Lotte Crunky Baked Cheese Tart

The concept of this bar seems stolen directly from the baked KitKat concept. It's a white chocolate bar designed to be briefly cooked in a toaster oven in order to caramelize the chocolate a little and change the flavor profile.

I tried this both "as is" and baked and it is a night and day situation. When it's "raw" and a normal chocolat bar, it is unremarkable with a somewhat cloying "dairy" flavor from the attempt at cheesecake flavor. It's crunchy and heavy in feel and not especially bad or good.

In my first attempt at baking some of this, I overdid it. The margin between golden brown and burnt is probably seconds wide. Even over-browned and nearly burnt, this tasted really good. The weird dairy flavor vanished and it had more caramel tones.

Like the baked KitKats, you not only don't want to overcook them, but you don't want to handle them while they're still hot or they disintegrate. In general, these are quite crumbly after being baked anyway. The texture becomes almost cookie-like. It's still very sweet and the impact of the little crunchy bits is reduced when the bar is baked.

I really loved this when it was baked. The cheesecake flavor isn't super strong, but it's still very enjoyable because of the caramelization and texture. I didn't mind how crumbly it became, though it was a mistake to try and eat it warm as it crumbled into tiny bits. If you can get your hands on one of these, be sure to wait for it to cool so it holds on to some integrity.

Note: This was part of my free ZenPop cheese sweets box.

Nestle Strawberry Cheesecake Crunch Mini bars (product announcement)

Image from Nestle Japan's web site.

On June 9, Nestle Japan will release a strawberry cheesecake version of their Crunch bars. This is marginally more interesting than a similar type of KitKat, but only mainly because they haven't saturated the Crunch bar market with varied flavors as they have their darling KitKats.

You may wonder why they're showing ice cream on the front of the package when this is a cheesecake flavor. In honor of the changing of the season from wet, humid, and uncomfortably warm to unbearably hot, humid, and somewhat less wet, they are advocating that you freeze the bars to give you a more pleasant experience. If you'd like to pick up a bag, they're retailing for 500 yen (about $5), but it's likely that you can get them for around 350 yen at most markets or discount snack shops.

My guess is these will taste pretty much like the strawberry cheesecake KitKats. I'll pass, thank you.

Glico Rare Cheesecake Pocky

When I did a product information post on the summer Pocky releases, I didn't really expect to find myself sampling them. However, my husband and I recently moved to a new place - and note that this is our sixth move since returning to the U.S. and I can say with experience now that moving is absolute hell - we found a place within walking distance of a Korean market that has the lowest prices I've ever seen on these types of limited edition Pocky. When I saw this for $1.99, I figured that there was no reason not to try it despite my reservations about the flavor.

What reservations are those? Well, they are the ones which say that this is going to taste like bad dairy or powdered milk at best and some sort of savory cheese like Gouda or Cheddar at worst. That was my initial concern when I wrote the product information post. There's something rather cool about making such a prediction and seeing whether or not it comes true.

"Rare" cheesecake means that this should taste like cream cheese. It should not be especially pungent or have the sharpness of an aged cheese and should possess a delicate sweetness and a rich undertone of fattiness. Yeah, I'm expecting a lot out of a psuedo-chocolate goo coated pretzel stick.

After opening the packet, I gave it a whiff and it smelled funky. My husband said that "it's a fine line between rare and bad cheese". This is definitely treading the line. It smells like milk that is going off, but isn't quite at the scary level yet. You could probably get away with keeping it for one more day and using it in your coffee or tea, but you're not going to want to drink it straight.

Pocky does not live or die on scent alone. In fact, I'm guessing most people don't even notice the aroma. The first bite tasted a bit "cheesy" to me in a not so good way, but subsequent bites allowed my tongue to acclimate and it wasn't so bad. In fact, there is definitely a progression when you eat these. The first bite is "too much" pungent dairy. The second is mellow sweet somewhat milky, but slightly cheesey in a good way flavor and the third has a nice lemon kick to it.

This is not the greatest Pocky on the face of the planet, but it is unique and kind of tasty once you get paste the first hit of strong "cheese powder" flavoring. It's has that sort of quality that you find in which a food becomes better as you eat more and it encourages you to chow down on the whole package at once. In this case, it at least helps you avoid the slightly unpleasant sense of that initial bite if you eat a whole package (170 calories) at once.

