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.

Nestle are trying to kill me.

Nestle have evidently cottoned onto the fact that there is somebody out there trying to eat and review every kind of Kit-Kat they make and have decided to try and kill me because just recently they have swamped the aisles with a huge variety of different flavours. To that end in today’s post I’m going to attempt to eat and review no less than 9 different Kit-Kats!!

Umeshu Soda



First up is actually a variety I forgot to review during the last Kit-Kat update; umeshu and soda. It has been sitting in my cupboard since late summer and apparently goes off this month so it may not be a fair trial.

Umeshu is a kind of very sweet and sticky liqueur made from Japanese apricots. The apricots themselves are very bitter but when mixed with alcohol and sugar they make a very strong and very sweet drink. When mixed again with soda you get a delightfully refreshing summer cocktail.

The packaging is pretty good. You get a nice and inviting looking umeshu soda glass, some dots which tie in with the floating ume design and suggest fizziness and a colour scheme which both matches the colours of the drink and looks suitably fresh and refreshing.



The packaging on the individual Kat is less impressive but is fine. Again the colours match the desired flavour well and the bubble design suggests fizziness.

However the problems begin when we get to the Kat itself. Bright green chocolate and a smell that is more strongly reminiscent of a McDonald’s milkshake than any other previous Kit-Kat. Both of these factors bode poorly for this Kat’s taste.

Disappointingly the first taste doesn’t. It is completely and totally bland. I may as well be eating thin air. The texture is grim and soapy with none of the fizz promised by the packaging and the first notes that hit aren’t of anything.

The only real presence of flavour is some generic tanginess that hits your mouth after you’ve chewed it for awhile. These aren’t especially reminiscent of ume but they are at least lively and a bit different from Kit-Kat’s standard fair.

The aftertaste though is really soapy. In fact it tastes more like soap than it does anything it is advertised to taste like.

All in all it’s like eating a bar of crunchy, tangy soap. A total failure.

Ginger Ale



Another drink flavoured Kit-Kat marketed with a picture of a fizzy and refreshingly inviting looking drink. The packaging on this one is superb. The colour choice is excellent for a ginger ale and evokes the label of a Canada dry bottle. The dark green looks classy and refined whilst the white looks fresh and inviting. Finally the actual packet has a photo print of ginger ale as the dominant colour. This is a new technique for Kit-Kat but it works very well. It looks much more stylish, classy and sophisticated than their packaging usually does. The only downside is that with the white on top and the photo print ginger ale it does look a little bit like a glass of beer.



The wrapping on the Kat isn’t a let down either. Cream and dark green are nice contrasting colours and again connote class and sophistication. They’re the colours of golf bars, of airport lounges, of cruise decks.

Sadly we’ve got colours chocolate again which always bodes poorly but we’ve also got a massive hit of ginger smell rather than the usual milkshakey odour. There’s also a faint sour or lemony element to the bouquet.

The chocolate is impressively gingery right from the first bite and what’s more has really strong tangy notes to it. I’m not really a fan of ginger ale and can’t comment on how well it emulates it but it does make for a nice biscuit. There are two strongly contrasting flavours happening in your mouth at once. Partly it feels like eating a ginger biscuit and is rich and mellow like a proper ginger nut is, but at the same time there are really strong tangy flavours like sucking a lemon. They contrast well and this is probably one of the more sophisticated and complex tasting Kit-Kat’s I’ve tried. A definite biscuit for grown ups; from the packaging, to the taste, to the smell and on.

The aftertaste is a little too tart but that just means it goes well with a cup of tea which cuts the aftertaste whilst the sweet and mellow Kit-Kat cuts the bitterness of the tea.

A hit from nestle here.

Milk Coffee



Another drink and a flavour that I’ve tried variations of before. This time the milk content is advertised quite prominently so I’m expecting it to be distinctly lactose-y.

Again, and annoyingly, I can’t really fault the packaging. The coffee looks fine (although not that milky) and the choice of colours is sound. Cream and pink contrast well together and are attractive to look at. The field of flowers is a nice touch and adds some interest to the design. The handwritten note giving the flavour is perhaps a touch to twee but it has a purpose which is revealed on the back of the packet.

Yes, this Kit-Kat isn’t intended to be bought and eaten, it is intended to be bought and given as a present. As such nestle have included a little space on the back to write a message.




Why would you give a Kit-Kat as a present? Well it is coming up to exam/graduation season in Japan now and people often give kit-Kats to students that are taking their exams. This is because Kit-Kat sounds like kitto katsu a Japanese expression meaning “you will surely win.”

In fact you can buy a special variety of Kit-Kat at the post office which can be addressed, stamped and mailed directly without an envelope to whomever you wish to give luck to.

The presence of pink and the use of sakura flowers are also symbols of good luck in Japan and the handwritten note is obviously tying in to the handwritten message on the back.



