Meiji Tasty Cinnamon Chocolate

I've been away from the U.S. for so long that I can't remember if products are named with adjectives like "tasty", "delicious", or "arousal-inducing." I may be amused that this has the word "tasty" in the product name when it's not really funny at all. When someone has to tell me it tastes good rather than allowing me to assume it is so, it makes me think they doth protest too much... but I can't remember if it's just a Japanese marketing thing or if all manufacturers name their products in this manner. Perhaps my readers who haven't lived abroad for a little over two decades can enlighten me.

I found this box of cinnamon chocolate for 138 yen ($1.67) at a Lawson convenience store while out for an early morning walk with my husband. We were resisting the bakeries full of fresh pastries, Mr. Donut with its, well, donuts, and all of the other morning enticements. The only thing we gave in and bought was this pack of 6 sticks (36 grams total, 35 calories per stick) of cinnamon chocolate.

My husband sampled this first and remarked that he wasn't quite sure what to make of it because cinnamon and chocolate weren't a natural pairing in his experience, but Mexican hot chocolate preparations often put these two flavors together. Additionally, I've got a recipe for Amish brownies which combines cocoa, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon. It's not an alien combination, but these two-tone bars offer a far more potent aspect of cinnamon than either of the aforementioned concoctions.

The chocolate is a dark chocolate with a heavy "bottom" flavor that hits you at the back of the tongue. The cinnamon, though infused into white chocolate, isn't incredibly sweet, but is quite potent. In fact, it remands me a lot of Dentyne chewing gum. Together, these do indeed make for a strange pairing. Imagine eating a dark chocolate Hershey's kiss while chewing cinnamon gum (or while brushing your teeth) and you'll have an approximation of what this is like.

I think Meiji dropped the ball on this by making the cinnamon too overbearing. I love cinnamon, and I even prefer super strong cinnamon but it's important that it have a chance to shine through with the proper background flavor, and this Meiji chocolate is all wrong for this purpose. I'm not sure if I'll bother to finish this box, small as it is, and I definitely wouldn't buy it again. However, this isn't bad enough to qualify for an "unhappy" rating, and my husband said he'll eat the rest even if I don't.

Little Big KitKat Mikan

I'm going to ask my readers to return to those less than thrilling days of yesteryear when they were young and naive and their mommies carted them off to the doctor for rounds of various inoculations. I realize that's something that may become a thing of the past with all of the controversy about vaccinations causing all sorts of problems such that people would rather their kids had polio or whatever. As a childless person, I'm really not too fussed about how other people deal with their off-spring unless they're kicking the back of my seat in a movie or on a plane.

Getting back to the point though, we all remember how dreadful the experience could be when young and helpless and forced to be skewered on our scrawny, tender arms with what I'm sure was a two-foot needle. The only "good" thing about it was that you'd often get a lollipop at the end of the ordeal. Well, it was best if you got orange or grape. Cherry would suffice in a pinch, and getting lemon or lime just was adding insult to the injured appendage that took the shot.

The reason I want you to remember those cheap lollipops that you got after being stabbed by a well-meaning health professional is that you'll need to draw on the sense memory of what those cheap, clear orange lollies smelled and tasted like to understand the essence of this KitKat. It's as if someone either stirred the milk chocolate with one of those suckers or crushed them up to sandwich between the wafers. Either way, it's the essence of a cheap, chemical orange flavor which is a bit too intense. With the milk chocolate, it comes across as an orange tootsie roll on steroids. On the bright side, these are crispier than usual KitKats.

This wasn't appalling or anything, but I wouldn't buy it again and had I known what it was going to taste like, I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. Adding orange to chocolate is something that needs some care and finesse. Real citrus flavors in the right balance make for something immensely delicious, but fake flavors in too high a quantity spoil the effect.

If you'd like to have one of these despite my low opinion of it, you can find them at convenience stores now. I got mine at NewDays for 120 yen. The only bright side is that there are 10 little morsels in the bag and each is only 22 calories so you can spread the "love" amongst your friends, family or coworkers should you live to regret your purchasing decision.