Since coming home, Pocky has been growing on me. I didn't care much for it in Japan, but I do like the pretzel goodness more than I used to. I'm not sure if that is because I no longer have access to certain other types of snacks or if I'm just more inclined to give it a chance. Whatever the case may be, I liked this, but perhaps only enough to try it about once a year. If I had a rating between "indifferent" and "happy", this would get it. In all fairness though, I did enjoy it, so it gets a smiling sumo wrestler.

Shigezo "Rare" Soy Milk Cheesecake

As I approach the end of my time living in Japan, my readers may find that I will be turning more to fresh food instead of packaged snacks. That's because I view the coming weeks as my last opportunity to easily purchase such things. Once I go back to the U.S., I will probably have opportunities to buy shelf stable items like Pocky, sembei (rice crackers), and Tirol chocolates, but not refrigerated items. It's a dimension of experiencing Japan that I'm certain I will sorely miss when I'm gone. So, I hope my readers will be tolerant of and patient with seeing a few more reviews than usual of the types of things they may not find unless they're walking the same streets as I currently am.

Of course, whether my readers like it or not, it's highly unlikely that I'd resist trying cheesecake. There are a great many things which I find hard to resist, and the prospect of anything made with cream cheese and cheesecake in particular is going to get my motor revving. On top of that, this is sold by Shigezo, purveyor of "healthy" food based largely on soy beans. After what I said about Japanese food not being as healthy as anyone thinks it is, it may seem odd that I'm buying into that idea, but I'll say that I believe this is wishful thinking on my part. I want this cheesecake to be healthier than the normal stuff so I can feel better about eating it. I only subscribe to the illusion when it suits my fancy. As someone who isn't a fan of tempura, but is a fan of cheesecake, I'm applying selective reasoning here. Indulge me, won't you?

The Shigezo page for this cheesecake is helping me along with my illusions by failing to provide much in the way of nutritional data. They do say that this is made with cream cheese, milk, cream, soy milk, sugar, egg white, gelatin and lemon. The claim is that the use of soy milk reduces the overall caloric value and enhances the nutrition. Since there are no calorie counts given, I'll take their word for it, because, as Fox Mulder says, "I want to believe."

Depending on how you conceptualize "cheesecake" this may disappoint. There is no crust and it is certainly lacking in "heft". Even for a Japanese cheesecake, this is super light and airy. My husband called it more of a "mousse" than cake, and felt that the taste was so mild that it tasted like nothing to him. My taste buds were rather more sensitive to its delights. I could detect cream cheese, soy milk, very mild sweetness, and the ever so slightest hint of lemon. The main drawing point for me with this was the texture. It was very fatty and rich on the tongue, but so light that it melts rapidly in your mouth. 

I liked this a lot. In fact, I ate the whole container at once and had to skip lunch. It was a very bad idea as I felt bloated, but I can't say I really regretted doing it just once. I'm sure, however, that it's not actually "healthy", despite the inclusion of soy milk and the lack of heft and sugary overload. It's not a very big container, mind you, but I think more appropriate servings would be three moderate portions and two somewhat large ones. That being said, I'm not sure fans of "real" cheesecake would be quite so keen. I love light, fluffy, fatty things which resemble whipped cream, so this was the bee's knees for me. Your mileage may vary.

Pumpkin Cheesecake KitKat

Quite some time ago, I got an e-mail from a reader who wasn't keen on my coverage of extremely strange Japanese snacks who said that he wasn't really interested in that sort of weirdness, but rather in things like the unusual Pepsi and KitKat flavors. I can understand that as many people may prefer to hear about novelty a few standard deviations from the norm rather than gag-fodder that they'd never eat. Unfortunately, if I focused only on those types of variants on popular and accessible snacks, I'd be making only 6 posts a year. 

