Kit Kats - The Final Chapter

I’m back guys and by back I mean back in the U.K.

The plan for this blog going ahead will be to do some retrospective posts about things I did in Japan and places I went to that I never got around to covering. Mostly because I was too busy doing stuff to have time to write about the stuff I was doing.

But the first order of business is to deal with what this blog has become famous for.

That’s right. Kit-Kats.

This is the last batch of Kit-Kat’s I will be reviewing for the foreseeable future as being in the U.K. I don’t have access to all that many Kit-Kat flavours.

So without further ado.

Fruit Juice



Released all the way back in May in honour of Children’s Day. Children’s Day is a festival in Japan that celebrates children, in particular young boys. Kids dress up as samurai, parents fly koi carp shaped streamers and some special food is eaten.
Nestle has decided to cash in on memories of being a child with a vaguely nostalgic looking packet. The girl drawn in an older style of advertising art and in historical clothes is the main sop to this idea along with the almost sepia yellow tone used for the background. Then we have some childlike drawings of fruit and that’s it. Frankly I think more could have been done to match the theme but at least the packet isn’t crowded and over designed. It’s very colourful too with lots of differently coloured fruit and a lot of colours used for the banner reading fruit juice. Again these colours evoke childishness and fond memories as well as tying into the idea of mixed fruits.



The individual kat wrapper is more subdued but considering the size available I don’t think using lots of colours would have worked. Instead we have yellows and browns, the colours of old photos and stylised fruit drawings. Simple but effective.
One thing to note about the packaging is the presence of bananas. As has been established on this site I loathe bananas. I loathe them with every fibre of my being. Not only are they disgusting but they have an annoying habit of inserting themselves into things completely unbidden. Many is the time I have gone to drink a smoothie or fruit juice and immediately gagged on the horrible and unmistakeable taste of banana. Banana that hasn’t been advertised on the packet! Grrr, horrible, evil, stealthy things. So whilst I appreciate the fact that nestle has been up front about the presence of banana I am not looking forward to this kit-kat.

The chocolate is coloured, never a good sign but it does smell nice. It’s hard to pick a distinctive not in the aroma but it is fruity. Which is to be expected I guess.

It doesn’t taste very nice though. The main problem is that it tastes really waxy. Upon biting in you aren’t hit by a strong flavour but rather by an absence of it. A sort of waxy coating surrounds your tongue and blocks out all flavour. Then you crunch down and some of the flavour comes through. What does come through isn’t banana-ey (thankfully) but it isn’t particularly fruity either. It’s not too sweet but it is just kind of generically sweet. If it tastes of anything it tastes of peach but even then it’s a really faint peach.

The aftertaste is bitter and tart and sits in your mouth like a bad smell going off. Ugh, not a fan. So waxy, flavourless and tart at the end. A poor effort.

Blueberry and Strawberry

Bought as part of a mixed packet containing regular kit-kat’s, strawberry and blueberry. The main packet has become lost in the move from Japan to the U.K. but from memory I know that it was an uninspired and messy design.



The individual designs aren’t messy but they’re certainly uninspired. In fact I think they may be the laziest effort I have reviewed so far. The strawberry one’s are okay, if a bit dull. Pink in colour (even though strawberries are red, but then so are regular kit-kat’s) with a picture of a strawberry. No thought has gone into their design but it works. However the blueberry wrapper is so boring it makes me a bit sad inside to eat it. The sole effort to distinguish it is to turn it blue and write blueberry at the side in a dull font. It isn’t even written in Japanese! Rather than entice me in or sell a theme it just makes me depressed and put off. This is chocolate for the desperate, chocolate for those with no friends, no taste and no hope.



The strawberry kat is regular chocolate and smells divinely and strongly of strawberries. Even sitting down the table from it I can get a strong whiff of strawberry filling my nostrils. In fact it’s making my mouth water a little bit.
Eating it has the exact same texture and mouthfeel of a regular kit-kat (complete with a little grittiness) but with a slight tang and a hint of strawberry. It’s nice, subtle, not too sweet and with a nice complexity that hits all the parts of your mouth with a burst of flavour. Then the aftertaste comes through like a punch to the tongue. After the chocolate taste dissipates it begins to really, really taste like strawberries. Your whole mouth gets taken over by a spreading wave of strawberry flavour complete with the tart notes and sourness of an actual strawberry.

This may not be the most exciting kit-kat ever but it sets out modest aims and more than fulfils them.

The blueberry also has regular chocolate and also has a nice strong aroma but nowhere near as strong as the strawberries. That’s fair though because blueberries aren’t the strongest smelling fruit to begin with.

Much like the strawberry the mouthfeel is like a classic kit-kat however it does have a certain waxy quality that spoils it. Unlike the strawberry though there is nothing at all subtle about this flavour. The blueberry comes out as the first note, overpowering the chocolate and everything else straight away. Blueberry fills your entire mouth and tries to escape out your eyes. These pack quite a kick for a chocolate bar, in fact they’re really quite sour. Nice though, the wrapper only promises you blueberry and blueberry is indeed what you get.

Bitter Almond



First up, that wrapper is absolutely horrible. There are way too many colours on it and they clash horribly with the kit-kat logo. The repeated diamond pattern clashes horribly with the picture of the bar and with the kit-kat logo and it just looks like a busy mess. There are at least 7 fonts used on the front and none of them compliment each other. My cat walking across a keyboard could produce a more attractive image. Actually my cat shitting on a keyboard could produce a more attractive image.



And yet the wrapper on the individual kat whilst haing many of the same problems works much better. The shiny foil makes the diamond pattern pop more and the colours are more subdued and complimentary. The logo is reduced in size and gives the patterns room to breathe and make an impression. Although still spoiled a bit by the logo it gives an impression of style and classiness. There’s an art deco feel which suggests a bygone era of style, sophistication and carefree pleasure. Considering bitter almond is an altogether more grown up flavour it’s a strong choice. This wrapper says not for kids and that can do a lot to draw my interest.

The smell is almost like coffee but it mostly chocolatey. No almond notes come through at all however it smells like a much richer and darker chocolate than a regular kit-kat. It looks darker too with little flecks of a lighter brown that is probably nut.

The texture is absolutely god awful. On the bottom it tastes and feels positively chalky, a horrible bitty, gritty waxiness. Almost like a piece of paper. Based on mouth feel alone this would be an absolute stinker.

However it tastes absolutely wonderful. Once you get past the first bite the texture settles down into a more standard kit-kat mode and one can start to think about the flavour. And what flavour! It’s definitely nutty, with some sour notes, some sweet notes and some really strong bitter notes. In fact I think there are actual nuts in it. It’s strangely not all that almond like. It tastes more like coffee if anything. But it is a deliciously complex flavour that stimulates your whole mouth. If the texture wasn’t so crap this would be a real winner of a kit-kat.

The aftertaste is a bit unpleasant as it leaves behind all the bitter notes without the sweetness to cut it. However I think this would compliment a coffee or tea very well and that would deal with the problem of after taste.

Coca Cola and Lemonade



Wow, that’s a busy packet! Not only have we got a picture of a big glass of cola, and another of lemonade but we also have hands, the logo, a blurb, another blurb, a diagram on the bottom of the packet and a joke on the top! But it’s done so well that it works! None of the elements crowd any other elements and each stands on its own as well as complimenting the others. The use of angles, spiky writing and geometric shapes imparts it some energy and an almost graffiti like feel to it. This is a kit-kat for kids and it has all the fun and energy it needs to do so. I also like the zippatone dots in the background suggesting fizziness as well as fitting into the youth/graffiti theme. Even the gradient from red to yellow is well done. This kit-kat is, dare I say it, funky!