Tohato All Apricot

I'm not sure what most people do when they buy a package of some food with the expectation that they're going to enjoy it and then discover that it's  not all that they'd hoped for. Do they feed it to the neighbor's dog? Do they eat it anyway because they don't want to waste food? Do they hurl it at pigeons as they grumpily make their way through the park to yet another soul-draining day at the office? Or, do they do what I do and eat one and then throw the rest in a plastic holding basket of snacks that need to be reviewed but are so boring that you don't want to do it yet?

The latter is where these apricot cookies have been languishing for several weeks now as I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm to review them. I've reviewed several of the "All (something)" line of cookies, and have been  pleased with what I've tried. Since apricot is one of my favorite flavors when it comes to jam, dried fruit, and cookies, I was really happy to see this in a local 100 yen ($1.20) shop/convenience store (Lawson's 100).

Everything about these cookies looked to be every bit as good as the usual compressed fruit between two biscuits of the "All (something)" line of snacks. Unfortunately, the fruit appears to have been skimped on in this particular variety. There was too much dry cookie and too little actual apricot. In fact, when I broke a cookie in half, instead of seeing the delights of dried apricot running like fruity sap through the cookies veins, I saw nothing but dry biscuit. The packaging claims these cookies compress 10 centimeters of fruit into a 1 cm. cookie, but it seems like they skimped a lot on the frequency of fruit.

Even at a  modest 29.5 calories per cookie, I couldn't see these as worth it on the "pleasure to fat cell size increase" scale that I apply to all snacks that I try. Sure, there's nothing at all wrong with these. The cookie is pleasant enough though it's a somewhat dry biscuit and there is at least a little apricot flavor there, but ultimately it's just not all that impressive. If I were seriously hungry or on a carb rage, and this was all I had in the apartment (not bloody likely, considering I'm a snack blog reviewer), I might tuck into these. Tohato made me wish I had a dog to feed these to, or at least some pigeons to walk by on the way to work.

Strawberry Cake KitKat (mini)

I have a feeling this will be one of my shortest reviews ever. This is because strawberry KitKats are often pretty much more of the same. The fact that this one is named "strawberry cake" seems more like an effort to re-brand something relatively mundane and oft-recycled into something more interesting and the pessimist in me (and the part that has sampled a lot of strawberry KitKats) stops me from having and real hopes.

The only reason that this is getting reviewed is that I wandered into a 7-11 to buy something else and saw a box of mini bars for sale individually for only 42 yen (50 cents). I figured that was a small price to pay for a chance to speak derisively about yet-another-strawberry-KitKat. Since this is a mini bar, both fingers together make up about the same volume as 1.5 regular KitKat fingers. There's no calorie information on these individual sale packets, but I'd wager it's about what most of these are, between 66 and 70 calories.

When I unwrapped it, I smelled that very familiar fake strawberry and sweet white chocolate smell. The bar is pale pink and quite sweet, and while it does carry pretty much the same strawberry flavor as all of the other variations of this, there is a little something else there as well. Whatever it is does have some sort of essence of "cake", but it is extremely weak. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't detect it unless you were looking for it. To me, it came across as a sort of vanilla, cream, and flour combination flavor.

The whisper of an element of this which resembles "cake" is certainly not worth seeking out this bar. Unless you are head over heels in love with the idea of a strawberry KitKat, you might want to give this a pass. It's nice enough, for sure, but more of the same old, same old for the most part.

Hida Natural Cheese Softly Bar

One of the things about food in Japan that keeps me interested, yet also ambivalent is the way in which they take a flavor that I associate with one sort of presentation and mix it up with one of a very different presentation. I guess I have an approach-avoidance conflict going on with such foods. I'm repelled, yet also curious.  I must say that I'm glad this is a situation in my life that mainly applies to food, and not other areas of my personal life. If you're going to be strangely repelled, yet curious, you don't want it to be about something which may land you with a social disease.

I should note that I did not buy these (so I can't offer a price), but rather that they were given to my husband by an acquaintance as a gift. You can see by the picture above that the box has a unique accordion file-style way of opening to allow display of the individually wrapped bars inside in a break room or on a coffee table. Clearly, this is one of those things designed as "omiyage" or souvenirs, often picked up by traveling businesspeople and given to coworkers who remain back in the office toiling away.

These "Natrual Cheese Softly Bars" are a curious menage a trois between a savory element (Gouda cheese), a cookie, and a cracker. The bars smell like a pungent slab of cheese, but the texture is dry, but not crumbly. It's soft and easy to bite into but dense. The taste is lightly sweet, fairly cheesy, but not in an intense Gorgonzola way.