One of the problems with not living here is that you get a distorted view of how often odd variations on popular food products come out, because other non-Japanese snack blogs only talk about such things. The truth is that that KitKat parade is populated mainly by strawberry, green tea, and various types of chocolate (fudge, semisweet, bittersweet, dark) than by edamame, ginger ale, and other extreme odd flavors. The triumvirate of the aforementioned flavors, especially strawberry, are the boring band members marching along and the really interesting stuff is like Santa Claus at the end of the Thanksgiving Day parade. You watch a bunch of people blowing into brass instruments and beating drums with a yawn and all you really care about is the fat guy in the red suit.

Fake mom and daughter are going to "fight" (with fists, apparently) to make sure fake daughter passes a test so she can get into a good school. 

At any rate, it has been a long, dry season on the Japanese KitKat front. At present, Nestle Japan is gearing up their PR campaign to sell to parents and kids for the studying season. The offerings they are focusing upon are adult sweetness KitKats (mild, dark chocolate), green tea matcha, and the umpteenth variant on strawberry (strawberry tart). They're also offering bags of white and plain KitKat minis in different packaging. Yes, I'm tired of watching the majorettes shaking their batons, too.

This pumpkin cheesecake KitKat was released some time ago, but I resisted buying it because I didn't want to buy a big bag of minis knowing I may not care for them. Don Quixote, the store, not the hapless avenger who attacked windmills, persuaded me to try a bag when they offered it for a mere 138 yen ($1.80) for a bag of 9 mini bars. Each mini bar is about the size of 1.5 regular KitKat fingers and has 68 calories. These were designed for Halloween, but were still available in abundance and at full price in shops in my area throughout the new year. In fact, most of them had larger bags for about $6.50 and that was a big reason why I didn't opt to try them until now. Each bar is individually packaged and there's a white space on the back that one can write a message on. I'm not sure what that message would be; perhaps you could say, "here is one bar from a bag of 9 that I could not consume on my own." 

Getting to the bars themselves, one of the reasons I was not necessarily keen on these is that "cheesecake" translated into actual flavor in the Japanese KitKat world usually means "tastes like sour powdered milk" and "pumpkin" (kabocha) is usually "strong vegetable flavor that feels rather out of place with all of that sugar'. My past experience left me anything but encouraged. 

The scent when you take a whiff of the bar is familiar yet hard to pin down. I think it may merely be that my olfactory senses are tuned to the scent of such kabocha-based treats after so much experience with them. They smell good, but unusual at the same time. The flavor is a balance between Japanese pumpkin and a custard flavor. I'm pleased to say that none of the yogurt/sour milk flavors in other "cheesecake" KitKats is present in this. One of the ingredients is "natural cheese", but the pungent elements are either masked or so subdued as not to register. This is quite sweet, but not in a cloying way, at least not if you stick to eating only one mini. My guess is that it might accumulate and become overbearing if you eat more than one at a sitting. 

With a surprising well-rounded combination of tastes, this was quite pleasing, albeit still rather sweet. Like most KitKats, the chocolate coating is slightly on the softer side with fresh, crispy wafers inside. The textural balance of a real KitKat is almost always superior to any knock-offs. It's the one thing Nestle always scores on. My feeling about these is that they are a pleasant digression, but definitely not part of a steady sweets rotation. I would buy them again, but likely only once a year. Chances are that they'll be back, however, because Nestle often rotates the same flavors in seasonally. Though this is no flavor "Santa Claus", it's definitely a bit more interesting than a mere member of the marching band.

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:

Plecia Raw Donut (rare cheese and strawberry)

Though these are called "donuts", they're not actually a donut in any way, so if you were hoping to satisfy your inner Homer Simpson, you're going to be disappointed. These are actually a cream-cheese/cream cheese pastry which requires refrigeration and has a short shelf-life which are ring-shaped. The beauty of a this shape of pastry is that the manufacturer can make it look bigger, but offer less substance.

These pastries are good example of how gelatin is the friend of pastry makers who want to offer the illusion of more without actually giving you more. It's also your friend if you want fewer calories. The gelatin mixed into the cream cheese mixture gives it a firmness without using fatty cream cheese for density.

This was my first experience with anything maybe by Plecia.  They're a maker of confectionery in Yokohama. It's a relatively young company, having been established in 1994 and has a line-up of pastries that seem to focus on the food not being quite cooked and have translations which should amuse. These two cakes are "raw" and another chocolate offering is "half-baked". There are also "runny" and "burned" puddings and pies. They also make mundane pound cakes.