The individual wrappers are less well done but are still okay. We get nice strong colours to denote which flavour is which and we get more of the same elements that made the main packet work so well, dots, angular shapes, etc but with addition of shiny and eye catching foil.

The lemonade kat has pale yellow chocolate, not a good sign, and even smells soapy. It also smells exactly like lemon vinegar, which was quite a nice flavour, and so this is a good sign. You really have to get a good whiff of it to get the smell though as it’s quite subdued. Interestingly you can even smell how fizzy it will be.
The initial taste is a bit bland, somewhat waxy, quite a bit soapy and even a little creamy. It doesn’t taste a huge amount of anything really, let alone lemon or lemonade. But then the fizz comes in the form of tiny dots of really, really, really sour lemon flavour. But the dots are so few that even though they are incredibly sour they struggle to overcome the blandess. I can guess what nestle was aiming for. The fizzy stuff makes an incredibly powerful lemon flavour and to make it palatable they added creamy chocolate. The idea being that the two should even out and the end result would be a pleasing lemonade taste. Instead you get almost painful punches of sourness and then a whole lot of bland soapy chocolate. So bland in fact that it kind of obliterates the aftertaste. A dismal failure.

Cola has cola coloured chocolate which doesn’t fill me with confidence but fairs much better on smell. Before the packet is even open you get hit a burst of unmistakeable cola smell. Not real cola though, this is the smell of rola cola, of the shit cheap knock off cola bought in pubs to entertain bored children and used to flavour all manner of sweets over the years. Again, like the lemonade, you can kind of smell the fizziness. It makes your eyes water a little bit.

The chocolate is horribly soapy and waxy. It has probably the worst texture of any kit-kat I have ever eaten. It doesn’t even feel like chocolate. It’s so insubstantial and waxy that it feels like eating a communion wafer washed with fairy liquid. And it’s bland, so very, very bland. Like the lemonade tiny fizzy dots of cola struggle to flavour the blandness. However it doesn’t work nearly as well as the lemonade. The cola flavour is pathetic, a tiny fart of flavour in a veritable Jupiter of bland crapness. Bland crapness that leaves an aftertaste like toilet cleaner fumes. Utterly appalling!

Strawberry Cheesecake



This is another kit-kat variety that is limited to one place in Japan, specifically Yokohama. Yokohama is one of the most international cities in Japan as it was one of the first cities to establish permanent trading ports with the outside world. Consequently a lot of food associated with Yokohama is a fusion of Japanese and western or just straight up western in nature. Yokohama is associated in people’s minds with history, the black ships (the American fleet that forced Japan to open its ports to foreigners), foreigners, foreign food and foreign culture. As such a strawberry cheesecake flavour is an entirely appropriate kit-kat to symbolise Yokohama.

The box art does a lot to tie into these historical notions. The background is in a cream and red bricks pattern evoking the unusual and exotic brick buildings that foreign merchants built in Yokohama. Prior to this all buildings in Japan were made of wood and stone. It’s also very distinctive and really stands out on a shelf, as well as being pleasing to the eye. And hey, cream and red are the colours of a strawberry cheesecake and of a Victorian building. That’s just too perfect. There’s a nice eye catching and attractive photo of a cheesecake and a friendly warning that this will have coloured chocolate and thus probably won’t taste very nice. The little gold ship ties into the historical theme but looks a little cluttered and busy. The old fashioned maid in western dress also ties into the theme and isn’t cluttered at all but seems a bit pointless. I guess she’s there to counter balance the necessary busyness on the other side of the box, with the words describing the flavour and the picture of the kit-kat.



The individual wrappers are boring beyond all belief, completely dull, flat and uninspired. They consist of nothing more than a cream colour with the logo and red etching with the flavour described. Why would you need to waste space describing the flavour? It’s on the front of the big box. And couldn’t we have had that nice brick pattern back? That was attractive and clever. Oh well.

The smell is strong and really distinct. This is obviously a strawberry cheesecake and nothing else. This is pretty much perfect actually, not too strong and not too weak. However mine are a bit old now and there is a weird element of sweaty cheese to the odour.

The taste is sweet but not too sweet, a touch gritty but not waxy and with a nice mild creaminess to it. Cheesecake definitely comes to mind but it tastes not one iota of strawberry. The strawberry flavour is completely absent. Weirdly there are some weird sharp cheesy notes, like cheddar or something. Not a feature I associate with cheesecake or with kit-kats.

The after taste is ungodly sweet and really harsh. It’s dehydrating and sits at the back of the throat like a cough. That’s not strictly speaking a bad thing though because these are meant to be eaten with a hot drink.

All in all a bland and inoffensive kit-kat that would go well with a hot drink.

Wasabi



Wasabi for the uninitiated is a kind of horseradish grown only in Japan. It is bright green and much, much hotter than regular horseradish. In fact it’s ironic that Japanese cooking, which is usually subtle and a touch bland, would also use one of the hottest ingredients going, quite liberally, in their cooking.

Wasabi is nice though, especially with sushi. Raw fish has a creamy quality to it that cuts the sharpness of the wasabi and the heat and creaminess contrast and compliment each other very well.

But a kit-kat?! This may very well be the strangest kit-kat I have ever eaten, right up there with corn, miso, soy sauce and watermelon and salt.

In fact whilst wasabi may be nice wasabi flavoured things are usually not. I have eaten wasabi flavoured sweets, they were horrible, and wasabi flavoured ice-cream. The ice-cream at first tasted creamy and mild and very bland. Then I realised that actually no, it wasn’t bland at all but in fact my mouth was on fire. After a small panic at my oral conflagration set about looking for some kind of cold creamy substance to soothe my mouth. Luckily I had some ice-cream, unfortunately it was wasabi ice-cream and me and this dessert got into an unpleasant cycle of burning and cooling that didn’t end well for either of us.

So my expectations are not high, let’s see what I’ve let myself in for.

Once again this kit-kat is exclusive to one area, in this case Tokyo. It specifically advertises one wasabi specialist shop in Tokyo but my Japanese is nowhere near good enough to decode the advertising. It does feature a picture of the shop and a website http://www.tamaruya.co.jp/ so go there if you’re interested.

Weirdly the box art features drawing of wasabi in a distinctly Okinawan style. Art comprised of big blocky jagged colourful lines with white fills is often associated with Okinawa, the semi-tropical island at the base of Japan. Wasabi isn’t associated with Okinawa at all though, in fact I’m not even sure if Okinawan cooking uses wasabi. They have a slightly different culture there to mainland Japan and their food is much more like Chinese. It’s very attractive looking and very distinctive but it doesn’t really make any sort of thematic sense. Other than that there isn’t much to say about the box art, it’s green, wasabi is green, the wasabi kit-kat is green. I think they assumed that the curiosity factor alone would sell it. They were right.



The individual wrappers have the same mystifying Okinawan theme along with a big label telling you stuff you already knew because you read it on the box!

So, how is it?

It’s a kind of pale green, like pea soup, or hospital paint, or baby pooh
.
It smells faintly of wasabi and kind of horrible actually. Although you can smell sugar too the wasabi smell is stronger and it’s not a pleasant smell.

And it tastes…



It’s pretty hard to describe actually.

The first thing to mention about it is that it triggered my gag reflex almost before I put it in my mouth. The smell, idea and colour all combined in a symphony of unappealing that made me hesitant to eat it. That gagging motion doesn’t contribute to a nice tasting biscuit. Once I got over the shock and swallowed a few bites that reflex subsided.

