KP Cheese Footballs

Oh wow! It's Cheese Football time of year again. 

They are sort of wonderful and sort of the last thing you ought to be eating all at the same time. And I can't help loving them. Yum yum yum.

OK, so if you never tried a Cheese Football think two semi-spherical half-football-shaped wafer outsides with a squishy salty fake cheese filling. It's a completely pretence food made of 100% not actually cheese at all. Just delicious!

Of course, one of the great things about Cheese Footballs is that you only get them at Christmas. So you get to look forward to them. Like looking forward to real English-grown strawberries in the summer. If Cheese Footballs were available all year round I probably wouldn't buy them. Yes, I know it's me being contrary again.

What do they actually taste like? Hard to say. The outer shell is a sort of wafer which doesn't taste of much, it's just there to hold the cheese in. And to pretend to look like a football I suppose. And the inner cheesy bit is a sort of cream-coloured salty cheesy mush. And quite sweet. Sounds horrible doesn't it? And yet... and yet, I find them hard to resist. At least once a year.

The trick is to bite off one half of wafer shell and eat that, then bite off the second half of the shell so you're left with the squidgy cheesy bit. And then you let that dissolve in your mouth. Or you can just eat them like a normal person would.

Because Cheese Footballs come in a drum I can't shove the packaging into the scanner so here it is on a bookshelf. The packaging says "the winning snack at home or away". Is this a snack you would take to a football match? I shouldn't think so. We also have two dreadful riddles:

Q What does Santa do when elves misbehave? A Give them the sack.

Q What do you sing at a snowman's birthday party? A Freeze a jolly good fellow. 

Probably best not to comment. Cheese Footballs were originally made by Huntley & Palmer and I have to admit I thought they were currently made by Jacobs but since many confusing mergers and a takeover by German snack conglomerate Intersnack they seem to come under the KP brand name these days.

Important Information 2 January 2022

I contacted KP at the end of December 2021. The Customer Services Team kindly replied almost immediately to tell me, and I am passing on the information to you lot, that this fabulous crispy snack is sent out to “most supermarkets” in mid September. So the advice is, if you find a shop with a stock of them, buy lots and eke them out. Because they have a 12 month shelf life you can safely keep a supply in the cupboard under the stairs. Or like me just gorge to your heart’s content over Christmas. And this Christmas I was given 2 tubs by 2 different family members! What could be better than that? (Because I don’t really like chocolate that much).

Just to add, I’m not sure what “most supermarkets” actually means. I haven’t seen Cheese Footballs in any of our local Waitrose branches for years, and my spies tell me that the smaller local Tesco stocks them, but the very large branch doesn’t seem to. And at least one branch of Sainsbury’s had them in December. So obviously you need to shop around….from mid September. Good luck next year.

October 2022: I followed my own advice and just picked up 5 tubs of Cheese Footballs from a giant branch of Tesco. But beware - there were four huge shelves of crisps and none of them were Cheese Footballs. We were super disappointed but kept looking and found what we were looking for on a completely different shelf some distance away. So keep looking.