Arnott's confirms that Iced VoVo never had marshmallow - Food Files

Jul 24, 2024

It's a NoNo.

Do you remember how outraged you were when you discovered that Arnott’s had swapped out the pink marshmallow part of Iced VoVos for boring old icing? Yes? Well, we have some disturbing news.

Iced VoVos have never had marshmallows.

You’re not alone. All it takes is a quick Google to confirm that plenty of people share this delusion. It’s an example of the Mandela Effect – the name for a phenomenon where a large number of people have a similar vivid memory that doesn’t actually match up with reality.

The confusion may stem from another biscuit you might not quite remember from the 90s: Paradise brand’s Strawberry Mallows. Arnott’s Iced VoVos have a strip of sticky raspberry-flavoured “jam” down the middle; Paradise’s version had strawberry, and in place of the firm pink fondant were two neat rows of round, squishy pink spheres that fit much more neatly into my vivid childhood memories of gleefully picking marshmallows off the biscuit base one by one.

Irish company Boland’s also makes a biscuit called the Jam Mallow, and another brand, Jacob’s, sells one very similar under the name Mikados.

Jam Mallows

You’ll occasionally see, floating around the internet, an image of a ’90s-era packet of VoVos where the product shot shows the pink icing with a more rounded, scalloped edge, certainly suggestive of those marshmallow puffballs – but given Arnott’s has insisted that the recipe is the same as ever, we must assume that either there was a brief period where the icing was piped on in dabs rather than slabs, or someone somewhere spent an afternoon in Photoshop just to keep the VoVo Mandela Effect alive.

A much-updated post by Kiwi blogger LongWhiteKid preserves a 1960s Arnott’s ad, also seen elsewhere online, with a handy cross-section of the VoVo, where you can clearly see that the pink sections are, if anything, even flatter than the dark jam stripe. While you should never believe everything you see on the internet, other ads from the time show the same 2D profile.

Still not convinced? Here’s the recipe, which has you making royal icing. No marshmallow. But if you’re determined to make your conflated memories a reality, Lauren Eldridge’s recipe for an Iced VoVo Viennetta includes a handy how-to for raspberry marshmallow. Who care if it’s ‘right’ when it’s this tasty?

The most disturbing Vo-variation, however, might be this recipe for homemade VoVos from 1946 in Sydney newspaper The Farmer and Settler. After making the base biscuits, the paper instructs home bakers to “put a strip of pink icing down centre of biscuit and raspberry jam down each side of icing”. Yes, you read that right. Icing down the middle, and jam down each side.

Whether you’re team icing, team marshmallow or just team biscuit, we can surely all agree that pink down the centre and jam on the sides is the absolute height of VoVo depravity.