The next thing to mention is that it isn’t hot, not at all. There is a slight, infinitesimal heat to the after taste but it evaporates quickly and isn’t that strong to begin with.

It is sweet, and creamy but not too much of either.

Finally it tastes of wasabi, or at least how wasabi must taste without the heat. Which is not very nice actually. It’s kind of herby, a touch lemony, a touch bitter and a touch of something completely indefinable but somehow unpleasant. It’s a tough one to review because the process of eating a wasabi kit-kat is;

"ugh that looks horrible, hey actually it just tastes sweet and creamy, and of something, something else, hmm, oh wait gone, sweet and creamy again."

It’s disappointing to be honest. If it tasted really strongly of wasabi it would probably be horrible but at least it would be an experience. As it is it’s bland, not as good as a regular kit-kat and not especially reminiscent of wasabi. What a let down.

Kontent! What is this? Ah, Kit-Kats.

Yes, yes "Why you no post?". Well ignore the unusually long gap in updating and prepare for kit-kats!

Kit-Kat Chunky Green Tea



The onslaught of flavoured chunky variants begins. Having seen and reviewed my first one ever back in March; Nestle have begun unleashing more and more of them. Two are up for review this time around starting with a perennial Japanese kit-kat favourite, green tea.

The packaging is crowded but generally fine. The green and white are a bit reduced next to the absolutely massive kit-kat logo and quite hard to see. The macha powder effect is well done however.

And again we're forewarned that this will probably be crap because it shows up front that we're dealing with coloured chocolate here. Never a good sign with kit-kats and usually an indicator that the chocolate tastes soapy and naff.

Oh and 234 calories, yikes.

Being a chunky you get an unusually big slab of chocolate relative to the biscuit so this is less crispy and more flavourful.

Unfortunately that flavour is green tea.

This is one of the stronger green tea kit-kats actually. It tastes quite definitively of macha and is bitter like macha but they've sweetened it to cut the natural bitterness and make it easer to eat. On first bite it's pretty pleasant, bitter, fresh, sweet and crispy.

But the aftertaste. It tastes like licking splenda off a tea spoon that has been sitting on a table for an hour. Faintly of tea mostly of horrible artificial sweeteners and shame.

Banana Kit-Kat Chunky



I despise bananas.

The merest hint of banana absolutely overpowers any other flavour for me so adding banana to anything ensures that I am disgusted by it.

Tropical drinks, smoothies, bannofee. No matter what you team it with bananas make me sick.

This is not hyperbole, they make me wretch.

And now I'm going to eat a banana kit-kat.

I don't want to do this, I have no desire to do this. Doing this will bring me no joy whatsoever.

Frankly you're not going to get an objective review here. At best it won't taste too strongly of bananas and I'll be fine. At worst I'll be sick in my mouth. Either way Idon't think my tastes align with the general banana loving populace.

And it has coloured chocolate, oh god.

And it smells, really strongly of bananas. This is not any other flavour, this is unmistakeable.

Oh god.

It tastes of...nothing.

Ah, no, when you chew the banana comes through very strongly.

Very strongly.

Hold on.

Yes, I have just been sick in my mouth a little bit.

So the aftertaste, um, mouth sick. I think I'll go brush my teeth.

Green Tea Kit-Kat



Yes, another one. This is a fairly common variety in Japan and some form of green tea Kit-Kat is on shelves all year round. This one has new packaging though that is lovely and ties it in to spring.

Pink and Green are the spring colours in Japan thanks to all the sakura and this packet is loading with pink and green. It practically yells spring at you, like a hyperactive child who has just learnt a new English word, or some kind of pogo based psychopath.

But it is well done. Its very striking and the green and pink are well balanced. The sakura leaves are a cute touch and that cup of macha actually looks delicious. In exactly the way that all macha looks delicious and inviting before you drink it and remember that it tastes like when you make a cup of tea and the bag splits.

And how awesome is that individual kat wrapper. I love the fading bars from green to pink through white. It's cute, it's classy, it's springlike and it's remarkably well done. I want to pin it to my lapel it's so flowery. Isn't it just adorable?

I may, possibly, be lacking in perspective when it comes to the aesthetic properties or kit-kat wrappers.

But wook at it, I wants to cuddle it aw wup.

Although both wrappers seek to disguise the filthy coloured chocolate within.

Ah coloured chocolate, my nemesis.

It tastes much sweeter and much less bitter than the chunky and dare I say has a nutty quality.

But it also has the fresh taste associated with green tea, and it isn't soapy. Yet not quite like proper chocolate either. Maybe its a bit...gritty?

The after-taste is still sickly sweet but much less so than the chunky. Overall it's really a bit bland. In fact it sort of cleanses the palette a little. This is nothing food, food that has texture but very little flavour. Which actually makes it kind of ideal as a dipping biscuit to go with something incredibly flavourful (say a cup of real macha. It may be a bad flavour but there sure is a lot of it).

Or maybe I'm just delighted after the banana.

Framboise (raspberry)



This looks promising. French name, pink and brown colouring and retro design aesthetic are all pluses for a kit-kat. In fact almost all the kit-kats with some kind of retro design such as spots or distinctive stripes have been quite good. As have all the pink and brown ones.

Both the main packet and individual wrapper are nicely done but the main wrapper is particularly great. As well as the really stylish pink on pink bubbles there is a delicious looking slice of cake and an adorable little bow. This is a kit-kat that screams present. Much like a small child at Christmas, or a kind of Santa themed psychopath. Not that you should ever give your loved one a kit-kat as a present. Unless your loved one is me and your enabling my destructive behaviour.

The wrapper even has a strange embossed pattern that makes it feel nicer to touch.

The only thing I don't like is the little "sweets concept" badge. Its the sort of meaningless English the Japanese stick on things that communicates nothing. It's visual and linguistic noise that only serves to detract from the stylish design.

The kit-kat itself is great too. Real chocolate for starters which is always a good sign. And from the second one opens it one gets a really strong whiff of raspberries that hit the nose. This is one of the best smelling kit-kats I've tried.

The taste is excellent. The chocolate is milk but quite bitter and not too sweet. It is the first taste that you get but as you chew the raspberry begins to fill your mouth. It is really quite amazing. Like a proper chocolate, from a box or selection. the raspberry filling is sweet, fruity, rich, complex, slightly sour and slightly bitter. Every part of your mouth gets hit with flavour at once. It's sublime.

The after-taste is just a touch sour but the delicious fruity notes linger for a long time making this one of the better kit-kats to eat without accompaniment.

All in all a solid effort. Great package, great smell, great taste, great after taste. A+

Shinshu Ringo (Apples)



My long sufferring girlfriend Fran's parents visited us recently and we went travelling. In the course of those travels I found many strange kit-kat variants which I brought back with me. Most of these are packaged to be used as "omiyage" a Japanese gift giving tradition. When you go travelling it is customary to bring a present back from where you went to share with others in your office and as an apology for being absent and giving them more work.

Being Japan everywhere has its own regional speciality so most omiyage is geared towards that regional speciality.

On our journey in the Shinshu region the specialities included crickets, bee larvae, apples, miso, chilli and a host of others.

Hence, apple kit-kats.

I can't really say much for the packet. Although larger than usual they don't really have any more elements than a standard (overcrowded) kit-kat wrapper. The apples look suitably delicious, the labelling is clear, the gold and red colours are appropriate for apples and suitably inviting and it all looks striking enough. The picture of mountain topography is a bit naff, if only because I've been there and it looks much more dramatic than that painting attempts to capture. I do like the picnic blanket pattern to the red. It suggests the outdoors, wholesomeness and nature. Good things for an apple flavour to aim for.



