Annin Dofu and Blueberry Cheesecake KitKats (Regional)

I vowed a long time ago not to seek out the regional KitKats nor to pay a premium price for them. I'm sure all of my readers will appreciate my faithfulness to this promise which has absolutely nothing to do with them and only deprives them of content they may desire. That being said, if a regional version drops in my lap at a low price, I'm not going to walk away. I may be cheap, but I'm not that cheap... yet.

My husband and I were taking a sweaty summer evening stroll and it was not the good kind of sweaty which involves inappropriate activity in a public space. It was the usual bath in a humid boggy atmosphere kind of sweaty. Anyway, he suggested that we pop into the Village Vanguard to look around at their usual array of imported food and Japanese snack oddities. It's always good to pop into one of their shops and listen to loud music that is supposed to let the patrons know how hip they are and  prime the rest of us for hearing aids in our elder years. They've been selling regional KitKats for awhile, and I guess they finally gave up on moving them so they reduced the price by half. Instead of 840 yen a box, they were 420 yen ($5.47). To this, we said, "sold", as this positions the price such that they cost almost the same as regular KitKats.

White KitKats are white. 

My husband chose the blueberry cheesecake because he'd had it before and liked it. I reviewed it before, and didn't much care for it, but figured I'd give it a try to see if this Kanto-Koushinetsu regional version was different. It turned out that it wasn't. It was exactly the same mixture of extremely subdued blueberry flavor paired with too pungent cheese flavor and overly sweet white chocolate. Each mini bar is 69 calories of disappointment, at least for me. My husband actually enjoys them, so it's all down to your tastes.

It was my adventurous spirit that compelled me to buy the annin dofu variety, which is labeled as a "Yokohama" edition. I've seen it in a lot of shops in Tokyo though, so they aren't doing a very good job of keeping it from wandering into other territories. Annin dofu is an almond jelly dessert which is actually made with apricot seeds. The Wikipedia page says that it is supposed to taste like almonds, but to me annin dofu desserts taste more like a funky fruit cocktail. That is pretty much how this tasted to me, like a very sweet non-standard fruit cocktail. It's a little unusual, but I liked it. I don't know that I'd buy it again if I had to buy a dozen mini bars at once, but I might occasionally pick up a single mini bar or a regular one if I was in the mood for something different. I wasn't over the moon about it, but I liked it fine. It gets a very marginal: