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Food

Police Stole This Guy's Banoffee Pie Icing and They Will Pay For It

An Essex man is demanding £850 from the police who broke into his houseboat and made off with a bag of powder, which turned out to be sugar for making banoffee pie.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US
Photo via Flickr user Robyn Lee

If you've tuned in the news at all in the past two years—particularly in the US—you've seen the airwaves dominated by growing tension between police and citizens, as trigger-happy authoritarian reactions to relatively benign situations have spurred injury, animosity, and death. From fear comes overreaction, and from overreaction comes fear.

This has proven true even in the realm of food, where paranoid cops have leapt to mistake the unfamiliar for the criminal. Take the security at Russia's Sheremetyevo International Airport who detained a group of Chinese passengers for days after mistaking the powdered soy in their luggage for meth. Or the six police vehicles that rushed out into the German countryside expecting to apprehend a group of bloodthirsty murderers, only to find a pack of asparagus gatherers who had stepped out of the fields to get lunch and carried their scythes with them. There was the Georgia man who awakened to the sound of helicopters and heavily-armed police with dogs lined up at his door after they thought his garden of okra was a pot farm.

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But the cops who took Richard Nicholson's banoffee pie frosting mix will live to regret it.

According to the UK's Metro, Nicholson has filed a complaint after police smashed through the door of his houseboat and made off with a bag of white powder, supposing it to be nose drugs. In actuality, after testing, they found that they had confiscated a bag of icing sugar.

Now, Nicholson wants £850 to replace the door. And for Christ's sake, that sugar was for banoffee pie, jerks.

"I think you need more than a couple of malicious phone calls to do something like this," he told the Metro. "They found a bag with decanted icing sugar because my girlfriend wanted to make a banoffee pie, so had brought some and put it in the kitchen cupboard."

For the unfamiliar, banoffee pie is a popular English dessert comprised of a pastry crust topped with a banana-toffee mixture and a generous layer of whipped cream and grated chocolate. It's delicious, and generally contains no cocaine or methamphetamine.

The raid took place on March 5, after police received a tip that Nicholson was throwing late-night, drug-fueled parties. However, Nicholson says that the claim was "false and malicious." Snitching accomplished, but now the police are the ones in the doghouse. And the hole—a houseboat door don't come for free.

But the cops are pushing back. Nicholson's boat, Blacksmith, is situated at King Edwards' Quay in Essex, and a spokesperson for the Essex Police department says that "Police executed a warrant under the Misuse of Drugs Act after acting on intelligence received … " although, admittedly, "No illegal substances were found." The spokesperson also confirmed that the complaint for the replacement door was received, but says that the police "may not be held responsible" since the warrant was legal. No word on whether Nicholson and his girlfriend will be reimbursed for their icing sugar.

True: Banoffee pie is sinfully tasty, but not criminally so. Legalize banoffee pie.