The individual Kat is more of the same but wisely tones down the flower pattern a little.

Sadly we have more coloured chocolate and our old friend the milkshake smell returns the minute you open up the wrapper. Also the chocolate is practically white with only the faintest whiff of brown to it. If someone served you a coffee this colour you would be forgiven for thinking it was simply some old cream in a bad light.

There is something of a smell that could be described, charitably, as coffee but it is more reminiscent of a room in which coffee was once stored many years ago or a chestnut. I’m not sure.

It’s also got really hard and firm chocolate for some reason.

Well in its defence it does taste of coffee right from the off. Coffee made with seven sugars though and a pint of milk. It doesn’t taste soapy and it doesn’t taste of anything but coffee but it is really, horribly, massively sweet. Any bitterness or complexity the coffee may have imparted is totally drowned out by the sweet. In fact it doesn’t taste of sugar at all but artificial sweetener. It leaves the same horrible chemical aftertaste in your mouth and has the same problem of overwhelming every taste bud you own at once.

This is a really sweet biscuit.

In fact too sweet because I couldn’t even finish it. In stead its staring at me, unloved, unwanted and uneaten.

Meanwhile my mouth tastes like I mainlined splenda.

Blegh!

I need a drink.





Sparkling Strawberry



I’ve passed up strawberry Kit-Kat’s on this site before because a) you can get them in the U.K. and b) they aren’t a limited edition flavour here. Briefly they’re like sweeter crappy ordinary Kit-Kat’s.

Sparkling Strawberry though is a limited edition and like the milk coffee ties into the good luck aspect of Kit-Kat. The chocolate is pink, strawberries are pink and associated with this time of year and pink is lucky. So this must be a super lucky Kit-Kat.

The packaging is very obvious but mostly fine. There are strawberries, they sparkle, the packaging is pink and sparkly; everything fits the overall theme and the name. It looks like an eyesore and the strawberries look plastic but they wanted to make a pink Kit-Kat and by god did they succeed. Also the sparkles look fizzy and if this is a fizzy Kit-Kat it might be nice because I really enjoyed the last fizzy Kit-Kat they released.

However the packaging is also being brutally honest with us. It shows us a picture of the Kit-Kat and lets us know up front that we’re dealing with coloured chocolate so it will be soapy, milkshakey and crap. I applaud their honesty but it doesn’t make me want to eat it.



The packaging on the inner Kit-Kat is a big step up. The pink is a much nicer colour, the gold is a striking combo with it and there are no sparkles or plastic strawberries. Instead we get the nice subdued bubble design from the umeshu. This looks grown up and swanky and cool. Much better then the glitter mess on the packet.

Smell wise it is in every way shape and form a strawberry milkshake. Although you can kind of smell the sherbet too which takes the edge off. And again the chocolate is unusually hard.

Surprisingly I liked this. The strawberry flavour is nice and strong. It isn’t soapy and it tastes of strawberries both on the first bite and in the aftertaste. It’s appropriately tangy for a strawberry flavour and whilst it is sweet it isn’t too sweet.

The sherbet is very subdued and not very noticeable, especially compared to the ramune flavour but it is present and is quite nice. It is mostly noticeable in the aftertaste and largely serves to spoil it and make it taste a bit more of chemicals.

So the strawberry side is better than I expected but the sparkling aspect is poorly implemented and a bit disappointing.

Raspberry and Passion Fruit



This is another package with a space on the back for a message. Only this time instead of exams this Kit-Kat is for Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure if most people I know would appreciate a Kit-Kat for Valentine’s Day but it might go over well with me.

Accordingly we get loads of hearts plastered everywhere in addition to the obvious implications of “passion fruit.”

Although the hearts are a bit gaudy I quite like the packaging here. The colour schemes are classy, brown and pink/purple are good contrasting colours and, dare I say it, a little sexy. It’s certainly more sophisticated than the usual colours. The abstract passion fruits are a nice touch too and give it a sort of funky cosmopolitan feel.



The interior packaging is even stronger with predominant brown and a few hearts that make the hearts “pop” much better visually.

And there are even small hearts on the inside of the packet itself.



Hallelujah and praise the god of Kit-Kat’s this one has normal coloured chocolate. In fact it’s much darker than regular Kit-Kat chocolate. The smell is amazing too; although not too strongly reminiscent of either fruit it does smell pleasant, like a high quality chocolate selection.

Again the chocolate seems much harder than usual. I think maybe they changed formulation recently.

Oh, now that is nice.

Well for starters the chocolate is brilliant. A massive step up from Kit-Kat’s usual offering. It has a much more complex taste, is bitterer, chocolatier and just better in every way. It tastes and even feels like a proper chocolate bar. It is just the right amount of sweetness (i.e. slightly bitter) and even has the slight grittiness you get with proper dark chocolate. This is seriously good chocolate.