Real chocolate (hooray) and a really powerful apple odour from the second the packet is opened. Actually a really, really nice apple odour. So apple-ey that goes right past apple and settles somewhere near apple flavoured chewing gum i.e. concentrated apple smell. More apple-ey than an apple.

The taste is much less strong than the smell but still pretty strong. The apple kills all the chocolate notes stone dead. The only thing you can taste here is apple. Although the chocolate does come through in the aftertaste.

And all in all its pretty good. Not too sweet, nice and rich, plenty complex and definitely apple-ey. Solid.

Yawatayaisogoro Ichimi (Japanese Chilli Pepper)



I'm actually not dreading this. Chilli and chocolate are an amazing coupling. Chocolate makes chilli richer and chilli gives chocolate a kick to it that offsets the sweet and brings forward the flavour. All in all I'm looking forward to this.

That packet is an absolute disgrace though. The faded red/orange pattern hasn't worked. The pepper drawing looks absolutely naff too although the picture in the middle looks fine. It's a bit lifeless but fine for illustrative purposes. The Kanji looks really bad too, really tacked on. It's way too small and the pepper drawing is way too big. The elements are all out of whack. Bad wrapper.



The individual wrappers look a little better. The shiny foil makes the red/yellow fade pop more and look better. It suggests fieryness in a way the main box doesn't. Oh and the inside of the main box is black, as if to sell the danger and hotness of the peppers. Ooooooh.

The chocolate is really, really black. It's almost not brown at all. That's a good sign to me, although there is a noticeable lack of smell.

At first all it tastes of is black chocolate.

Then later all it tastes of is black chocolate.

Then finally it tastes of black chocolate.

then the after-taste is a bit spicy.

Alright that's a bit unfair. The after-taste is a lot spicy. Much spicier than I guessed. But that's still rubbish. You can't taste the spice and it doesn't improve the chocolate one bit. In fact if anything they've sweetened it a bit to try and counteract the spice that isn't there. All it does is make you want to drink a glass of water.

Miso



Miso is another of those packets with space on the back to turn it into a postcard. It is also a regional speciality recipe only available around Tatteyama area.

For those unfamiliar with miso it is a kind of paste made by fermenting soybeans. Japanese people mostly use it to make a soup which has a strong umami (savoury) flavour. It is also used to flavour vegetables and fish and in a variety of dishes.

Miso consists of mostly fermented soybeans but it also mixed and flavoured with leaves, herbs and shoyu (soy sauce) in its preparation. Another thing used in its preparation is tiny fish often used in Japan to make stocks and give an umami flavour.

So yes, this is in part a fish flavoured kit-kat. I'm amazed it took this long.

I really like that packet. Instead of going with the most literal representatin they've gone for a theme. Sure there is a tub of miso at the top but most of the packet illustrations are of a miso shop in an ancient Japanese street. It connotes tradition, the past, elements of nostalgia and wholesomeness. the traditional Japanese pattern background helps enforce this too as does the orange and beige colour scheme evoking both miso and sepia photos. It's a great bit of design communicating a lot of ideas with only a few simply elements.

The individual kat is a bit poorer but maintains most of the same ideas, orange and beige, ropes and traditional Japanese patterns, etc.

It doesn't really smell of miso which has a very distinctive odour. Instead it smells of toffee. That's good, because I like toffee. although there's also a sort of burnt aroma too.

It doesn't really taste of miso and whilst it mostly tastes of tofee it doesn't quite taste of that either. It's salty for a start but at the same time really sweet and again at the same time quite umami. I kind of think it tastes of brown apples, but, strangely in a nice way.

Although the taste is hard to describe it's really very pleasant. It sets off all the parts of your mouth and is properly rich and complex. It is sweet but not very sweet and it's fairly mild but at the same time has a weird salty kick.

And there is almost no aftertaste. What little there is is actually very good. Again like a toffee, a sort of rich mellow sweetness.

I'm utterly mystified reader. I like this kit-kat a lot but I lack the words to explain what it tastes like. Not miso, not even slightly like miso really. But it is very nice whatever it is.

Potatoes, Chocolate and Lies!!!!

After that epic (seriously that last post was more than 8 pages long in word, my essays at University were shorter than that) we’re back to what Mummyboon does best.

And that’s reviewing kit-kats.

I can feel the excitement being transmitted down the net tubes.

First up is an autumnal offering that is no longer available but that I’ve been saving for when I finally finished that Kyushu write up.

Sweet Potato Kit-Kat



Sweet potatoes are huge in Japan. They come in tons of different varieties such as ; purple inside, purple outside but yellow inside, long and thing, flat and wide, round like a potato and lots more.

What’s more, being potatoes, they are really versatile and are used in a wide selection of dishes. They can be a savoury accompaniment to a meal, they can be salted and eaten as chips, they can be made into ice-cream (which is my favourite ice-cream in the whole world) they can be covered in syrup and eaten as pudding and they can be added to Japanese curry.

They are most commonly eaten though just baked and maybe with a little bit of butter. Whilst this might sound a bit boring it is anything but. Baked sweet potatoes are so good they could talk a suicidal man from the ledge. They are evidence of a benevolent and wonderful universe. More realistically they are lovely and fluffy, buttery and with a wonderfully complex sweetness. Not the sweetness of sugar that is simple and gone straight away but that of caramel which you can roll around the tongue. A rich sweetness. A sweetness for grown ups.

There are in fact little wagons that traditionally roam the streets of Japanese cities in autumn baking sweet potatoes and making little puffs of sweet smelling steam as they trundle along. Yaki-imo (baked sweet potato) the vendors cry as their little carts trundle along causing flocks of sweets crazed Japanese ladies to flock behind.

And one of these wagons is depicted on the packaging along with some puffs of inviting steam. In fact that steam has been co-opted into the design of the packet. I love that! In the same way that the real steam seems to say “look yummy sweet potatoes,” so too does the packet say “yaki-imo.” That’s brilliant theme-ing in the design there. And they added a picture of a yaki-imo looking fluffy and moist and oh so delicious. Plus it’s a sort of golden yellow, which is officially the best colour a biscuit can be (see custard creams and gold bars for reference).

The design of the individual kit-kat is nothing special, although I note that they’re including the calorie content on the smaller packets now. Apparently the sweet potato ones are 2 kcal’s more per serving than a standard chocolate one.



Considering what they taste like though that is totally worth it.

The taste, oh how can I describe the taste?! Well it tastes like sweet potato to start with but it is so much more than that. It tastes of dreams. It tastes of ambrosia. It tastes of honey and caramel and nectar and Elysium. It tastes of victory. It tastes of loves first bloom. This, my friends, may very well be the perfect kit-kat. This is the platonic biscuit from which all others are mere imperfect reflections. This is a biscuit fit for a deity.

Actually it tastes a bit like caramac only nicer. Does anyone remember caramac? I think you can still get them at newsagents.

Sadly nestle have stopped making them which may be the worst biscuit related news I have ever heard. In fact it is the worst biscuit related news I have ever heard and it’s worse than quite a few bits of non-biscuit related news I have heard. I would go so far as to say that it is much sadder than hearing that someone else’s hamster has died but maybe not as sad as your own dying.


Wow that got morbid. Ahem, excuse me whilst I mourn the loss of the perfect biscuit.

Better now, next one.

Extra Cocoa



Like a normal kit-kat but with nicer chocolate. Considering that kit-kats have crap chocolate these can only be an improvement.

And a whole 4 kcals more per serving, ooh la la, extravagant. Ambassador, with these nice kit-kats you are really spoiling us.