The shining star of this is the texture, which is very pleasing because you can tell that there is a lot of fat layered into the flour. The first ingredient is margarine, followed by flour then sugar and cheese. If you took a cheese cracker and tried to change it into a bar cookie or shortbread, this is what it would be. Usually, this sort of sweet and savory mixture comes across as a very funky and unhappy marriage, but it works pretty well in these cookies. That being said, though I found these reasonably enjoyable, I wouldn't seek them out or buy them myself.

Nippon Ham French Bread Pizza

I rarely buy frozen or chilled pizzas in Japan. In fact, I'm pretty sure that aside from a random Lawson VL "Mix" pizza for 100 yen (like this tuna one, only without the tuna and mayo) every once in a blue moon (however often blue moons make an appearance), every pizza I've bought of this type has been reviewed in this blog. 

I like to think I buy such pizzas when I have forgotten how bad they are in Japan, but the truth is that I occasionally sort of crave a bad pizza. That is, I crave one until I actually have one and then I am full of regret and bad carbohydrates. At the very least, I can always get a review out of these things when I take the occasional pizza plunge.

One "pizza" sealed for your protection.

This particular "chilled" pizza is "Japan's #1 brand" of said type of pizza according to the advertising. I have to wonder if that has more to do with the pricing and portions than the quality. I found this bag of 4 hot-dog-bun-sized "French Bread" pizzas at Seiyu supermarket for a mere 298 yen ($3.69). Any time each serving comes in at less than 100 yen ($1.24) each, it's on the cheap side for Japanese prepared foods. Each serving provides 245 calories and a small mix of cheese and a few scraps of ham and sausage. The ingredients include flour, "natural cheese" (as opposed to the ominpresent processed stuff in Japan), tomato puree, bacon, and very curiously, "apple pulp".

It sort of looks like the bottom of your shoe after you have stepped in something really nasty, doesn't it?

I had the first pizza as I imagine they are intended to be prepared. I unwrapped it from it's tight plastic and placed it directly on the toaster oven grate without a tray. The packaging makes a point of telling you not to use a tray so that you can get cheese all over the toaster oven and have a devil of a time cleaning the mess up later. The instructions recommend you toast it for a spare 3 minutes at 1000W, but that wasn't even long enough to melt the cheese. I think I gave it 7 minutes to get the cheese to the melted state you see in the picture above.

As for the pizza itself, there's a reason I compared its size to a hot dog bun and that's the fact that it tastes a lot like the devil's spawn of said bun and French bread, and this is an offspring which favors the dog's bun side of the family in texture. The bread does not get crispy at all if you heat it from the chilled state to a point where the cheese hasn't turned into a mass of brown bubbles. The results were a little better when I froze the remaining "pizzas" and toasted them longer. The bread had time to get slightly crispy before the frozen cheese got too over-cooked.

The flavor of this was pretty much like cheese on bread with the faintest hint of tomato. It wasn't a bad thing, but it was nothing like a "pizza" or even French bread. I did eat the rest, but mainly because it was there and easy to prepare. I also had a vat of lentil soup I had been trying to eat up over several days and this was a decent accompaniment. I wouldn't recommend this unless you're too lazy to put cheese on your own hot dog bun or piece of bread. You can do better even doing that if you use more flavorful cheese.

Bourbon Cubyrop Gum

The Japanese are famous for taking something successful and improving upon it. It's nice to know that they are also capable of taking something successful and making it lame. This gum, made by confectioner Bourbon, is based on the "Cube" series by Lotte, which I reviewed favorably before. I think that the name might be a fusion of "cube" and "drop", but I have no idea what it really means. A lot of the English names of products mean nothing and foreigners who try to make sense of them are looking for meaning where none actually exists.

I picked up this sugar-free gum because it is a big container of gum that looks like "Cube" brand for a lower price. It was on sale for 399 yen ($4.74) at Okashi no Machioka discount sweets shop. That may sound expensive for 85 grams (3 oz.) of sugar-free gum, but it is cheaper than similar containers.

Strawberry: Weak, slightly tangy and too sweet. It seems to get sweeter as you chew it more until all of the flavor leeches out. 

Grapefruit: This has a nice grapefruit flavor, but like the strawberry is too sweet and the flavor diminishes pretty quickly.

Grape: This is the sweetest, and has a lot of the same flavor of the type of purple lollipop you used to fight with your sister or brother over when

Green Apple: Unsurprisingly, this has the same fake green apple flavoring that you get in most candies. It's fine, and even has a bit of the real feel of an actual apple once the initial burst of stronger flavor wears down a bit.

Comparing this to the product it clearly is ripping off made sure this ended up looking worse than it might. The outside of the "Cube" brand gum is kind of crispy and feels a little candy-coated. This is just gum in a cubic shape. That doesn't make it bad. It's just not "good", particularly since the flavor isn't' especially intense and tends to fade fast.

As gum goes, this is just "okay" but I wouldn't buy it again unless it was super, super cheap (300 yen or less). I'd rather just buy real "Cube" gum with all of its textural qualities and stronger flavors. Since the cubes are small, the best way to have this is to chew on 2 or 3 different flavors at once. You get a second-rate Juicy Fruit gum experience that way, and that's about as good as it's going to get.

Mitsuya Cider All Zero

There's no way for my readers to know this, but I used to have an internet stalker. This person first discovered me via a personal blog, and followed me to this one. As this person's preoccupation with me started to ramp up, my stalker started to post comments under various made-up names. The main point of such comments was to post moderately critical or contradictory statements. If I said I didn't care for something, this person would say it was a favorite.

The reason this stalker (who I believe has since lost interest in me) comes to mind is that one of the sock puppets this party created asserted that I wasn't posting enough beverage reviews. This was despite the fact that I had posted about 25 drink reviews at that point in time. The main residue of my experience with this stalker is that my husband has moderated comments since that experience began so that I wouldn't have to think about them. That's right, my husband filters your comments, not me! A secondary one was that I disabled anonymous commenting (to make it more troublesome to post under fake identities). The tertiary one is that I always remember that person's phony baloney assertion that I don't review enough drinks every time I review one now. So, as I review this Mitsuya Cider, I remember that my stalker wanted more of these types of reviews, or at least pretended to.

The last time I reviewed what the Japanese call "cider" it was the Fanta Zero Cider. Mitsuya Cider has been around a lot longer and is a more popular brand than Fanta. I didn't know what to expect, but part of the reason for that was that I had forgotten what the Fanta Zero was like. That was an experience that floated back as I sampled this.

This smelled like bubblegum The taste was very hard to pin down. It has some vague elements of ramune with its lemon-lime notes, but it's very weak compared to something like 7-Up or Sprite. It's a light soft drink, which probably suits Japanese tastes with it's less overbearing flavors. It's very heavily carbonated so it really bubbles on the tongue. In fact, this is like a lightly flavored club soda. I can see how it would suit Japanese tastes since, by and large, they prefer subtle flavors.

The web site for this is here. The site recommends various drinks with this as a base including adding mint and lemon and honey and ginger. I think that this can certainly be enjoyed "as is", but may be seen as being a bit on the weaker side flavor-wise. It probably occupies a similar space in the market to ginger ale in the United States (though it is weaker in flavor than that beverage).

Though this was fine, I wouldn't buy it again because the experience lacked a strong impression. On the bright side, it doesn't taste as strongly of artificial sweeteners as the Fanta Zero Cider. If I had no other option, I'd drink this without hesitation, but I wouldn't seek it out.

Morinaga Rare Cheese Dessert

There are two words that should serve as red flags to anyone seeking a snack treat. One of those words is "drink". If you find something which is called "orange drink" or "grape drink", you know that qualitatively you're going to be getting something which is closer to a lollipop in flavor and nutrition than the fruit the drink is based on. The other word is "dessert".

You'd think I would have seen this red flag, but I must have been colorblind and seen green instead when I picked up this box of "rare cheese dessert" at Yutakaraya for 189 yen ($2.22). I think that I was paying more attention to the 79 calories per serving rather than the product name. I was thinking "low-calorie cheesecake," rather than cheesecake-like substance. Silly, silly flower girl. Incidentally, "rare cheese" is what the Japanese use to describe New-York-style (unbaked) cheesecake.