But the filling just puts it one step above. It doesn’t hit you at first but once you start to chew the raspberry and passion fruit notes are really strong and clear. They’re fruity, sweet, slightly tangy and delicious. They contrast with the bitter chocolate remarkably well. You whole mouth is stimulated. The combo is neither too sweet nor too bitter but just perfect.

And it leaves a wonderfully fruity aftertaste, almost like a liqueur.

Eating this isn’t like eating a Kit-Kat at all. It’s like eating a proper chocolate from a tray or selection of chocolates only with a slight crunchy texture to it too. This is seriously good stuff. In fact it is probably my new favourite Kit-Kat flavour and is easily ranked amongst the best they have ever produced.

Alright I take it back; this would be a good Valentine’s present.

Maple


A tie in to the Vancouver Winter Olympics gives us new maple flavour. I love maple flavoured things and usually the toffee/caramel/sweet potato group of kit-Kat’s are among the better ones so my hopes are high for this one.

The packaging is a bit of a disaster all told. I realise that it is mainly white to create a link to snow and that the medal and coloured edges are also tie-ins to the Olympics but the effect they create is to make it look like a supermarket’s own brand product. White isn’t the colour of maple, oranges, browns and reds are and whilst we get some orange it is drowned in white that just looks cheap. The maple jug is squeezed off to one side too much and looks small and ineffectual. Plus we get some brutal truth that yes; this is a coloured chocolate occasion. I’m not impressed.



The packet on the individual Kat is better but still bad. We’ve toned down the multicoloured edges but it’s still too white, too dull and too cheap looking.

It does smell of maple, and quite nice too, so maybe it’ll be okay.

Once again the chocolate is really hard for some reason.

This is actually pretty good. The initial taste is mostly sweet and a bit bland but once you start to chew the maple taste comes through very strongly. It is a nice clear maple with all the complex toffee, flower and bitter notes that would suggest but not too sweet. The aftertaste is, if anything, even better than the actual biscuit and is identical to eating any kind of maple cookie.

Unusually for Kit-Kat in Japan I can see this working really well with a cup of tea. Not amazing but a definite hit.

Roasted Soybean Kit Kat Bar



Yes, Kit-Kat chunky does exist in Japan but they call it Kit-Kat Bar. This is the first time I have seen a flavoured version of the Kit-Kat bar so it’s the first time it has shown up on this site.

Setsubun, however, has shown up before on this site. It is a Japanese festival where children throw roasted soybeans at their father, dressed as an Oni (ogre) and chase him out of the house to chase out bad luck. Then, everyone eats 1 roasted soybean per year they’ve been alive plus another for good luck. I’ve done this tradition a few times and can inform you that roasted soybeans are horrible. They are small, flavourless things with a hard horrible texture. Why anyone would willingly eat them escapes me.

So Nestle produced a Kit-Kat with a filling made of them. Hurray!

The packet is naff. It looks like an ordinary bar only with a cheap rubbish white patch and a picture of an Oni. The Oni is fine and I guess they need the white patch to make his face stand out against the background but it is still a boring uninspired design.

The chocolate is the standard Kit-Kat stuff (i.e. crap) but the smell is unique and frankly awful. I know it’s soybeans but there is a second, more horrible note underpinning the beans. Something akin to wet fart. It really is disgusting.

The bar itself tastes disgusting. It’s utterly revolting. The chocolate is innocuous but the bean filling tastes like soggy grass. It’s just horrible. It’s actually probably closest to eating raw dried pasta mixed in with some muesli. I don’t really have the vocabulary to describe it because it doesn’t taste like food so much as it does animal feed.

I’d describe the aftertaste but I had to wash my mouth out immediately in order to focus on writing that paragraph so I have no idea what the aftertaste is. And I refuse to eat any more of it.

Cantaloupe Melon




The last two Kit-Kat’s I’m going to feature are special flavours only available in Hokkaido. Fran and I just came back from a trip there and I’ll be telling you all about it in the next blog post.

Hokkaido is famous for farming and the wide variety of delicious fresh foods available there. In particular because it has a more temperate climate it produces a lot of food not grown elsewhere in Japan.

One of these famous foods is cantaloupe, but when melons aren’t in season Nestle has you covered for souvenirs with melon flavoured Kit-Kat.



The packaging is quite well done with 2 slices of really delicious looking melon and a picture of the fields of Hokkaido. Oh and this is one of those Kit-Kat packages that can be posted. In effect it is a postcard and souvenir in one.



The package on the Kat is completely naff. It’s green, has a picture of a melon and a picture of Hokkaido. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with it but it is dull and uninspired. Could do better.