In both cakes, the texture is super light, like a mixture of cream cheese and whipping cream. It's firmer than one might expect because of the gelatin. The cake doesn't lend much overall because it has gotten moist from contact with the topping. It doesn't add much flavor either, but makes a bland and sufficiently pleasant base.

Blueberry:

The first bite of topping is very mild in flavor. It's not very sweet until you reach one of the blobs of blueberry jam. Except in the spots with blueberry, it has a subtle, sweetened cream cheese flavor. The blueberry jam areas taste a lot like, well, blueberry jam. I really liked this, particularly since it is only 128 calories for something which is reminiscent of actual cheesecake.

Strawberry:

Because the strawberry is pureed throughout the cram cheese topping, this smells and tastes more strongly of berries. It really does taste a lot like someone has mixed a berry or two with the cream cheese mixture. This one was only 100 calories, but I wasn't fond of it. The strawberry flavor was too intense for me, but I think that was a personal preference and no slight about the cake itself.

Before writing this review, I had already bought 3 of these cakes, so clearly, I like them. I think if you're looking for a cheesecake-style treat which is light and low in calories, these can't be beat. However, if you want something really decadent and are indifferent to how much it causes your fat cells to inflate, you may find this a bit anemic for your tastes. Personally, I'd buy these again.

Tops Rare Cheese Yogurt

It's hard sometimes to convey the value of a product that isn't available to the majority of your readers and Tops brand cakes are something you have to have experienced to understand their (relative) value. Most of the cheesecake in Japan does not resemble New York cheesecake. It is either chiffon cake which is made with cream cheese, baked cheesecake, or some bizarre bastard off-spring of sour cream, whipped cream, and cream cheese which lacks the heft and luxurious feel of cheesecake.

 The real deal, in all of its fattening glory.

The steady exception to the unpredictable and strange "cheesecake" offerings is Tops. Their shops are in some stations and in department stores and they sell the only cheesecake that I will be sad to say goodbye to when I finally pack my bags and quit this land. It's dense, rich, covered with a light frosting, and has a nice base.

This yogurt had a lot to live up to, and I know that I had to adjust my expectations. This is yogurt, not expensive cheesecake from a select shop. That being said, if they're going to slap the Tops name on the label, they'd better give me something. You can't put out a lure like that and not let me reel in a big fish.

When I first peeled back the foil, I was presented with the smell of regular yogurt and a very thick, white offering. Digging your spoon into it shows that it has the same textural quality as warmed cream cheese. The first bite is very much that of yogurt, but by the third bite, it takes on more of a cream cheese dense cheesecake sense to it. By the end, it was definitely carrying the essence of a Tops brand cheesecake both in richness and general flavor.

It's important to keep in mind that this is yogurt, and it's not going to fill the space of a really rich slice of cheesecake. That being said, this is an interesting experience and will remind you of the real deal. At 109 calories for 90 grams (3.17 oz), and at a cost of only about 100 yen ($1.20) when a small real Tops cake is considerably more expensive and exponentially more calorific, this is a chance to experience the fringes of decadence for a fraction of the cost.

Meiji Sweets Gum Blueberry Cheesecake

There's an episode of the Simpsons where Homer goes into the Kwiki Mart and asks Apu if he has a new beer which has brew with Skittles candy floating around in it called "Skittle Brau". Of course, no such product exists, but Homer is not dissuaded. He gets a 6-pack and a bag of Skittles and makes his own candy/beer combo.

This scene comes to mind because this Meiji Sweets Gum is a mixture of gum and candy. I didn't realize that it was literally a "sweet" plus "gum". I thought it was just going to be blueberry cheesecake-flavored gum. I guess someone was thinking that gum would be better with a blob of chewy candy in the center.

I picked this up at Inageya supermarket for about 100 yen ($1.07). They also had double caramel and strawberry vanilla on offer, but I'm a sucker for cheesecake. There are 7 pieces of gum in the box, and it's 51 calories for the whole box. Unlike many types of gum in Japan, this isn't sugar-free. It is made with "sugar water", though it also includes Maltitol and other artificial sweeteners.