Each tub contains what can best be described as cream-cheese-flavored gelatin. It's not quite as firm as American Jell-o, but it's also not the least bit creamy. The flavor is right on though. It does have all of the taste of the filling of cheesecake, but there is something which seems very "wrong" about it. Until you eat something with all of the flavor and none of the texture of cheesecake, you don't realize how integral the velvety, fatty goodness is to the experience. This tastes good, but ultimately doesn't satisfy. It is like semi-liquid sweetened cream cheese.

I don't mean to regard this product unfairly by giving it an "indifferent" rating. Morinaga did a very good job of approximating the flavor of cheesecake filling without the fat, calories, and crust. This was likely no small feat. However, I'm not sure the world really needs cream cheese gelatin, and I'm certain I won't buy this again.

Ki-bidango (millet dumpling)

 I have been farming the kid's snacks bins of various odd snacks or things which are difficult to tell the nature of merely by looking at the package and its shape. This little bar, which is about the size of a Snickers candy bar, caught my eye both because of its graphics and the fact that I'd never heard of bidango before. I found it for a mere 28 yen (33 cents) at Okashi no Machioka, but these are the types of things that tend to show up in the kid's treats areas of supermarkets like Seiyu.

There is no information on the package about the calories or size, but it can be guessed at by comparing the average as offered on the Calories in Japanese foods site. I had to weigh it myself and it's 45 grams and that would appear to be about 140 calories for the entire bar. If this is the same composition as that on that aforementioned site, ki-bidango is rich in copper and carbohydrates.


When I unwrapped this, I wasn't sure what I was going to get. The Wikipedia page on this type of thing shows little white balls which resemble traditional dango or mochi. What was revealed looked like a block of youkan wrapped in edible plastic.

This doesn't smell like much of anything. The texture is chewy, though not tough. It is slightly reminiscent of gum without the elastic properties. In terms of taste, it's rather hard to pin down. At first, it reminded me of brown sugar or molasses, then it took on more of a red bean flavor. The taste is actually quite subtle and it's mildly and pleasantly sweet.

The ingredients include sugar water, red beans, sugar, flour, powdered mochi, vegetable oil, honey, and salt. Of course oblaat is also an ingredient because it is the edible wrapper on the outside of the sticky bar. It was actually quite difficult to cut with a knife to get this shot.

This is an interesting snack, and it's not bad at all. The taste is pleasant. The texture is interesting, and it's pretty satisfying. That being said, though I'd eat this if it was offered or given to me as a gift, I wouldn't buy it again. It's not that it's bad in any way, but rather that it's not the sort of thing I would "crave" as a sweet treat. It feels more like actual rice-based food that has been modified to become a sweet. I guess that's part of the reason that it is on offer for children. It's probably seen as more wholesome than the average chocolate bar or salty treat.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment. 

Ginbis Asparagus Biscuits

If you want to dive deep into the heart of weird snacks in Japan, I recommend you raid the kid's section. That's what I did to find most of what I'm offering during my weeks of weird. Most of those snacks are not only a little strange, but they're also very cheap. This packet of 6 long, thin cookies (about the width of a pencil and about 2/3 the length of one) was only 28 yen (33 cents) at a convenience store. 

The manufacturer is Ginbis, and I've never reviewed anything made by them before, but I've seen some of their snacks on sale. Mostly, they make cookies, but they also offer a few salted snacks. Their web site says that this is their longest seller and has been on offer for 40 years and mentions that these small packages offer great portion control.

These smell like crackers in a rather generic way. They are not made of or with asparagus, but are merely meant to resemble it. They're made with some not so great fats including palm oil and "shortening". Other than that, they're made with your usual selection of cookie material - flour, sugar, yeast, etc. You can see that they are studded with sesame seeds. Though they don't look it, the outside of the crackers becomes very  oily when you touch them with your warm fingers. It's a very odd situation. The main good point of them is that they are super crispy. The texture is quite appealing. Other than that, the only thing to recommend them is the fact that they are fortified with Calcium, but only 31 mg.

The taste is like a not so sweet, very strongly baked animal cracker. The main flavor is black sesame with a generic biscuit/cookie flavor. These are actually pretty decent tasting, but nothing to get excited about. The black sesame flavor could be stronger, and they have a little bit of an overcooked flavor.

