As well as being baked at home, they are widely available in shops, ready-packaged, often with extra ingredients such as chocolate, dried fruit such as glace cherries, nuts, yoghurt and toffee pieces or coatings, either as individual servings or full unsliced trayfuls.

They are usually an alternative to a biscuit or cake, and textures range from soft and moist to dry and crisp.

[3] The Oxford English Dictionary records the word "flapjack" being used as early as the beginning of the 16th century, although at this time it seems to have been a flat tart.

[1] Shakespeare refers to "flap-jacks" in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, but this is one of the many anachronisms in his historical plays and does not suggest that he thought it was a middle eastern dish, merely a common English dessert of the time: Later, flapjack would be used to describe something similar to an apple flan, but it is not until 1935 that the word is first used to describe a food made of oats.

The food is called a flapjack in the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and Newfoundland.