The box is pretty dull, although it does have a sort of festive snow thing going on. What’s more interesting for me is that it is in a box at all. Kit-Kat have fairly standard packaging formats on the whole. There are the 4 bars in a box, small multipacks, chunky, premiums, minis and one or two odd outliers but a square box with 5 double wafers is a new one.

And yes, I just realised that I said I was “interested” in a new box. I think that makes me the world’s only kit-kat nerd.



The packaging on the bar itself is much better. For starters it’s brown, which is the colour of chocolate. It’s as if it is saying “come, see how chocolately I am. I am the chocolateiest kit-kat, I scoff at the red ones, and I fart in its general direction.”

Snooty kit-kat then. And it maintains the winter wonderland theme but it works much better because we aren’t distracted from the snow pattern by a massive picture of some chocolate.

How does it taste?

It tastes like a kit-kat with nicer chocolate.

I don’t really know what to say. We all know how chocolate tastes, well like that. I mean, it isn’t amazing chocolate but it is good for a biscuit and amazing for a kit-kat.

It isn’t as sweet as a normal one and the after taste is actually pleasant rather than that horrible soapy taste you’d get with a regular one. I rate them highly but ultimately it’s nothing more exciting than a chocolate biscuit.

Royal Milk Tea



I despise Royal Milk Tea.

Tea, as every properly civilised person knows, should be black leaves, made in a pot with some, but not too much milk. I will leave the sugar debate open except to say that I drink my tea with sugar. My excuse is that I was abandoned on a building site as an infant and raised by a pack of wild builders who taught me everything I know about drinking tea, turning up late and wolf whistling at ladies.

Alright, that isn’t true, but what is true is that I was raised in Yorkshire, where the general rule of thumb is that tea should be stewed so long and have so much sugar in it that a spoon will stand upright if left in it.

In contrast the barbarians in Japan seem to think that tea should use green leaves, should be mildly infused and should have no milk. What’s worse is that they assert that this is the correct way to do it. They even have some kind of bizarre ceremony to demonstrate the “correct” way to drink it. Whilst there is neither excuse nor explanation for this abhorrent behaviour I have had to learn to live with it and I take solace that proper can still often be purchased.

Proper tea is known as kocha and sometimes as milk tea. Being English I will often ask for a cup of kocha or milk tea if seated in a Japanese café. Usually this will result in me getting a nice pot of tea. Sometimes it will result in me getting Royal Milk Tea.

Royal Milk Tea is not tea. It is some kind of disgusting powder consisting of powdered milk and something brown. When hot water is added it creates a deceptive and evil drink which looks like tea, smells sort of like tea and appears for the entire world to be tea until you drink it and realise that it is in fact the juice from Satan’s nipples.

It is, to be blunt, horrible. It is worse than vending machine tea.

And the worst thing about it, the way it pretends to be English. From the use of the word “royal” down to the packaging it tries to sidle up to England and borrow some of the country’s association with tea in order to pass itself off as something authentically British.

It makes me sick.

So I am not predisposed to be a fan of Royal Milk Tea Kit-Kat.

To start with the packaging is literally enraging. Not only are we calling it Royal Milk Tea but the package is bloody tartan! Tartan!! You don’t get more cosily British than tartan and Royal Milk Tea is the very antithesis of British values. Shortbread comes in tartan packets and Kit-Kats are no shortbread!

And then to make it worse the edge has little caricatures of the palace guard. The palace guard! Complete with bearskins! Does the Queen know about this? Can she sue? This is blatant false advertising, there is nothing royal about Royal Milk Tea but it not only has it in its name but has started adding palace guards!

Frankly this package makes me sick. I am revolted.

I will give it this though, the inside of the bag smells more like a cup of tea than any cop of Royal Milk Tea has ever done.



How does it taste?

It tastes of betrayal and lies.

No, actually it doesn’t really taste of anything. The first few bites are astonishingly bland. They’re a bit creamy and sweet, but pleasingly not too sweet but they taste nothing like a cup of tea or Royal Milk Tea.

In the after taste some tannins start come through (those are the sour notes in tea) that are surprisingly bitter for a kit-kat. But frankly I don’t know if I’m tasting them or smelling my mouth. The smell of these things is really strong but the flavour is aggressively bland. It’s almost as if the flavour was hiding from me in case it made me angry.

I cannot stress how tasteless this biscuit is and that puzzled me for a while until a thought struck me. I often ponder what the purpose of these tea flavoured kit-kats is when surely a kit-kat is designed to be dunked into tea. Perhaps what we have here is a biscuit that is designed to be dunked and absorb the flavour of the tea it is dunked into.

So I made a cup of tea and tried it out.

The difference is astonishing. It went straight from bland to one of the strongest tasting kit-kats I have ever eaten. The tea flavours and tannins come hard and fast and almost knock you out. And it’s nice too. Not too sweet with a lovely rich tea taste. Unfortunately it does have the weird soapy aftertaste that a lot of kit-kat’s have.

So I summary without tea it is boring and crap. With tea it makes a great companion but has a nasty aftertaste. Either way it didn’t make in vomit in rage and revulsion so it is a massive step up from the product it is named after.

Mummyboon 4: Mummyboon in Space

Yes, I’ve been gone for far too long but now I’m back.

Frankly I can’t promise how long back will be but I’m going to do my very best to at least maintain a weekly schedule along with any short updates I can fit in.

What has brought me back you ask? Well the people have spoken and they have demanded that I review kit-kats!

“suppai orange”



Suppai means sour, and although I love sour sweets the prospect of a sour orange chocolate strikes me as a little odd. Then again if what I’m eating is only a little odd then I’m doing very well for a Japanese kit-kat.

The packaging on this one falls squarely into the good category. At least the bag itself does. The shiny foil used along with the bursts of light and the streaks all add up to a very summery, fruity kind of feel. Very appropriate for what they’re selling. I suspect the tone was supposed to be akin to a starburst or some other kind of very fruity sweet. Again, a little bit off-putting for a chocolate bar though.

The packaging on the individual kat is a bit more boring. A plain orange with a little bit of decoration. Still the font is nice and energetic and again fits in with the whole energy, impact, xxxtreem thing going on. Plus I guess you can’t complain that the wrapper for an orange chocolate bar is orange, can you?

So how does the flavour stack up?

Well the first notes just taste like orange chocolate. Good orange chocolate but a bit of a disappointment really. Then as you chew on the sour stuff used in it really kicks. I mean really kicks in. I like a sour sweet but this is quite strong, almost unpleasantly so. By the end of it all you can taste is sour orange and the chocolate notes have entirely vanished leaving you wanting another bar almost straight away.

Let it sit for a moment though and the sourness soon goes leaving you with a lingering chocolaty mouth. Absolutely superb. Good chocolate, not too sweet, with a nice kick in the middle and then a pleasant after taste. Well done nestle, this is a top notch kit kat.

Mango Pudding



The second of our mini kit-kat offering this week and one I have been dreading. I am not the world’s greatest fan of mangos and I absolutely despise custard pudding. Their combination does nothing to appeal to me and the picture on the bag of some horrible gloopy custardy Chinese thing doesn’t help. Honestly does that look nice to anybody? It looks like a bowl of children’s sick to me.

There’s obviously something vaguely Chinese about the whole affair too. Not only is the kiddie sick served in a Chinese bowl but the bag has the same decorative edging as the bowl itself, as do the individual wrappers. Other than that it doesn’t look too offensive. It is an unassuming creamy colour that’s actually quite appealing. It’s just that the gleaming sprog vomit on the main bag is making my stomach churn.