I finished the packet and enjoyed it, but this isn't the sort of thing which strongly appeals to me. If you like sesame and animal crackers, you might want to give them a try. Otherwise, I'd not bother.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment. 

Bakauke Tomato Curry Sembei

Much to my surprise, tomato is coming on as one of the summer's hottest flavors. Tomato gelatin is on offer in convenience stores, for instance. I'm not sure who decided it would be the fruit du jour in the summer of 2010,  but I think they made a good choice. I love tomato. When I was a kid, I used to eat them as a hand fruit. Yes, I was a strange kid. I wonder if tomato may be touted as the flavor for summer because it contains lycopene and that is supposed to help your skin handle UV rays. Of course, I'm probably giving the food manufacturers too much credit.

Given my love of tomato, I snapped up this bag of Bakauke (Befco) tomato curry sembei when I saw it for a mere 139 yen ($1.58) at Okashi no Machioka. The bag has 15 medium-size crackers at 34.4 calories each. These are the sort of super crispy, deep fried sembei which are meant to help a person drink more alcohol by putting more fat in the stomach (and on it, most likely). Frankly, I don't favor this variety in general because the frying oil is often a bit overbearing in the flavor profile, but you never know until you try.

The front of the bag tells us that there are 29 spices in these. A list of all of the spices is not given in the ingredients. I'm sure it's a trade secret or something, but tomato powder, chicken extract, wheat germ, Sucralose, and sugar are included.

The crackers are pebbly and crisp. They do smell like frying oil and baked rice with the barest hint of some sort of spicy smell. The first taste didn't reveal much of anything except the usual oil and sembei flavor. The second hinted more strongly at tomato with a whisper of curry. I was really disappointed that these were so bland when there is such promise in a stronger flavor from both tomato and curry.

I think this is the sort of thing where eating a lot at once might intensify your ability to perceive the flavors, but two crackers at once is my general limit. I was really disappointed that these were only a little better than plain sembei. That doesn't make them bad at all. They're still crispy and salty and good quality crackers. They just aren't very flavorful for something which promises 29 spices. I enjoyed finishing the bag, but I wouldn't buy another.

Sanko Seika Japanese-style Curry Sembei

I'm coming up on two years of this sort of Japanese snack food reviewing and you'd think there would be some lessons I would have learned about having food lying around all of the time, especially in the 5-month long "summer" in Tokyo. If you don't finish up a salted snack food rapidly, it's going to go stale in the heat whether it is completely sealed up or not.

I left two of the six packets of sembei in the bag for about a month before I got around to them and they started to go stale despite being well-sealed both in their individual packets and a Ziploc bag to boot. Stupid heat! The fact that they sat around for about a month is an indication that these were not something I was crazy about or that I was really lazy about getting around to reviewing. In this case, it was mainly the latter as I've found far too many salty snack treats this past month and couldn't eat them all up.

If you look at the picture on the front of the bag, you'll see that it is not Indian-style curry but rather Japanese. Japanese curry is more like a spicy stew than actual curry. It's heavy on the beef or pork gravy and usually lacks some classic Indian spices (like cardamom) and includes some Japanese components (like soy sauce, though not always). Among the ingredients for this are apple juice, black pepper, soy sauce, pork and chicken extract, and chicken oil.

There are two parts to the sembei, a flat curry flavored cracker and a small ball which is shrimp flavored. If you eat them separately, the shrimp balls are quite sweet and the curry crackers rather savory. I recommend eating them both together for the best effect. They smelled nicely spicy, and carried a lot of the flavor of curry powder with some good cumulative black pepper heat. They have a lot of good savory flavors in them, but somehow seemed a bit flat in flavor regardless. I think part of the problem is that the peppery nature and curry powder flavors saturate your tongue too rapidly and mask any other tastes (like garlic).

These were good, and I think fans of rather mundane curry (as opposed to authentic Indian curry) would probably enjoy them. I liked them fine, but I wasn't over the moon about them (as their approaching staleness testified to). I found them at Okashi no Machioka snack shop for about 160 yen, and I certainly don't regret sampling them, but I would have been happier with about half as many packets as come in the pack (six, at 86 calories per pack). These have a nice sweet/spicy thing going on, but they just didn't blow me away.

