Variety Friday: Gokaku Mug KitKat

On December 21, Nestle released this package deal of a KitKat, packet of instant Nescafe Excella coffee and a 5-sided red mug as part of their "support the students" campaign. Like the Milk Coffee KitKat, this carries the symbols and cherry blossom motif for all items marketed as gifts meant to encourage students to do well on their entrance examinations.


The mug has 5 sides and I believe that the Chinese characters (kanji) are a play on words that represent luck. This is why the mug is five-sided. The mug is the size of an average coffee cup and not some dinky affair. It's definitely built for use rather than novelty if you set aside the unusual shape. It's also quite solid and thick.

The combination of the full-size regular KitKat, single serving packet of instant coffee, and mug is only 200 yen ($2.18). This represents quite excellent value because the KitKat itself sells for 100 yen and most plain coffee cups (of smaller size, but similar quality) are about 100 yen as well. My guess is that Nestle Japan regards these more as promotional tools than as a premium money maker. I guess having a bunch of tired students who have been studying a lot drinking out of a KitKat and Nescafe mug that might inspire them to seek a sugar and caffeine rush seems like a pretty good idea.

Happy Year of the Tiger!

Happy New Year to all of my readers and thank you for following my blog!

Japan follows the Chinese convention of seeing each year as the year of an animal. This year is the year of the tiger, so you can get tiger figures everywhere. The item pictured above is a traditional New Year's mochi (pounded rice cake) decoration with the little plastic tiger on top instead of the traditional mikan (Japanese tangerine). I picked this up at 7-11 for about $4. Note that you can get similar mochi for about $1 at most convenience stores. I doubt there is a qualitative difference in the texture or taste of the mochi. I was mainly paying for the tiger.

Many Japanese families have freshly made mochi as part of their display, but I've been told that when they use the fresh stuff, it sometimes starts to grow mold before it is eaten and the mold has to be cut away before they can consume the remaining mochi. I'm not sure how I'm going to prepare or consume this mochi, but I'll give it a go.

I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable new year. :-)

Fujiya Sweets Torte Mille-Fueille Chocolate

Part of me wonders if I should reject sweets that try and imitate foophy (I made that word up) French pastries like mille-fueille. Then I remember that I like such things and just abandon all pretext at rejecting class consciousness when it comes to food and buy the damn chocolate. Besides, how foophy can something be if it is sold in a supermarket for 150 yen (about $1.45)?


The dessert these chocolates are trying to imitate is made up of layers of pastry and pastry cream topped with chocolate. There are supposed to be many different types of mille-fueille, but the most common appears to be the type I just described. You often see this type of pastry on sale in Japanese cake shops, though they look far less decadent than the ones pictured on the Wikipedia page that I've linked to or the one shown on the front of this box of chocolates.

(the color has been lightened to show the texture on the chocolate)

There were actually several new chocolates of interest on display when I bought these, but this one won because my husband said it was the one he was most interested in sharing with me. I always prefer to reduce the calories I might consume by hoping to fob some off on him. These aren't too bad for you though at 41 calories apiece. Each is about the size of a quarter (or 100 yen coin) and about a centimeter tall.


To imitate the multiple flavors of the mille-fueille pastry, there are three parts to this chocolate. First, there is a bittersweet chocolate shell (which detaches easily from the next layer). Then there is a "custard" chocolate shell and finally some crispy "pie" center. The pie center actually tastes like puff pastry and the bittersweet chocolate is very high quality and offsets the sweetness of the custard layer well. If a complaint can be made, I'd say it's that the custard flavor is very weak because the bittersweet chocolate is so strong. Nonetheless, you do get a hint of the custard taste as well.

I really enjoyed this and felt it was a high quality consumer level product. I'm not even a fan of bittersweet chocolate, but it somehow all came together for me in this sweet. I'd definitely recommend sampling this, and wouldn't mind having these on hand for something which has the texture of a wafer, but a bit more interesting taste profile.

CC Lemon Zero

C.C. Lemon is one of those drinks that I've had an interest in for quite some time because it is packed with Vitamin C and who doesn't enjoy a good lemon beverage? My former boss used to drink it on occasion and some of my students swear by it as a way of keeping colds at bay.

