By Patricia Devlin.

It's not just a good hot cuppa we love here in Northern Ireland, but apparently Jaffa Cakes as well!

Research by leading biscuit brand McVitie's has revealed that we are the only region in the UK not to favour chocolate digestives as our favourite tea time biccy.

27% of us would prefer the chocolate coated orange cake as our prime dunker, with the most popular time of eating our favourite tea treats between 7pm and 8pm as opposed to the UK average who of 3pm to 4pm.

The McVitie's Bonkers About Biscuits research also shows that almost three-quarters of Northern Ireland biscuit eaters (72.9%) would help out their friends by telling them if they had biscuit crumbs on their mouth, but we are less inclined to do the same for work colleagues as less than half (48.6%) would tell a co-worker they had crumbs around their mouth before walking into a meeting.

According to the research, Northern Ireland ‘biscuit-iquette' depends on whether we are on our own or in public. Over half of us enjoy dunking biscuits in a hot drink in private (54%), or admit to scoffing them down fast and consuming most of the packet (10.8%). In public however we take fewer and smaller bites and one in ten (10.8%) say they would never eat biscuits in meetings!

McVities have also found us Northern biscuit lovers are among the most selfish with more than one in four admitting to taking their favourite biscuit from the plate before others could get their hands on it.

Jan Boyle, from McVitie's who commissioned this survey said what biscuits we loved varied from area to area. Jan said: "In Northern Ireland we favour Jaffa Cakes but the rest of the UK's favourite, the Chocolate Digestive is still a close second. How we choose to enjoy our favourite biscuit varies vastly from area to area and between the different ages and sexes, but one thing is sure, people are not about to get tired of biscuits anytime soon."