Still, it is a kit-kat. It can’t possibly resemble pudding all that much.

The biscuit itself is bright orange and smells faintly of mango and mostly of McDonald’s milkshake. Actually lots of kit-kats smell and taste a bit like a milkshake. I wonder why. It is a nice smell that makes me want to eat it. Then I look at the kiddie sick, then back to the smell. The only possible outcome of this is that I’m going to be put off milkshakes for the rest of my life.

I can report that it tastes not in the slightest bit custardy or like a pudding in any way shape or form. In fact it barely tastes like a mango. What it mostly is; is sweet, vaguely milk shake like and kind of fruity but without resembling a distinct fruit. I mean if I had to guess I might say mango but nobody is going to be blown away by the stunning replica of mango flavour on offer here.

Overall I kind of like it. A bit too sweet mainly but it’s nice and creamy and just a little bit more complex than a standard kit-kat. I can see it pairing well with green tea.

Kinako Ohami-something



Points off right away for having an unreadable font that I can’t decipher. Judging by the picture it is supposed to taste like some kind of Japanese sweet (wagashi) made with rice, sweet soy powder (kinako) and some unidentifiable red substance.

This really has to be the ugliest kit-kat packet I have had to review. Look at it. It is awful. Unreadable font aside look at that picture. Does that look like something you wish to eat? It looks vaguely like something that has already been eaten. At my most charitable it looks like something savoury, I mean the main constituents I can identify there are soy powder and rice. The filling looks like corned beef. It looks like a pasty. Japan has done many strange things but it has yet to present me with a pasty flavoured kit-kat. Much like the mango pudding the picture on the cover just serves to put me right off the biscuit.

The rest of the packet is awful too. The fake scroll and the rice grains are combining to suggest early autumn in Japan. Nothing wrong with that, but the colours?! Yuck! Institution green and mustard yellow may just be the most horrible colour combination ever devised. It looks like a 1970’s living room or a doctor’s waiting office. I know that they’re aiming for rice paddies but they have missed and landed 40 years ago in a middle class flat in Birmingham.

The wrapper on the actual kat is no better. Plain yellow with wispy clouds.

I am actually a little bit angry at this biscuit. That isn’t a healthy attitude is it?

It smells nutty, really nutty. Actually, and I am not exaggerating here, it does smell very, very faintly of poo. Mostly nuts but a little bit like poo. Then again I think some nuts smell of poo anyway so it may just be me.

The taste is entirely non-descript. It tastes of a normal kit-kat with some slight nutty notes. Very, very slight too; in my opinion. The after taste is nice though, a big step up from the sort of chemical-chocolate you get with a regular kit-kat. It’s more complex and mellow, much nicer to roll around your mouth.

So basically they’ve put a slight improvement on a normal kit-kat in a really, truly awful bit of packaging. Sorry nestle, try again.

Vegetable Juice



Carrots!

Seriously, carrots.

Actually why not carrots? Carrots are quite sweet for a vegetable and they make a nice cake, why not a nice kit-kat. Plus the sooner nestle branches out into more savoury flavours the sooner I can look forward to my pasty flavoured kit-kat, smokey bacon kit-kat and salt and vinegar (actually, the salt and vinegar might not be so bad).

Technically this isn’t a carrot kit-kat though. This is a partnership with ito-en who make a vegetable juice that contains amongst other things carrots and apples. I haven’t tried it, vegetable juices may be popular in Japan but they scare me, and so I can’t comment if the taste matches up.

I have nothing but praise for the packet. That’s a good use of negative space there, the over saturation of white serves to make the veg seem fresher somehow and the mix of reds, greens, whites and oranges in the font and packaging also helps project a healthy fruity sense. The individual wrapper is much the same but adds a little more orange and somehow looks even better.

The kat itself is bright orange and smells strongly of both carrots and apples at the same time. That bodes well. Kit-kat’s struggle to do complicated flavours and usually only one comes through very well. If they can get it to smell like both main ingredients than this should be okay.

Sadly not. Although you can smell both apples and carrots it is hard to pick them out distinctly. However it does still taste quite nice. It is definitely more like an apple than a carrot but it really reminds me of something else that I can’t put my finger on. It’s not too sweet either, in fact it seems remarkably fresh and fruity rather than dessert-like.

The aftertaste is not very nice at all though. Really chemically and faintly bitter. It leaves bitter juice at the back of your throat that is tart and stingy.

And actually the more I’ve eaten of it the more I dislike it. It is too sweet actually and it gets progressively sweeter with every bite. Trying to eat another piece to remove the aftertaste just adds more tart juice and makes the whole situation worse.

Plus I can’t see this pairing nicely with a cup of tea. It is far too strong and far too weird. Maybe with water, but who has a kit-kat with water?

Sports Drink



Like the veggie juice and the ramune from our last session here we have a kit-kat based on a drink. Actually these have been becoming more popular with nestle recently, apple vinegar, coffee, green tea, etc are all drinks and they all share the same problem in my book. How can you have them with a cup of tea? You surely want a complimentary flavour, not some other drink entirely.

Sports drink refers to Japanese sports drink such as Pocari Sweat or Aquarius. I don’t know if there really is an equivalent product back home. Neither lucozade nor red bull really taste much like it at all. Maybe the lucozade isotonic water is the closest match but frankly I’m at a loss for comparisons. Probably the easiest way to know what I’m talking about will be to drink some Pocari Sweat. Its marvellous stuff and you can tell all your friends you’ve drunk sweat.

The outer packet is a total mess. It seems to be done as an offer in conjunction with some Japanese Football Association competition. Consequently it is full of blurbs and logos in horrible clashing fonts. The colour scheme is a balls up too with the yellow being underused. It is striking though so I suspect they were aiming for eye-catching rather than aesthetically pleasing. The football pentagon pattern is a bit washed out and hard to notice unless you’re studying it intently (as I do for the benefit of you people).

The individual wrapper is much nicer. No hideous yellow and the footballs work much better at that scale. Plus shiny foil. I always approve of shiny things.

The kat itself is a sort of pale yellowy-white. I guess that makes sense to try and recreate the vaguely translucent colour of Pocari Sweat which, to be honest, does look a little bit like a bottle full of spit.

The smell is absolutely uncanny. It smells exactly like a bottle of Pocari Sweat or Aquarius. I realise that isn’t helping you so I guess I’ll have to say that there are hints of lemon and spice.

But whilst the smell is uncanny the taste is a bit of a letdown. It’s quite bland actually with a tangy lemon taste on the back of the tongue. Pocari does taste a little bit of lemon but it has lots more flavours to it than that. This seems to offer almost no flavour whatsoever. It isn’t even that sweet or that lemony in fact. The lemon tang is principally an aftertaste. Nestle have produced here a chocolate bar that tastes of almost nothing and certainly not of sports drink.

It’s not horrible though, just quite bland.

We drink some weird things in Japan.

This isn't entirely what I intended to do today, particularly just after another food review, but the planned post is proving to be tougher and more complicated than expected so here is a quickie for you.


For the past few years Pepsi has been producing a special limited edition drink each summer. When I arrived they released a cucumber soda that I sadly didn't get the chance to try. Last year they brought out a bright blue "Blue Hawaiian" flavour that tasted almost entirely of chemicals.

This year they have something completely different, Shiso Soda.

Shiso (also known as perilla) is a kind of Japanese leaf that is related to mint. It has a really unique flavour, sort of a cross between basil, mint and sprouts with something wholly unique thrown in. Said flavour is really incredibly strong and Shiso tends to be one of those herbs that completely overwhelm a dish. Consequently I do not use it much (although I do know a nice pasta recipe using it). It is not, however, in the slightest bit sweet. Furthermore it has a texture pretty much identical to a stinging nettle and stings your mouth a little when you eat it.