Hooray, proper chocolate colours and the smell is promising too. It is distinctly identifiable as melon, an even as cantaloupe.

Oh and the chocolate is the usual texture.

This is a great Kit-Kat. The melon flavour is distinct and immediate and complements the chocolate very well. The chocolate is rich and the melon is sweet and a little bit tart. The sweetness is just right. It’s surprisingly fruity and surprisingly accurate for a fruit flavoured Kit-Kat which usually tend to be a bit sweet and soapy. This is probably the freshest tasting Kit-Kat I’ve enjoyed, for want of a better word.

The aftertaste isn’t really. It kind of fades from your taste buds almost immediately which makes it surprisingly moreish.

A well balanced and very good Kit-Kat.

Corn



Yes, corn.

Hokkaido, amongst many foods, is also famous for corn.

So, obviously Nestle decided to make a corn Kit-Kat. I eagerly await the potato, crab, lamb, beer and butter flavoured Kit-Kats.

Actually I would quite like the beer one.

So corn. Well, I guess it is sweet. And I did eat a carrot Kit-Kat once. But carrots are used in cakes and corn, in so far as I know, is not.



The package is in the same format as the cantaloupe, picture of Hokkaido farms, picture of corn and space to post it on the back. However they swapped the delicious looking photo print of a melon for a kind of children’s book illustration style drawing of some ears of corn. I suspect that some real corn would look off putting whereas the picture seems more abstract and possibly sweeter? Frankly it doesn’t really make me want to eat it except out of immense curiosity.

Accursed curiosity, if only I could shake it and my crippling OCD I could stop wasting hours of my life describing Kit-Kat’s.

Oh well, write what you know. And I know all about OCD and incurable curiosity.

The packet of the individual Kat has all the same problems as the cantaloupe, it’s dull and unimaginative. I’ll grant them that it’s a nice colour though.

The colour of the kit-Kat is yellow. Bright, bright yellow. Corn yellow in fact. I haven’t seen a Kit-Kat emulate the colour of its flavour so effectively since, well, chocolate really.

And the smell is strongly, clearly, unmistakeably corn. It is the corniest smelling thing since corn. Cornflakes don’t smell this strongly of corn. Cheap sweet corn doesn’t smell this strongly of corn.

I wasn’t sure before I opened it but after 8 Kit-Kats that corn smell is actually starting to make me feel a bit sick. For the first time doing this I held it up to my mouth and snatched it away. I really don’t want to eat this.

But you bastards want me to don’t you.

Fine.

It’s kind of horrible.

I mean, its sweet and actually not too sweet, I much prefer it to the milk coffee for example. And it has some nice complex caramel notes which are usually really good in a Kit-Kat. Having eaten corn you’d expect both of those things. At least half my mouth was really happy.

But then, the rest of it just tastes really strongly of corn. And even butter a little bit. It’s not bad at all but it seems to clash horribly with every other flavour going on. A disconnect happens in your brain between the parts that taste nice and the parts that really, really don’t.

And it gets worse the more you eat of it. At first it’s sweet and delicious but as you chew it gets cornier and cornier and cornier. And the aftertaste is disgusting, like soap and chemicals and corn.

I mean, I like corn just fine but for some reason I really can’t get into this. It’s foul!

No, nice try nestle and I like your vision but corn and chocolate are two things that should never go together.

Now get to work on that Sapporo beer flavour.

Random Festivals are Fun and Delicious.

Japanese schools seem to spend an inordinate amount of time doing things which gave nothing to do with lessons or education at all. I could go on to describe how this is a feature of the Japanese education system and helps to instil a strong sense of community, culture and group think in Japanese students but frankly I’ve already discussed that on this blog.

Anyway the upshot is that working in a Japanese school means that sometimes all the classes get cancelled so we can all do something cool.

As was the case last Friday when school was cancelled and instead we all played games and ate soup. Yay!

Around this time of year there are a few traditional cultural activities. I have done one or some of these at both my previous schools but at Iwaoka they decided to roll them all together into one big day of Japanese winter fun.

The first of these is that at pretty much every school in Japan the kids will play karuta. Usually only the first graders will play but at Iwaoka the entire school shuffled into the freezing cold gym to sit on the floor and play some cards.

Karuta is just the Japanese word for cards but there is a specific card game by that name too. Basically it is snap but rather than trying to match a card your opponent has just revealed you instead listen to what a speaker is saying and try and find the card that matches. I use this all the time in my lessons (Mr. Adam says elephant and all the kids try and grab the elephant card at once for example) but Japanese people do it for fun too.

This particular karuta game though is very special. A speaker reads out the first part of a poem and students have to find the end of the poem on about 100 cards in front of them.

The game requires not only for students to have memorised 100 poems but to be able to listen, come up with the next part, scan for it and move at lightning quick pace.