I don't like to drink my calories and I particularly don't like to drink sugary acidic sodas because they have a bad effect on the teeth. This is what has kept me from sampling C.C. Lemon for all these years. I especially wanted to try it around the time that the Simpsons were used heavily in their promotions as there were some nifty bits of swag available at that time. Unfortunately for me, the Simpsons aren't being used now when a zero calorie version is available.

I investigated the name "C.C. Lemon", but didn't come up with any explanation of what the "C.C." stands for besides the fact that it's supposed to be packed with a lot of Vitamin C. The American Wikipedia page says that there has been some controversy about whether or not the advertised amount of C is really as claimed, but the Japanese page doesn't mention anything about it. The weird thing is that they don't mention the amount of Vitamin C in terms of usual measures, but as the number of lemons worth of C. A 500 ml. bottle of C.C. Lemon zero supposedly contains 70 lemons worth.


The soda smells pleasantly lemony and you can tell it's lightly carbonated when you open the lid since it makes less of a "pop" noise than other fizzy beverages. The lemon flavor is pronounced, but not overwhelming. The sweetness level is just a tiny bit higher than I'd personally prefer and you can detect the fact that this is made with a cocktail of artificial sweeteners, but it's far less obvious than some of the other diet beverages I've sampled. After the first several sips, the artificial sweetener taste tends to mute (but not disappear) a bit as your tongue grows accustomed to it.

This was a very refreshing lemon drink with a good balance of flavors and a very mild citrus bite. It's flawed because I wish it had a little less of an artificial sweetener flavor, a little more carbonation, and a little more citrus bite and less sweetness, but it's pretty good for a diet version of a beverage. My feeling is that diet soda beggars can't be too choosy, but this is pretty good regardless. I will definitely revisit this if it doesn't end up vanishing as so many zero-calorie drinks in Japan seem to do.

Suntory's web site for C.C. Lemon is currently sporting a strange space ship made from a drink bottle motif. It includes a little Flash-based game, but you have to read Japanese to play it and some desktop pictures and a screen save that can be downloaded. Among the desktop pictures, I find the diagram of the internal structure of the imaginary spaceship rather amusing because of all of the lemon-shaped furnishings.

Smoky Cheese Cratz

In Japan, you can't buy boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese or a knock-off variety of that carb and chemical bomb. You can only get your hands on it via importers. Because of this, I make my own cheese sauce and pasta from real cheese. It's not really that difficult, but it is messy, time-consuming, and, to be perfectly honest, lacking in that special something that has drawn generations to the powdery packet over real cheese.

The thing about artificial flavoring when it comes to cheese is that you can get just the right hint of cheesy sharpness. Using real cheese and mixing it in with other ingredients tends to undermine the tang. In the case of macaroni & cheese, the milk that is necessary to create a sauce mellows the cheese a bit unless you can get your hands on something extra sharp. I live in Japan. There is almost no extra sharp cheese.


When it comes to some foods, fake is actually better than real. In the case of cheese-flavored snacks, I think that there's really no point in using real cheese most of the time. I want my salted crap food to prioritize flavor over authenticity. I'm not fooling myself into thinking this is anything like real food. The people at Glico don't seem to understand that as they list that there is 1.6% natural cheese in this salted pretzel snack. My response to Glico is, "who cares?"

At any rate, this is the latest in the Cratz line and replaces the "spicy cheese" variety that I reviewed previously. I wondered how this "smoky" cheese was going to differ from its predecessor. The answer is, not very much at all. In fact, except for a hint of heat, these are almost identical to the spicy version. They are the same price (100 yen/$1.13), smell the same, have the same satisfying crunch, and they have nearly the same number of calories (229) for the same quantity (44 grams/1.44 oz.).

These are good, but I preferred the nice hit of heat on the spicy cheese ones. I'd probably have liked these more if I could detect any sort of smoke flavor. It's as if they just took the old recipe for the slightly hot Cratz and stripped the spices out of it that gave it some heat without adding anything back in. I can highly recommend these if you've got a "cat's tongue" (as the Japanese say) and can't tolerate hot spices much, but if you're accustomed to the old spicy cheese Cratz and really enjoy smoke flavor, you might be a little letdown.