An odd choice for a bottle of pop, wouldn't you say.

But what really makes the Shiso soda worthy of a blog entry is that this year Coca Cola have seen fit to try and directly compete in the weird summer drink market with their own entry. Green Tea Diet Coke plus catechin (and no, I'm as in the dark as to what a catechin is as you are).

So how do they stack up?

Well being the slightly more normal entry I thought I'd try the coke first.

It smells pretty much exactly how you'd expect. It smells of Diet Coke and faintly of green tea.

But it tastes just like Diet Coke. Now, in fairness I haven't drunk diet coke in a while no do I have a bottle here to compare and contrast but from memory this is just Diet Coke. If there is a green tea flavour then it is subtle in the extreme.

What about the Shiso Pepsi?

Well first strike against it, it is a violent green colour. That never bodes well and puts me in mind of that Final Fantasy Potion I had last year.

The packaging is much nicer than the coke bottle though. In fact for a soft drink it is almost understated. Look at the sheer amount of text Coca Cola has to cram onto the bottle. That is astonishingly ugly even before the design, horrible clashing colours and clashing styles are factored in. I count at least five different fonts on that bottle which is simply unforgivable.

The Shiso bottle is much simpler in design. All laid out in a simple line format and with less fonts and a nice design that complements rather than clashes with the font.

Can you tell that I am trying to put off drinking it?

It smells unmistakeably of Shiso too. To try and convey that imagine some nettles, cucumbers and plums left to sit in a box together. Shiso is almost like that.

And it tastes, entirely of Shiso. The flavour is pure Shiso to the extent that it isn't even sweet. It even makes the roof of your mouth tingle in the same way Shiso does.

I'm not certain that is a good ambition for a soft drink to aim for though. The flavour is nice enough but it distinctly savoury and the notion of a savoury drink is more than a little bit off putting. Even most beers are sweeter than this.

Ultimately I don't think it works. The taste isn't bad as such but it is so odd that is pretty much impossible to drink a whole bottle of the stuff.

No, I think I shall be sticking with my Pocari Sweat thank you very much.

Sod Japan, Talk About Sweets Some More

Everyone that has commented on this site, sent me e-mail or spoken to me about in person likes one feature of Mummy boon above all the others.

Well never let it be said that I am above a little bit of pandering to my audience so here is more of what you people apparently like.

Kit-Kat Reviews



First up is a selection of mini Kit-Kats comprised of ordinary ones (and yes, I have forgotten what they taste like) and some rose flavoured entries. Just in time for, oh wait, Mother’s Day was a while ago wasn’t it?

Oh well I guess June is the time roses bloom in Japan so that must be the connection. Unless I’m making the mistake of trying to understand Japan again.

The packaging on the bag itself is brilliantly, wonderfully girly. Not only are there 3 pink roses and a pink rose petal motif there is also swirly writing and a faux decorative label trying to make it look like a hand made present.

It also features a really baffling note proclaiming it to be a “Kit Kat Limited Edition.”
I have been doing this for a while now and I can reliably inform you that all the Kit-Kats I review on this site are limited editions. And usually they are not only released for a limited time but they are only released in limited areas/stores to boot. So what on earth is so special about these rose ones? The mind boggles at what incredible treasure Kit-Kat must have produced here to warrant such a label.

The packaging on the individual Kat (I have decided from now on this is how we’re going to refer to the singular, okay!) doesn’t disappoint either. It is bright pink and has a rose motif. Frankly if it had been anything else I would have felt betrayed.

Sadly the chocolate itself is a normal colour and not pink in the slightest. Still that tends to bode well as far as the flavour is concerned; all of the better flavours have been in the standard colours.

So how does the flavour stack up?

Well, whilst it definitely tastes differently to a normal Kit-Kat sadly I can’t really detect flavour other than chocolate. The rose element is so slight that all it really serves to do is put a slightly different edge on the chocolate. Less blandly sweet and just a bit more complicated. It works and it does taste nice but the majority of the roses in the product seem to have wound up on the packaging rather than in the biscuit.



Next up we have some Lemon Vinegar.

Hold up, vinegar?

On a biscuit!
……for the first time ever I am having second thoughts about actually eating one of these. Chocolate and vinegar is not an obvious match and surely the lemon is only going to make it even more sour and confused.

Ah I get it. Apparently lemon vinegar is some kind of delicious refreshing soft drink, at least that’s what the packaging seems to suggest. Hold on let me Google that for a moment.

Most of the results appear to be home making websites advocating how you can use lemon vinegar as a substitute cleaning substance.

Well that is very reassuring. New Kit-Kat substitute bleach flavour! Yum, it’s poison-licious.

The packet doesn’t help either. It is white and yellow. Those are the colours of bottles of bleach!

Oh thank god it is a normal chocolate colour.

And it tastes really very lemony. In fact as chocolate goes this is easily the lemoniest I have ever had. And it isn’t an after taste or a suggestion it is a big lemon hit. In fact it may be a little bit too lemony actually. The taste does tend to linger somewhat. In fact quite a lot. Wow, maybe a bit less lemony next time Nestle.

I am very glad to report that it also tastes not in the slightest bit like vinegar. Or bleach.

Usually I question what the purpose of these really strongly flavoured Kit-Kats is but this time nestle has seen fit to give me some idea. See that little chef’s hat in the top right corner. That is promising that these Kit-Kats are perfect for use in cooking, specifically for spicing up a kind of yoghurty/pudding thing. There is more info at http://cookpad.com/kitkat for anyone who is interested.



Since the lemon vinegar ones were not so bad I was a bit more comfortable trying out some of the apple vinegar ones. Particularly when after a Google search I discovered that apple vinegar is really a kind of traditional cider. I like cider and more Kit-Kats flavoured after booze would suit me down to a tee.

The packet was nice and friendly too, particularly the individual wrapper which is in pleasingly retro colours that are also the colour of apples. Offset with lovely retro typography it was all very welcoming and wholesome. I was, dare I say it, excited to try my new Kit-Kat.

Oh hell the chocolate is cream coloured. That is never a good sign.

Before I even bit into it I was overpowered by apples. This thing smells really, really strongly of apples. In fact the scent is the strongest fruit scent of any Kit-Kat since the watermelon ones. I don’t have any watermelon Kit-Kats to hand right now but I suspect the apple vinegar Kit-Kats smell more strongly of apples than the watermelon Kit-Kats smell of watermelons.

….

Do you ever write something that causes you to consider what exactly it is that you’re doing with your life?

Anyway, how do they taste?
Bloody marvellous!

There is very little recognisably Kit-Kat here. It is less sweet than Nestlé’s usual offerings and the chocolate seems creamier and not quite as cheap. IT is also really, really powerfully appley. The lemon vinegar Kit-Kats have nothing on the apple vinegar for fruity taste. These things are kings of fruity tastes. The high lords of apple flavour.

Nestle have produced a few apple Kit-Kats before now but this one wins hand down. They simply haven’t made anything that tastes this much like an apple before. And the whole line should switch to this kind of chocolate. I have no idea what they changed but it just seems slightly creamier and has a much better mouth feel.

Absolutely delicious.

There is a recipe included with these too, for a kind of apple cinnamon topping for ice-cream. I may jut have to try that and let you know how it fares.

I can now also report that the after taste is very similar to a milkshake. Not a real milkshake but a McDonalds or Burger King milkshake. Since I swore off fast food these are the things I crave most in the entire world that I cannot have. I may be trying to manufacture my apple vinegar Kit-Kats into some kind of apple vinegar Kit-Kat milkshake.

