Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Happy Halloween!

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To all my readers, it's been a while since my last proper blog. I have loads of new posts in the works. If you pop over to my Facebook page Tasty Japan, you will see my updates for Halloween 2017.

Wishing you all a spooktacular Halloween, hope you get to eat lots of cool Japanese candy!





Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Pocky Strawberry Heartful ポッキーつぶつぶいちご ハートフル

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Thanks to Jen who sent me this delightful snack to try.




It's called "Heartful" because the pretzel stick is pink and actually supposed to be shaped like a heart. If you see my photo you will find they didn't quite accomplish this but it was a nice marketing idea!

The chocolate on the stick is quite thin but it is full of flavour. The "tsubutsubu" which is small bits of strawberry is very tart and exactly the taste of a real strawberry so it feels very realistic. The pink pretzel stick is also very sweet and has a slight strawberry flavour so this is actually quite a nice little snack.





It comes in two packets inside the box which is great as you don't have to eat the whole contents at once and you can share with someone else!

Overall I really like this Pocky, it is just a shame that the stick wasn't heart shaped, but I do love the name of it and all the pink!



Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Morinaga Bake Sweet Potato 森永ベイク スイートポテト味

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A big thanks to Jen for sending this over to me in a big box of goodies :)




Sweet potato is a seasonal flavour of Japan, usually for Autumn and Winter, and we don't really ever see it related to any sweets or snacks in Western countries. For this reason I was kind of taken aback when I saw the packaging and flavour, but I do like sweet potato, so I thought this would be an interesting review.

Firstly, the packaging does really stand out but it has a lot going on. It has a lot of text and a big W on the front. If you don't read Japanese then you wouldn't know what is going on. But it is saying that it's sweet (as expected), and it has been baked to perfection, like one of those roasted sweet potatoes that street vendors sell.

Inside the packaging there was a black tray containing 10 pieces of Bake separated by a thin divider. 4 pieces on one side and 6 pieces on the other. I'm not sure why they were separated like that, there seems to be no real reason why.



There were a lot of crumbs in the black tray and I guess while making it's way to me in the parcel it was bashed around a fair bit. The piece of Bake is quite crumbly though, and even picking it up crumbs fall off the side.

The Bake pieces smell very sweet and there is a scent of sweet potato but also an odd smell...I just can't put my finger on it. It's crunchy on the outside and soft and cake-like on the inside. What I wasn't expecting was such a high level of sweetness. It tastes only of screamingly sweet cake with a hint of fake sweet potato. Oh, this is bad. Sorry, but it's so so bad. 

I love the crumble and the softness of the cake inside, but the taste is horrible. They have tried too hard and delivered the "sweet" part of the potato way too much. This is an odd tasting snack and you will need a big glass of water after eating a couple of these.

I would recommend avoiding these altogether.