surprisingly moreish – while chatting over a cuppa, I managed to devour most of the packet without really realising it. Highly recommended for both ladies and postgraduate silly sausages.
I’ve always loved the Vo-Vo as it feels like she’s a biscuit who dressed up for the occasion of being eaten.
Perhaps my memory fails me, but didn’t the Iced VoVo originally have marshmallows on the strips?
Jeb – I always used to think the pale pink part was marshmallow and was surprised by how hard it was. This shop describes the consistency as a “transitionary form between icing and marshmallow, and is perhaps closest to the components that pink shrimp sweets are made from.”
Having never eaten the shrimp sweets they’re talking about, I can’t say if this is true.
I’m not sure if they used to be made with real marshmallow and have since downsized to mere icing, but apparently Aldi sells a biscuit called Snow Cakes that contains real marshmallow. I’ll have to check these out and report back.
Those shrimp sweets are made out of spongey stuff that is very similar- if not identical- to lolly bananas. And they do not taste of shrimp.
I joined Arnotts in the eighties and the first week attended a retirement of an employee who had worked for them for 40 years. The manager giving the farewell speech said to the retiree “You must have had an interesting job to stay so long”. The reply was “I shook the desiccated coconut onto the Iced Vo-Vo”.
He had done this for 40 years? What dedication to the Vo-Vo.
I loved Iced VoVos as a kid precisely because, unless my memory is totally screwed, they were soft, fluffy and marshmallowy. I tried one again last year for the first time since I was a child and discovered - exactly as you report - that it was neither as soft and fluffy as I remembered, nor as marshmallowy. And also tiny.
I’ll allow that everything seems bigger when you’re smaller, but I remain convinced that downsizing has definitely occurred.
Is there any way to find out? Would Arnotts’ admit to such a thing?
These people are talking rubbish. A proper iced vo-vo never had marshmallow or anything disgusting like that on it. It was always soft but crunchy. The only difference between the biscuits I used to eat in the forties and the contemporary version is that we now get much fewer biscuits to the packet. There is a substitute version made by another company which unashamedly uses marshmallow. I reccommend that to those of your readers who lack discernment.
I agree with the last post - the mallow vo vo seems like a good idea but in reality it whacks out the proportion of the biscuit.
No need to get personal, Brigid. Geez. Each to their own, chill out.
This article makes me sad. Not because I care whether Iced Vo-Vos have marshmallow on them, but because someone brought a packet of them to my last-day-of-work morning tea a couple of weeks ago, and I thought ‘I’m enjoying this cheesecake! I’ll have an Iced Vo-Vo later.’ But when I went back later, they were all gone.
The moral of this story is that when it comes to free biscuits, carpe diem.
“And then when I asked if the Iced VoVos would be back, they said they didn’t know.”
The more marshmallowy biscuit referred to in this comment thread is perhaps Paradise Food’s Strawberry Mallow: http://www.paradisefood.com.au/_images/product_fancies3.jpg
Rediscover, mellygoround!