KitKat time again! This time we have a bag of 13 mini KitKats from Japan supplied by J-List. I’m told this particular flavour is in honour of the Winter Olympics in Canada and is made with real maple syrup, but not being a Japanese reader, I have no way of confirming that. What I can tell you is they’re 69 calories and very cute.
Open the bag, and the unmistakably sweet aroma of maple syrup greets you immediately – despite each mini KitKat being sealed in its own wrapper. Open one and it just gets more intense. I swear these smell more like maple syrup than maple syrup itself!
The mini KitKats just look even cuter when unwrapped. Although some might argue that being white, they’re not “proper” chocolate (something we’re going to see a lot of in this week of Japanese chocolates), frankly I don’t care.
They taste just like you’d expect – a sweet, white, crispy KitKat infused with maple syrup. The maple flavour isn’t quite as strong as the aroma, but that’s probably a good thing – it would need to be hewn out of solid maple to taste that… mapley. It’s difficult to tell if it’s the white chocolate or cream between the wafers that’s flavoured, but my guess is both.
I enjoyed it, but I have a very sweet tooth. Those of you who only eat 70%+ dark chocolate will probably die just by looking it. But you’d be missing out because it’s a fun little snack.
Make no mistake, these are a very sweet, mapley treat. But they’re small enough that they’re not sickly. Not unless you scoff the whole bag like I did. Whoops.
A companion product to ‘Kinoko No Yama‘ (Mountain of mushrooms) (can there be more?) here we have a Village of Bamboo Shoots, which in itself is enough for it to win my affections. Can you imagine a British or American chocolate manufacturer coming up with a name like ‘Village of Bamboo Shoots’ for a product? Thought not.
Where the mushrooms were made of a crunchy biscuit ‘stem’ with a chocolate ‘cap’, these little bamboo shoots are more cake-like, and seem to have been dipped in the chocolate. And yes, they do look just like they did on the packet.
The dust on the chocolate is just the result of the Takenoko jostling each other in the bag.
They’re made with the same milk chocolate as the mushrooms, but there’s less of it. The cake part is pleasant enough, and they are a little on the moreish side in the way that sugary, sweet chocolate and slightly spongey cake can be. The cake has a slightly vegetable taste to it – it could be an attempt at replicating bamboo flavour, or possibly something else. It’s not unpleasant and lends a little extra dimension to what might have otherwise just been a ‘cake and chocolate’ experience. Using cake also made them seem a little less cheap than the mushrooms. Of course, they didn’t have the immediate visual impact that a packet full of tiny chocolate mushrooms has, but they make up for that with a much more interesting flavour and texture.
Like their fellows, these aren’t top notch chocs. They’re kids’ stuff, probably loaded with sugar (I can’t read the ingredients but there’s a reference to 77g followed by a breakdown of quantities, and 26.1g is followed by 41.6g, so I hope it’s the former!) and the chocolate is nothing to write home about, but I like the conceot and the packaging. I won’t, however, be nominating these for a Chocster.
It’s Japan week on Chocablog! Why? Because we said so!
Also, because the lovely people at J-List sent us a big box of chocolatey fun from Japan.. and because Simon has been acquiring more goodies from his growing circle of Japanese “contacts”.
First up, little cubes of KitKat with chilli powder. Awesome.
I wish I could tell you more about these, but unfortunately, pretty much all the writing on the pack is Japanese. But I can tell you they have 188 calories per 35g… and they’re a really funny shape…
They take the form of 1cm cubes with rounded edges and a little dimple in each face. The finish is slightly glossy, so I’m not sure if they’re finished with a thin shellac coating, or if it’s just how they’re made.
The milk chocolate is standard Nestlé fare and nothing to write home about, but that’s to be expected. Inside, we have what looks just like normal KitKat wafer, and indeed on first tasting you probably wouldn’t notice much difference from a regular KitKat.
Then the heat starts to creep up on you. And it builds to quite a reasonable level for a mainstream chocolate. I’ve had much hotter chilli chocolates in my time, but this still packs a nice kick – certainly enough to warm you up for a few minutes.
And you know, I really rather like them. They’re moreish, but you can’t eat them too quickly without breaking into a bit of a sweat, so even a little pack like this lasts a while.
I would love to see something like this sold in the UK. As you’ll see during the course of this week, KitKat is something of a national obsession in Japan, and they have some of the wackiest flavours you could imagine. But something as simple as a bit of chilli in the every day KitKat bar and I would go out and buy them regularly. Go on, Nestlé… you know you want to.
Chocolate for breakfast may not be a new thing, but it’s something I’ve been experiencing much more of recently. Usually it just takes the form of a cereal bar, but I was pleasantly surprised when these two decent sized boxes of granola from Dorset Cereals turned up on my doorstep.
A word about the packaging first. For a breakfast cereal, the boxes they come in are really quite beautiful. They’re simple and elegant with little cut-outs so you can see the product inside. Even before opening the box, it looks likes a quality product. Top marks.
I was sent a plain chocolate granola and a chocolate granola with macadamia nuts to sample. Both are made with oats, sunflower seeds, barley and fair trade 70% dark chocolate. The clusters of granola look and taste rather good straight out of the box, but I decided to try mine with a little milk and some fruit.
And it really was rather good. Crunchy, yet light enough to be very easy to eat, and so chocolatey, it even turns the milk brown (hey, they should trademark that as a strapline!). Certainly the tastiest breakfast cereal I’ve had in a while.
Personally, I preferred the non-macadmia variety, simply because it was a little more chocolatey. But either of these would be a tasty way to start the day. They look and taste like a quality product and have fair trade credentials to boot. Highly recommended.
Information
- Buy it online from:
- Contains dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids).
- Filed under barley, cereal, coconut, dark chocolate, dorset cereals, fair trade, granola, macadamia, oats, sunflower seed, uk.