Consequently even though the cards were printed in Japanese which I could read, the double disadvantage of not knowing any of the poems and having to read in a second language meant that I couldn’t capture a single card in my brief attempt at playing. So instead I mooched about for a bit, had a chat and tried to stay close to the enormous space heaters for fear of developing hypothermia.

The kids got really into it though. Its incredible how much they can memorise and how quick they are.

Seeing that I was not exactly thrilled to spend hours watching my kids play a card game I didn’t understand at all one of my teachers seized me and took me outside.

Where a Mochizuki was occurring.

Mochizuki, or making rice cakes, is a past time for communities in winter in Japan. It is usually done either just before or just after the New Year. Mochi is a kind of very sticky rice cake. Imagine PVA glue. Remember when you were a kid and you’d leave PVA glue all over the outside of the bottle and it would set into a hard rubbery substance? Well just before it set when it was still kind of stretchy, that is the consistency of mochi. That or play-do which is going stale but isn’t quite there yet. It is actually much nicer than I make it sound but I don’t quite know what is appealing about it. The taste is just white rice and the texture is not very pleasant and a bugger to eat. I think it might be that it provides a comforting feeling. It is, to use an expression of my mother’s, food that sticks to your sides. Like dumplings, or a sticky toffee pudding or a doughy pie. Your stomach just feels really full but in a pleasant way.

I don’t know why this time of year is associated with mochi but I suspect that in olden days it was a good way to turn rice from the harvest into something that would store better. Less surface area means it is less susceptible to mold and any rat trying to eat mochi would soon choke to death or drown. It could also be improvised as fly paper or to fill up the cracks in draughty farm houses. In fact, it would probably make a very good insulation, potentially even better than it would a food.

To make mochi first you boil lots of rice without washing it so there is a ton of starch.

Then you heat up a stone bowl using hot water until it is red hot so the rice will stay warm in it.

Then you grind the rice using a big mallet until the shape of all the individual grains is blurred and it looks like a big lump.

Then the important part, one person folds the mochi into the middle of the bowl whilst another hits it with a whopping great big mallet.

Observe this video of just that.




You need skill, speed, timing and trust to avoid getting your hand smashed in whereas the other bloke just needs tireless muscles and a penchant for the repetitive.

This is the second time I have made mochi but the first time I have made it whilst elderly Japanese men criticised my technique. Eventually they so tired of me doing it “wrong” that they stepped in and freed my cold and aching arms from anymore pounding.

I should probably feel ashamed that a tiny old man took over for my strapping young self but I am not because I know the secret of elderly Japanese people. They are not made of flesh and bone but stone and wood. Their skin is aged teak and their bones are granite. Old Japanese people are indestructible. When the apocalypse comes it will be them and the cockroaches.

Once the karuta game was finished the students came outside to watch a massive bonfire.

This bonfire had been assembled the day before of bamboo and various decorations left over from the New Year. New Year decorations have to be burned before the next New Year or else they will become evil spirits, or yokai.

There are plenty of yokai stories of possessed items. Most famously an umbrella with a single eyeball and a man’s leg instead of handle. When you abandon an umbrella in Japan it will turn into a monster and seek revenge. The same goes for unwanted decorations so instead they get burnt.

We all watched as the school principle went inside the fire holding a flaming torch (health and safety existeth notteth in Japan) and then came out again and lit it more safely from the back.

It went up like a shot. Within barely 30 seconds of lighting it there was a hole in the top and a stream of fire issuing forth. It looked like a volcano.

And the noise was incredibly. Presumably because bamboo is a grass and full of water deposits every time one of these pockets superheated and turned to steam it went off with a massive bang. It was like standing in the middle of a gunfight, or a firework show. I have never heard such a violent fire.

Before too long a small twister had formed above the hole and bamboo ash was being strewn wildly across the playing field, in our hair, on our clothes and basically everywhere. It was some sort of ash…like snow.

Hmmm, catchy name that. Would make a good song title.



All in all it took about 15 minutes for the enormous bonfire ( a good 20ft high) to be completely burned to a crisp.



Before the fire was over my students did various demonstrations to their classmates, the teachers, the local people and some school kids from the nearby primary school which had come to visit and watch the show.

Japanese primary school kids are absolutely adorable. Not only are they much cuter than western kids but this natural cuteness is amplified by the matching hats they are all made to wear when they go on trips. Me and most of my female students were in paroxysms of kawaii watching them.

Sadly I can’t show you the videos I took of the presentations for legal reasons. But they included live kanji painting and taiko drumming. Impressive taiko drumming too. I didn’t even know we had a club! They kept that one quiet.

Eventually everyone was released to go do the most important part of the day. Eat ozouni!

