Roasted Sweet Potato KitKat

It's no secret that I am not a great food photographer and I'm comfortable with this fact. I don't consider myself so much a purveyor of great pictures as much as a writer. The pictures are just here to make the blog a little more interesting to look at and to show people what things look like as a point of reference. That being said, despite their second-class citizen status, I spend as much or more time taking and processing pictures as I do writing the reviews.

One of the things that causes me a great deal of consternation is the lack of light in my apartment. I literally get no sunlight at all because of my apartment's position in the bottom, center part of our apartment building and because we are surrounded by taller buildings. I've seen all sorts of tutorials on how to take better food pictures and they all start with natural light and reflectors so that you don't get all sorts of glare off of the things you're taking shots of when the flash is used. At any rate, I shrug my shoulders and keep taking my mediocre shots.


Every once in awhile, there is a food that I try to take a shot of which just kicks my ass. That is, no matter how hard I try, my camera won't focus. Usually, this happens with light-colored foods like white chocolate candy or light-colored cookies. I'm talking about this because my ass got handed to me by this sweet potato KitKat. I took 12 shots during two separate picture-taking sessions and then gave up. This is why you don't get yet another shot of the insides of a KitKat that looks pretty much like any other KitKat. I'm sure you're all disappointed but will somehow manage to carry on with your days as if all were well and good. (If you're really desperate, you can look at the daigaku imo KitKat, which looks very similar except that the filling between the wafers on it is kind of grey and this one had a whiter filling.)

This KitKat has been around for months and months and I've avoided it because it's sold as part of a multi-pack which is includes 7 regular milk chocolate KitKats and 6 roasted sweet potato ones. What is more, it was usually sold for over 300 yen ($3.35). I just didn't want or need a lot of plain KitKats along for the ride and refused to buy it despite quite a strong desire to sample the sweet potato ones. Fortunately, these finally went on sale at Okashi no Machioka for 197 yen ($2.20) and that was cheap enough for me to cave in.

I should have caved earlier because I loved this KitKat. It smells of white chocolate and sweet potato, which is to say, quite sweet. It tastes very sweet as well and has just the right amount of sweet potato flavoring. This is a difficult balance in some cases. Too much tastes like rotting potato and too little makes it hard to detect the flavor at all. There's also a certain sense of "creaminess" to it. It's hard to pin down but it's both a flavor and a sense of texture, though the bar is pretty much your usual firm chocolate with crispy wafer bar.

Each bar is 69 calories, and I should be glad that these are too expensive to get just any time and that they are made less appealing because of the inclusion of regular bars. I'd be wanting to have these all of the time if I could just buy them as single bars any time. If you like real sweet potatoes, there's a decent chance you'll like these quite a lot.

This has been reviewed at many other blogs by people far less fussy than me, but the easiest one for me to find a review on: Jen's KitKat Blog.