The cheesecake portion of this is the off-white candy in the middle and the blueberry the gum casing. The first bite has intense blueberry flavor and the cheesecake candy center follows a bit sluggishly behind. The tastes are intense and pretty good at first. The main problem is that the flavor lasts for a maximum of two minutes and dies very rapidly. The gum is soft and fine, but soon it's just jaw exercise. Clearly, this isn't made for long-term chewing. In fact, I'm not sure why this has been rolled out in gum form at all. It would seem more effective to make this a chewy candy through and through.

If this were a hard candy or chewy candy, I'd probably consider buying it again, but as gum, it's not flavorful enough for a long enough period of time. While I was happy to chew this for a few minutes and I liked the taste, I wouldn't buy it again because of the long-term flavor shortcomings.

Blueberry and Strawberry Cheesecake KitKats

The number of KitKat flavors in Japan is pretty well known by most people actually living here and abroad. In fact, I'm guessing we're not too far away from Nestlé Japan exhausting all the potential flavors and having to travel the road of the Harry Potter Jelly Belly jellybeans. That is, we'll get flavors like "sumo wrestler's sweaty salty belly" or "geisha lipstick" in the near future.

Until such a time as Nestlé Japan formulates a taste resembling things like the "emperor's belly button lint" to continue to expand its line, we'll have to amuse ourselves with the ever changing sizes and packaging that are being offered to add more variety to the KitKat line. You can now buy single finger sized bars for about twice the cost of a regular bar's contents. The cheesecake varieties I'm reviewing here were 40 yen (43 cents) each and were sold individually whereas you'd get 4 fingers for about 100 yen (around a dollar) in a regular bar.



Being a huge fan of cheesecake, I was looking forward to sampling these bars. Opening the wrappers provided further encouragement as they each smelled rather strongly of cream cheese and vaguely of their respective berry flavors. The bars look identical to one another despite being different flavors and I wondered if I'd be able to tell the difference between them if I mixed them up.

Taste, unfortunately, did not go hand-in-hand with the scent of cheesecake. I found the cheese flavor to be very subdued and mainly the bars just tasted of the sweetness of white chocolate. The strawberry bar carried some of the tartness of berries, but the blueberry one was quite weak in my opinion. All in all, these were a big disappointment for a cheesecake fan.

I wanted to test how strong the berry components were in a blind taste test so I gave my husband half of each bar and asked if he could tell which was which. He immediately discerned which was strawberry and which was blueberry, but he his impression of the intensity of the berry flavors was the opposite of mine. That is, he felt that the blueberry was more powerful. He did agree, however that the cheesecake component was very weak and mainly the bars were like white chocolate flavored with berry, though he does like white chocolate more than I.

These are not bad bars, though they are a little too sweet for my tastes. The portion control of buying these packets is very appealing, but the expense and wastefulness certainly are cause to hesitate. There was no calorie information given on the packet, but I'd guess that these are probably about the same as any other KitKats and will set you back 50-60 calories per finger. There is a list of ingredients which includes "natural cheese". Note that sometimes "cheesecake" in Japan includes things like Gouda or processed cheese and not cream cheese so it's hard to know what the cheese component in these really is, not that you could actually taste it anyway.


As a footnote to this review, I'll mention an experience my husband had with these bars. In Tokyo, it's not uncommon for certain buildings to rent their space to a seller for a few days or a week then for a new seller to rent that space. Each seller offers different items. One week it might be kitchen wares and the next a tea seller. Sometimes, they sell a potpourri of discounted items. My husband was looking around one of these short term sellers shops and saw that 30-unit cases of strawberry or blueberry cheesecake KitKats that would normally sell in convenience stores for a total of 1260 yen ($13.88) were on sale for 500 yen ($5.50). My husband wondered if they were sold off the back of a truck or something and continued to look around the shop.

The seller noticed his attention and came up and gave him two free samples. A short while later, he offered him the box for only 400 yen ($4.40). In the entire time we've lived in Japan, we've never spontaneously been offered a discount to entice us to buy. It's just not that common, at least in Tokyo. At that price, my husband decided it was worth it to buy them, though we both are still curious as to why there was such a drive to unload these. The expiration date on the box is September 2009, so it's not like they're anywhere near their sell-by date.

These KitKats are also reviewed at Snack Love.