Ozouni is a kind of soup whose main ingredients are miso (a salty paste derived from soy and which turns into a soup when mixed with water) and mochi along with anything else you fancy putting in it. Ozouni is associated with New Year’s where everyone eats some for luck. I had eaten some at Fran’s relative’s house this year and the year before Fran made some for just the two of us. It is true comfort food. Warm, filling, sticky and made with all your favourite things.

Together we gobbled multiple bowls of the stuff graciously prepared by local volunteers. I stopped at two but some of my kids ate as many as five bowls! Japanese people can really eat when they put their minds to it.

There was also kinako ( a kind of sweet flour derived from, guess what, soy) flavoured mochi and mochi floating in a soup of red bean paste. I’ve had both of these before and find them too sweet for words. Except possibly words like coma, diabetes, help and blegh! They’re not horrible but they’re so ridiculously sweet so may as well just mainline sugar.

Finally two primary school kids were hauled up to give a speech thanking us all. It was, without hyperbole, the single cutest thing I have ever seen in my life. Any attempt to describe it properly will just end up with me degenerating into baby talk and saying things like “wook ad da widdle hats isn’t it cutes, isn’t it cutes??!” which frankly, nobody wants to see.

And that, bar an assembly, was that.

You’ve got to love Japanese schools sometimes.

New Year, New Mummyboon

I’m back.

After a sizeable absence for Christmas, New Years and getting back into the swing of things at work I have returned to the interwebs to resume blogging duties.

I can’t promise that this year is going to be much better than last year in terms of updates. The plan is to have a definite Tuesday update every week without fail and try and squeeze in some smaller updates on other week days but we’ll see how that goes.

The frustrating thing is that there really is a lot of stuff I’d love to talk about and get written down for you all but my available time for blogging has dwindled significantly whilst at the same time the length, photo content, quality of videos, etc have all grown in size and complexity. So it takes me much, much longer to get a post up and I have less time to do it in. In that situation less blogging is the result.

Anyway to start us off in the New Year I thought I’d begin by talking about how I ended last year and began this year, at a traditional Japanese New Year’s or Oshogatsu.

Oshogatsu is effectively the Japanese Christmas. Whilst in the west we consider Christmas to be a time for families and New Year’s to be a time for hanging out with friends and getting wasted in Japan New Year’s is the time for families to get together.

Actually Christmas Eve in Japan is usually a time for lovers. Young couples go out on expensive dates and give each other presents before retiring to an, ahem, love hotel.

And since my girlfriend (Fran or Mariko-chan to her Japanese relatives) is half Japanese this year I got to spend a traditional Oshogatsu with her relatives.



I stayed with her older cousin’s family (sorry, no names guys I want to protect their privacy) consisting of him, his wife and their three kids. Fran’s mother is the youngest of five siblings and had Fran very late in life so whilst she is only 23 her oldest cousin is in his mid-forties and most of her other cousins are around that age.

As the oldest male in his generation said cousin is basically the defacto head of the family. Japanese people are very concerned with status, even amongst families, and so this meant as the guy in charge obviously Oshogatsu had to be at his place.

They were tremendously generous people, as pretty much every Japanese person I’ve had the good fortune to befriend has been, and during our stay made us feel more than welcome with copious amounts of food and drink.

In fact often I felt that the vast quantities of food were some kind of challenge, a test of my ability to appreciate Japanese hospitality and cooking. I did very little but eat and drink for the entire time I was there. We would get up in the morning, dress and go downstairs to snuggle under the kotatsu (a kind of table with a heating element underneath to warm your legs) and eat breakfast. Breakfast wasn’t anything vast but it was usually nice and in typical Japanese style consisted of five or six different dishes all eaten at once, including rice, fish and soup. After breakfast some tea would come out and we would snuggle under the kotatsu and talk. Then a snack would emerge and more tea. Shortly after that lunch would be served along with the first booze of the day (beer for me, whiskey and soda for everyone else). Next the television goes on and after a while another snack emerges and yet more beer. Yet by the time dinner rolls around, consisting of some vast feat of 10 or 12 dishes, I was still hungry enough to demolish it. Around about 10 o’clock I would finally emerge from my nice warm kotatsu cocoon and have a wonderful relaxing Japanese bath then bed.

Seriously, eat, eat, eat, drink, drink, drink and then bed. It was almost as if they were scared that if I ever got up at any point I might destroy the house or something so they needed to keep me constantly fed and sedated. Except that everyone else does it too; well, except the poor wife who has to cook everything.

Food culture in Japan is enormous. Anything and everything revolves around food. All seasons and special events are associated with special food. Apologies are made with gifts of food. Dating is primarily accomplished by girls offering boys food and boys then taking girls to restaurants. Workers bond over food. Very few people entertain in their own homes, instead most parties are held in Japanese inns with all you can eat and all you can drink offers. And conversation takes a definite second place at parties to food. People travel principally to eat or buy the food there. I thought Americans loved food and I thought Italians loved food but nobody, nobody has so thoroughly fetishised and idolised food like the Japanese.

