Coffee and Teacakes

A couple of stories that caught my eye this week - expensive coffee and cheaper chocolate teacakes:

• Animal dung coffee at £50 a cup: Fancy a cup of an exclusive coffee? What if it is a gourmet coffee blended from animal droppings and currently being sold at a London department store for £50 per cup. Two rare coffee beans (Jamaican Blue Mountain and the Kopi Luwak bean) are used to create Caffe Raro which is thought to be the most expensive cup of coffee in the world. What makes it unique is that the Kopi Luwak beans - which sell for £324 a kilogram - are eaten, then passed, by the Asian palm civet (a cat-like mammal).

• Teacake set to cost taxman £3.5m: Chocolate teacakes have been wrongly classified as a biscuit for two decades and the European Court of Justice has ruled that the UK Treasury must pay out £3.5m as a result. Customers paid VAT on Marks and Spencer teacakes for 20 years before the authorities accepted the product was a cake, which does not command VAT.