It’s time for another KitKat form Japan, and once again, this takes the form of two pairs of individually wrapped white chocolate KitKat fingers. Part of me had been hoping for milk chocolate for a coffee flavoured KitKat, so I was immediately a little disappointed when I opened the pack. I suppose it’s easier to impart other flavours into white chocolate than it is into milk chocolate.
Once again, we have a KitKat with a strong aroma, but this one smells more like a mix of toffee and cheap coffee creams than real coffee to me.
I find the way this KitKat has been put together a little bizarre. Bite into a finger, and first you get a sweet milky flavour with that vague coffee-cream flavour, then very quickly a bitter coffee taste kicks in. It’s a real coffee flavour, it’s just not a particularly nice one. If you’ve ever eaten instant coffee granules straight from the jar, then you’ll know how it tastes. And if you haven’t done that, I don’t recommend trying it.
It’s seems that the bitter coffee flavour is hidden in between the wafers, where is the more subtle milky flavour is in the white chocolate coating. A clever trick, but I’m not sure why one would want to make something taste of instant coffee, rather than the real thing.
The end result is a KitKat that’s half “cheap coffee cream” and half “cheap instant coffee”. Neither half works particularly well on its own, and put together they just clash. It’s interesting and unusual, simply for the fact that I’ve never seen coffee flavoured chocolate done like that. There may be a market for it amongst those who like that instant coffee flavour, but I wouldn’t buy it again.
Another Meiji product and this time it has a distinctly more sophisticated feel to it than Kinoko No Yama ot Takenoko No Sato.
The packaging is beautifully explanatory, and the contents didn’t disappoint – they were exactly like the picture. What I expected to find was a stick of biscuit that had been dipped in a white chocolate or possibly the legendary Cool Whipp (with the ‘h’) and then finished with a dark chocolate and dusted with hazelnuts.
Here we have one. It’s rather like a big edible sparkler. Thirteen centimetres long, smooth surface, occasional nobbly bits (the hazelnut). As you can see, a tasteful margin of the white part left on show between biscuit and dark chocolate.
Now these were definitely some of the most refined looking chocolates I’ve seen during Japan week, but I’m afraid that once again the standard of chocolate used let Frann Whipps down. It’s more akin to the artificial chooclate used on cheaper cakes, with the white cream ‘Whipp’ part only adding to the impression of something with only a distant relationship to cocoa and dairy products. I did rather like the crisp, slightly dark tasting biscuit, mainly because it offered a counterpoint to the overall slightly greasy sweetness. Something that looks like it should taste interesting but which turns out to be best suited to those who like their chocolate with more sugar and much less cocoa.
How KitKat’s became so popular in Japan is a mystery to me. This simple little snack was originally created in Yorkshire by Rowntree’s in the 1930s, and for a long time didn’t do anything particularly interesting.
For as long as I can remember, it’s been the most popular chocolate bar in the UK, but the primary reason for its success has been that it’s a reliable, unchanging brand. You always knew exactly what you were going to get with a KitKat.
And then the French came along, stole our KitKats and took them to Japan. So now we have (well, Japan has) every flavour of KitKat imaginable. But I think this may be my favourite…
Clearly a Valentines Day special edition, the box is covered in heats – inside and out – but the most noticeable thing about it is that it’s made with dark chocolate.
There’s a nice fruity aroma to it, but nothing overpowering or too artificial like some of the other KitKats I’ve tried this week. The smell is more subtle – and more like real fruit.
The dark chocolate is rather nice. There’s no cocoa percentage given, but it’s not too sweet, not too bitter with a nice, smooth texture. There does seem to be some subtle raspberry flavour in the chocolate itself, but most of the flavour comes from the pink creme inside the wafers.
And it’s the wonderful fruity tartness of real raspberries that accounts for most of that flavour. The effect is not unlike the Raspberry Riot I had in the Chococo Love Box earlier this month. I’m surprised Nestlé opted not to try to counteract the tartness by packing it with sugar, but I’m glad they didn’t because it works so well.
There is a hint of passionfruit under all that raspberry, but it’s subtle. Frankly, I suspect it’s mainly there so they could write “Passion” on the box. But none of that detracts from what’s a really nice KitKat.
Another one for the “must have in the UK” list, please Nestlé.
KitKat supplied by J-List.
As Dom bravely makes his way through a seemingly endless parade of KitKats, I find myself faced with something which might actually stretch the remit of Chocablog a little.
Pakitz is a double pack of a strange hybrid of ice cream cone type wafer and a cocoa-flavoured substance in which are suspended tiny crispy balls. Viewed from the top, it looks like some kind of biscuit.
But flip it over and you see the truth of the matter.
Now I don’t know about you, but this didn’t shout ‘fine chocolate treat’ at me on any level. I’m willing to bet that whatever cocoa content there is here isn’t traceable to any one source. Nor do I think we’re looking at anything over 20% here, if that. It’s cheapo, high-sugar, factory made chocolate. This is never going to win any great taste awards – it’s what children throw a few Yen into a vending machine for at lunchtime. I guess.
In fairness, it does have more chocolate flavour than I expected, but the fun part for me was having something made from the stuff they make ice cream cones out of, that wasn’t an ice cream cone! How bizarre. The tiny crispy bits were an afterthought, barely making themselves known. To be honest, after I’d tried to remove all of the crispy exterior from this product,after the first two pieces the rest was just a matter of consumption. Unremarkable, mass-produced, cheapo rubbish with only a minor novelty factor, and therefore not worth bothering with. There are a myriad of odd flavours and some much better chocolate products out there for you to be wasting your time on this.