I think the best example of this was on the last day of our trip. We visited Fran’s Uncle (who is the actual head of the family but part of a slightly smaller side) whose wife is a fantastic cook. From the moment we arrived she kept bringing out dishes constantly, some leftovers but a few brand new dishes. There was so much food in front of us that we didn’t really make a dent in it despite eating constantly from the moment we arrived. And yet when we were due to leave and get our bus she still insisted on going to the supermarket with us to buy sushi to eat as our supper.

And the beer. I was trying not to get drunk but it is damn near impossible not to. In Japan in a social setting it is considered very rude to pour your own drink. People should offer to pour each others and that way everyone stays topped up and the party stays lubricated.

There are some flaws in this system. In a big party that gets quite raucous your own drink can easily get over looked, especially if you are fairly low in the seniority order (like I, the gaijin). The best tip for that situation is to pour someone else a drink and hope they notice that your glass is empty and return the favour.

The other flaw in that system is that if everyone is topping up your drink it becomes impossible to keep track of how much you have drunk, especially if someone fills your drink without you noticing or without asking. Which Fran’s relatives did to me all the time. Almost the first question I was asked in every household was “what do you drink?” Shortly after that a beer glass would be placed in front of me and it would pretty much be full until the end of the night. I was trying not to get too drink I swear but it is impossible not to drink beer when there is a full glass sitting in front of you.

All of which has made me very thirsty. One moment.

*crack* hisssssss.

Ah… where was I?

So yes. Eat, eat, eat, drink, drink, drink. Any other time left was spent playing with the kids, who were awesome and ridiculously cute. I don’t know what it is about Japanese kids that makes them look so adorable but I want one. Particularly Fran’s baby cousin who wrote Fran a letter when we visited her, one which read;
“Dear Mariko big sister.

I love you.

Let’s play lots!”

Couldn’t you just eat her up with a spoon? It’s just a shame that her brother thought I was scary.

So staying with Japanese people is an Epicurean delight but what about Oshogatsu itself? What are the traditions and ceremonies associated with it?

Well on New Year’s Eve itself there aren’t that many traditions. Most of the focus is on New Year’s Day. This makes a lot of sense to me, for the Japanese the celebration is not so much about the end of the old year as it is the beginning of the new one. Consequently there are a lot of special “firsts” that Japanese people do at this time. The first dream, first visit to a shrine and first meal of the year all have special connotations and traditions attached. Mostly these are based on obscure Japanese word play puns where dreaming about an object that sounds like or has a similar kanji to something good can be lucky i.e. dreaming about Mt Fuji is said to be auspicious.

Other than the first shrine visit the most important of these firsts is the first sunrise of the year. Many Japanese people climb (or these days, drive to the top of) a mountain to get a good view of the first sunrise of the New Year. Fortunately for my abysmal fitness we did not do that.

New Year’s Eve does have some traditions of its own though. A relatively recent one but a popular one is for people to watch Kouhaku Uta Gassen or “Red and White Song Battle” a singing competition where celebrities are organised into teams one red (all female) and one white (all male) who take it in turn to sing songs. At the end a combination of studio judges and a home vote decide which team is the winner.

The show is considered a big honour because of its popular appeal so the top singers and artists in Japan are featured. I’m not madly keen on Japanese music to be honest but stripping away much of the extraneous crap and horrible bubblegum J-Pop and just presenting the cream of the crop has shown me that there are quite a few worthwhile Japanese artists. And my favourite Japanese artist (Angela Aki) did my favourite song of hers, tegami, which was awesome.

Plus the little girl from Ponyo (now two years older so much less cute sadly) did the Ponyo theme. Probably my second favourite Japanese song (and the only Japanese song I know the words to).

Oh and every year a foreign guest is invited onto the show. Anybody have any guesses as to which international singing sensation made it onto Japanese screens this year?

Susan Boyle.

Sadly no clips to show you lot as NHK have ruthlessly excised them from Youtube. That’s a real shame as SMAP’s “tribute” to Michael Jackson really had to be seen to be believed.

The guys won this year but if you ask me the women were robbed. I mean, they had Susan Boyle who is famous for winning singing contests.
Oooooooo, bit of a blow there then Subo.

Another New Year’s Eve tradition is to visit a shrine and hear the monks ring the bell at exactly the stroke of midnight. I did this last year and it was a lot of fun. Although Ikuta Shrine in Kobe was packed all the people's body heat just made it nice and warm. We did shriney things like get our fortunes read, buy decorations, etc. I would have happily done it again but in the words of Fran’s cousin;

“We’re not going because it is too cold.”