And then I can die happy.



Moving on, we have cherry “through the break”. First a note about the packaging; which is bloody horrible.

Look at the individual Kat’s wrapper! That is boring as hell, a pink wrapper with some men and “through the break” written on it.

The main wrapper doesn’t fare much better. It is overly crowded with tiny text in a horrible font and far too busy. That tiny space has to cram in the Kit-Kat logo, some headphones, the “through the break” logo, a picture of some guys, a visualisation of the Kit-Kat inside and a picture of a cherry in addition to tons of text. It is all horribly composed and far too busy. Epic fail Kit-Kat.

All the text is because it is some kind of tie-in/competition running in conjunction with a DJ and a record label. There is a code inside that one can enter to possibly win…something. Sadly my Japanese skills don’t stretch to finding out if I have won anything.

And the chocolate is pink, not a good sign.

Ahhh this is more like it Kit-Kat. The first taste is waxy and bland. There is only a very slight cherry flavour detectable. The mouth feel is horrible due to sub-par chocolate. That is the Kit-Kat we have all come to know and love here.

So we’re on firmer ground but overall this isn’t actually that bad. If you roll the Kit-Kat around your mouth then cherry notes come through really strongly at the back of the mouth. Nice sour cherry notes too. Overall though it is much more like cherry yoghurt, in that it is kind of bland and creamy with subtle cherry notes, than it is like a proper cherry. Still, I imagine that will pair quite nicely with a cup of tea. Overall then a not bad but dragged down by some simply horrible design.

Finally I have saved the best for last.

Feast your eyes on…



Ramune Kit-Kats!

I have talked briefly about ramune before on this site. For those not in the know, briefly, it is a kind of Japanese lemonade that tastes a lot like sprite. However it comes in a special bottle with a marble in the top. In Japan it has strong associations with summers, festivals, childhood and also the post-war period when it was invented.

The important thing to take away from all that is that basically Nestle have made sprite flavoured Kit-Kats!

I invited you to feast your eyes and feast is the right word because just look at that packaging. That is lovely. The lovely retro colours, the retro dot-matrix printing style and even a retro font just all scream post-war at me. The dots also serve to evoke bubbles and fizziness as much as they do a retro aesthetic. It is really eye-catching, really novel and really, well retro. I know I am abusing the word but I really do like this bag. How can one company produce something so spot on for a product and also something as fantastically ugly as the cherry wrapper.

The Kat’s individual wrapper is a nice touch too with little fizzy bubbles.

Hold on, you don’t think they actually are fizzy do you?

I mean it is ramune flavour, all bets are off here. Fruit yes, cakes or sweets yes, even soy sauce but a fizzy drink? This is new territory for Kit-Kat and I am both a little bit excited and a lot scared.

Oh god! The chocolate is blue. Not a good sign.

I don’t believe it.

I really don’t believe it.

They actually are fizzy!

And it works!

The first thing that hits you is the smell. The smell, sadly, is not of ramune at all but of “bubblegum.” By which I mean bubblegum the flavour, the mysterious flavour drinks were sometimes given when you were a kid which always prompted the existential debate of how something could be bubblegum flavoured when bubblegum has many flavours. Well it smells like that.

But it tastes exactly like ramune. Exactly, to a scary degree. I just tested it with some ramune and there is no difference in flavour.

And they’re fizzy! I suspect this is due to the presence of sherbet in the chocolate. They’re only mildly fizzy but all the same they are fizzy Kit-Kats.

This is going to be my baby cousins’ Christmas present this year. No kid can possibly resist fizzy Kit-Kats.

I can’t really objectively rate these because the novelty is so great that it becomes impossible to get past it. Everyone needs to try these because they are that damn strange.

They are also surprisingly more-ish. And that is coming from a man who just ate 5 Kit-Kats.

100th post!

100 posts everyone.

I could have whipped up some kind of impressive new banner or some sort of retrospective on the nearly 2 years that Mummyboon has been up and running but i thought that would have been boring and self congratulatory.

Instead let's talk about the one thing that really defines this site.

KIT-KATS!!!



3 new flavours to discuss today.

Tiramisu flavour

Picked up in Kyoto at the weekend as part of a trip that will definitely make it to this site eventually. Probably on Thursday.

The packaging is unusual in that it is a single regular sized finger. Usually when nestle makes a single fingered kit-kat it is slightly thicker than a regular finger. Frankly I feel that something has gone very, deeply wrong with the world of kit-kats when a regular sized single finger is considered an acceptable product. We need to be very careful here people. Give em an inch and they'll take a mile. First it was the special flavours but soon all kit-kats will be sold purely as single fingers and then civilization as we now it will collapse in an apocalypse fueled by insufficient quantities of biscuit.


.... I may have drifted a bit there.

Anyway, not been a big fan of tiramisu in general and coffee flavoured chocolate even less so I was not really looking forward to sampling the new tiramisu kit kat.

And it tastes...

Actually it tastes kind of bland at first. The initial bites are pretty tasteless, sweet but with no definite flavours. The after taste has a very strong coffee note that is very pleasant and surprisingly complex. I would even go so far as to say that it tastes of tiramisu. But it is overpowered by the sweetness. In fact this may be the sweetest kit-kat I have ever eaten.

I understand why it is packaged as a single finger now. It is so sweet that I am struggling to finish even one finger. 2 fingers would be such concentrated sweetness that it may prevent my tongue from ever tasting anything ever again.

Maccha Tiramisu

Matcha (spelled Maccha for some reason on this packet) is the strongest and bitterest of all Japanese green teas. It is never served as leaves but rather made into a powder of such an emerald hue that it calls to mind the mutagenetic ooze that turned the teenage mutant ninja turtles from ordinary reptiles into fighting ninja teens.

It is also bloody awful. Well that isn't really fair but it is terribly, terribly bitter. Much bitterer than the strongest espresso I have ever had. For this reason the Japanese usually eat a very sweet tasting snack with the tea to cut the strong flavour. Traditionally this was a daifuku, dango or wagashi but nowadays it commonly can be a kit-kat. A matcha flavoured kit-kat then completely defeats the purpose of a kit-kat.

And it is also another example of this appalling new packaging strategy. Blegh!

So, how does it taste...?

Well, like the other tiramisu offering the first bite is pretty bland and the real flavour is in the after taste. Again the after taste is nicely complex and really evokes the flavour it is meant to. Pleasantly it is significantly milder than the other tiramisu and nowhere near as sweet. Whether this is because it has less sugar or because the matcha flavour somehow cuts the sweet notes I do not know but overall I'd say this is one of nestle's better efforts.

Still annoyed about the packaging though.



Cookie Kit-Kat

One of the odder new varieties to burst onto the scene recently is the cookie kit-kat.

Whilst most varieties only change the chocolate coating and leave the wafer intact the cookie kit-kat has a different strategy. It inserts a layer of oreo like biscuit between the top layer of wafer and the chocolate.

The result...?

Pure bliss.

The oreo-esque biscuit has a much richer and bitterer chocolate flavour than the cheap nestle chocolate on the outside (or an oreo for that matter). The clash of the three different textures and the two different chocolate flavours is exciting, interesting (for your tongue at least, which needs stimulation y'know) and pure joyful chocolate ecstasy.

It's a subtle one. It's charms are not obvious but it is a massive improvement on the standard model without any of the usual drawbacks.

AND... it is one of the more common "premium" line that are slightly thicker than a regular finger and thus not an abomination unto the chocolately god "avabrew" like these horrible single finger efforts.