Calpis KitKat Mini

This is a party which I am arriving very late at for various reasons. The primary one is that this particular mini, which is a collaboration between drink maker Calpis and Nestlé Japan, was available in limited stores (Family Mart was the only place I saw it on offer), it was only available as part of a 13-unit bag, and it was too expensive. Usually, I can get bags of mini bars for 199-250 yen ($2.27-$2.85) and I only saw this for 278 yen ($3.17). And I try to avoid buying a lot of something which is an unknown and of dubious taste value. Let's face it. This is the sort of thing which one could easily find oneself disliking.

Essentially, I was waiting for just the right opportunity to buy this, and one did not come along for quite some time. I don't know if this was one of the very few "under-produced" KitKat flavors or if it just sold so incredibly well that no leftovers made their way to the bargain shops, but I didn't find a discounted one for a few months. Most Japanese KitKat specialty flavors hit the bargain bins in a month or so and seem to sit there for quite awhile.

A new discount snack shop opened on the other side of my neighborhood, and one hot evening I chanced upon it. Bags of these bars were sitting nonchalantly in a cardboard box outside the shop for 199 yen ($2.27) each. The shop owner was very keen to be of service and as I wandered around his empty shop, he tried to foist samples of very familiar bubbly sembei on me. I declined, twice. Though I do like that sembei, I wasn't hungry. The shop also had free cold green tea on offer. I'll have to revisit them soon and see if their solicitous behavior is ongoing or just an opening gesture from a new shop.

Getting back to these KitKats, which are actually less interesting than the service I got at the shop, I didn't quite know what to expect from them considering that I've only had Calpis in its non-original state a few times. Frankly, I was hoping it'd have more of a yogurt flavor than it did. There is definitely a bit of a "soda" flavor going on. I think the powder between the wafers must be made with ramune (Japanese lemon-lime soda) flavor. The filling reminded me of blue "soda" flavored fizzy candies I used to have as a child. I wondered if Nestlé Japan recycled part of the ingredients or formula for the ramune bar it released last summer.

The outside coating had a little bit of a yogurt flavor, but was so much sweeter than it was sour that it just seemed like a relatively generic white chocolate with the vaguest hint of something else. Frankly, the chocolate was quite similar to the Calpis I sampled awhile back; it was like greatly watered down yogurt mixed with slightly tart lemon-lime.

This is a decent candy bar, but nothing to write home about. I'll either slowly eat the rest of the bag when my sweet tooth beckons me or slowly give away the rest of it. I can't say "don't buy this", but I also wouldn't say "go out of your way to buy this." It's interesting, but ultimately not all that incredible. This was clearly a corporate match that was done for the marketing value rather than the potential for a winning combination of flavors.

Lotte Kagoshima Sweet Potato Cake

While stumbling around Okashi no Machioka snack shop, I noticed that there seems to be a new line of snacks featuring a graphic of a stern-looking Japanese gentleman in old-style garb. The man who is represented is Ryoma Sakamoto, a political revolutionary in the mid to late 1800's. Is it me, or is that sort of a weird thing to put on a box of cakes?  This particular line of Lotte snacks represent areas of Kagoshima prefecture associated with Mr. Sakamoto and were released on June 22.

There are 6 snacks in this campaign, and I'll be reviewing at least two of them. Besides these sweet potato cakes, I also bought a box of yuzu (Japanese citrus fruit) cookies, but there are also purple potato Crunky chocolates, Toppo castella-flavored pretzel sticks (like an inverted Pocky), and some yuzu gum which I haven't located yet. In fact, I seriously considered doing a Ryoma Sakamoto snacks theme week, but most of these items are multi-packs and I could't finish them off for weeks if I bought that many of them. And frankly, doing a week of snacks themed around a guy who was assassinated at 33 and whose Smith and Wesson revolver is picture on his Wikipedia page is just too damn weird.

There are 6 cakes in the box and I paid 198 yen ($2.19). That price will probably go down as the product line rapidly ages. The back of the box shows a statue of a proud and tall Sakamoto with what looks to be a tiny Japanese woman slightly behind and off to his left looking on in admiration. I'm guessing this statue is in the area where the sweet potatoes used in this confection are from. Frankly, it looks a bit sexist in design to me as it brings to mind the idea of women walking 7 paces behind men in old feudal Japan.