Well, you can’t argue with the head of the family. Instead we watched various snowy temples around Japan ring in the New Year through the magic of television.

The final thing to do before the stroke of midnight is to eat soba (buckwheat noodles). I don’t know why, probably for good luck. Still I like soba so I was all in favour of this tradition.

New Year’s Day was a lot more interesting for me and a much more fun experience. Although we didn’t do many of the “firsts” on New Year’s Day itself we were getting ready for a big party, all of Fran’s relatives that lived nearby were coming and the real heart of Japanese New Year was about to begin. Osechi Ryori.

Osechi Ryori is a special meal prepared on or just before New Year’s Day but eaten on the 1st. Traditionally it consists of several beautifully presented dishes stacked in gorgeous boxes. Department stores will make Osechi for you and a box for a family of four can easily run into the many hundreds of pounds. These are massively elaborate and ornate dishes with an insane amount of time and effort put into their preparation.

But we didn’t make any. Why? Let’s ask Fran’s cousin.

“Because nobody likes it.”



Which is true actually. I have had left over Osechi before (most of it is eaten cold) and wasn’t very impressed an opinion apparently shared by most young Japanese. So if the food isn’t especially nice then why make it? Well as ever with the Japanese it is all about puns. Many of the foods in Osechi sound like auspicious or lucky things and so Japanese eat them as a way of summoning good luck. For example;

“Kazunoko (数の子), herring roe. Kazu means "number" and ko means "child". It symbolizes a wish to be gifted with numerous children in the New Year.” Stolen from wikipedia.

We did make some Osechi but very little. We made some edamame, (black soybeans which sound like “health”) some kazunoku, some kamaboko, (fish cake in pink and white colours that are considered festive because they are the colours of the Japanese flag) and some kurikinton (I have no idea but it is bright yellow and sweeter than sugar).



And I say we and not Fran’s cousin’s wife because I helped! I was finally allowed to roam free of my cocoon and actually assist in helping prepare the food I consume. Japanese people are actually always really surprised that I can cook (as a rule, Japanese men cannot and eat out pretty much constantly until they marry) to the extent that I have had fawning admiration for a cheese sandwich I prepared. Consequently my beautifully made and presented Inarizushi (sushi rice in a sweet tofu wrapper) was met with much appreciation. I did feel a little bit bad when Fran’s cousin used it as an excuse to complain about how his wife always fills the parcels with too much or too little rice though. Whoops.



Although we made very little Osechi we made an enormous feast which puts most Christmas dinners to shame. Here’s a brief run down of what we ate;

Various Osechi products
Green soy beans
Fried prawns
3 different kids of fish cake
Boiled eggs
Soy simmered carrot and root
Fried chicken
Spring rolls
Sausages
Boiled Hokkaido crab (which was gorgeous)
Konnyaku (devil’s tongue potato jelly)
Pickled octopus
Raw tuna
Sushi
Salad

It was an epic dinner.

As Fran’s relatives started to arrive they started to give the kids Otoshidama (as did we, bloody sponging kids). Otoshidama are elaborately decorated envelopes filled with money and are basically the Japanese version of Christmas presents.

By the end of the day one of the kids who was about 12 had accumulated nearly 500pounds worth of cash! £500! At his age I had never seen so much money in once place. And he just keeps it in a flimsy envelope. It just goes to show that there is hardly any crime at all in Japan.

Throughout the meal we talked of various things. As a guest and a foreigner I got a lot of attention, most of it the usual stuff (can you use chopsticks, do you like Japanese food, why did you come here?), some of it startlingly original (what British films have we all seen? Um, James Bond and ….. nope, that’s it.) and a bit of it quite embarrassing. Particularly when everyone commented that my Japanese is better than Fran’s brother. Whoops, that’s going to be a bit tough for him the next time he visits.
I had expected the conversation to be a bit awkward and me to be intruding into a family situation but it was actually fine. Whenever they wanted to gossip and be a family they just switched into Japanese too fast for me to pick up. At which point I nattered to Fran or gorged myself on pickled octopus (my new favouritest thing in the world evers) Whenever they expressed a genuine interest in my opinions or me they slowed down and simplified and I joined in.

Afterwards exhausted, drunk and full the family fell into a catatonic stupor and watched television.

What we watched was this.



This is a show called Sasuke (apparently it’s called Ninja Warrior in the states) which is basically a televised obstacle course. However some of the obstacles look absolutely insanely tough! Witness, for example, the climbing task about 2:40 where the contestant has to hurl a bar upwards and hook it onto some hooks then using momentum hurl it upwards again in order to climb a wall. These people are superhuman!

The man in the video is the only contestant this year who actually managed to complete all four courses although one guy lost by a mere second. I recommend watching this and just letting your jaw hit the floor.

So good food, good drink, good company and good telly. All in all a great start to the New Year.

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.