When I unwrapped the foil packet and gave these a sniff, they smelled excellent. There was a definite good whiff of Japanese sweet potato. The first bite revealed what seemed to be brown sugar and buttery notes as well as sweet potato, though I will note that these use margarine (not butter). The second bite, however, actually wasn't quite as good as a strange flavor seemed to be revealed. The flavor seemed similar to coconut, but wasn't really quite the same. By the third and fourth bites, this flavor dominated and I couldn't detect the sweet potato much. I wonder if that weird flavor was a result of the use of "natural cheese" (probably Gouda if I know Japanese snack makers, and I do). Note that these are colored with anatto in order to bring them closer to a potato color. There is no real sweet potato in them, but rather a powder. Oddly, they also have cocoa powder in them.

These were fine, but not quite what I expected. Certainly as a generic sweet they're fine, if a bit oddly seasoned. The texture is moist and they're a bit fatty. Each small (16.5 gram/.6 oz.) cake is 77 calories, which isn't bad even for a morsel like this. I just wish the sweet potato flavor weren't diluted by so many other tastes. I will slowly eat the remainder of the box when I am in the mood for cake, but I'm quite certain I wouldn't buy these again.

Country Ma'am "Morning Toast" Cookies

It seems that a lot of new releases of funky flavors of various foods seem to show up at the same time at convenience stores. I'm sure there's some sort of rhyme or reason to the release scheduling, but I often find that there are "fertile" and "fallow" periods in my snack purchases. Sometimes I'll wander the aisles in boredom... well, the aisles are short so it's more like an extremely brief stroll... and at others I'll buy more than I can review in one week. These cookies showed up at 7-11 during what I consider a "fertile" phase for snack purchasing.

I've reviewed a lot of Country Ma'am cookies, and frankly, I had little intention of buying more in the immediate future. It's not that they aren't good cookies. They're actually pretty nice with their crispy outer shell and chewy interior. They are even more impressive if you warm them a bit in the microwave as the center takes on a quasi-brownie-like somewhat gooey interior. The main reason I was going to stay away from them is that they seem to be shrinking in size with every incarnation. These cookies are minuscule at around 3 cm in diameter (1.18 in.). I think these cookies are like a collapsing star. Some day, I'll open the bag and my hand will enter a black hole.

Generally, tiny treats don't bother me, but they're also 50 calories a pop for something which is two tiny bites at a stretch. You could easily gobble up this whole bag of 5 tiny, wastefully individually wrapped cookies and still have room for more. At least real "butter" is an ingredient in these. That's something they have going for them.

That being said, the promise of chocolate chip cookies that taste like buttered toast lured me in. I couldn't say no when I saw the little white bag on the shelf for a measly 105 yen ($1.14). When I opened the first packet, the smell of the cookies didn't encourage me as it was a bit like some sort of funky, day-old bread. My first taste was of a bit of the crispy shell that broke off in the packet. That part also tasted like weird, stale bread.

The buttery part of this cookie is concentrated in the interior, and the flavor is muted when you eat it cold. If you follow the instructions on the packet and warm it in the microwave (20 seconds is recommended for all of the cookies, but I did only one for about 8 seconds), the cookie's "butter" flavor comes alive and the center's texture is very, satisfying. It's not quite like a fresh-baked cookie, but it comes close. It's buttery, sweet, and nicely chocolate-flavored when warm.

I'm rather torn about these cookies. I liked the novel experience of their flavor combination, and unlike some of the other strange Japanese snack taste marriages that I have sampled, these two flavors ("buttered toast" and "chocolate chip cookie") went together decently. On the other hand, I'm not sure that they're worth repeating as they didn't bowl me over. Frankly, I think other Country Ma'am cookies, particularly the plain chocolate chip, are better. The best thing these have going for them is that they are thicker than average cookies from the Country Ma'am line so the gooey filling is more expansive.

If you have a chance to sample these, I recommend picking up a bag, but I also strongly advise warming them up rather than eating them as is. I think that the "toast" part is too strong when cold and the butter part is really brought out when heated. Though I can say they're worth trying, I can also say that one bag with 5 cookies is going to be "enough" for me and I wouldn't buy them again. It's not because I didn't enjoy them, but because they are too small and fattening for repeated consumption and just not significantly better than a classic chocolate chip cookie.