Another regional omiyage edition, this time from Yokohama – a very tasty strawberry cheesecake.

Fairly cheesy but more yoghurty, and a very delicate fruit flavour.

All the way from Tochigi prefecture, Tochiotome is a special breed of strawberry.  They’re apparently far superior to common-or-garden strawberries, but I think you need to be a strawberry farmer to know the difference.

And to be able to tell the difference between strawberry KitKats… well that would be quite a feat.

Decidedly not bad.

So as the cool evenings get decidely chillier, thoughts turn to winter delicacies – like yaki imo, or roasted sweet potato.  Well, not my thoughts, actually.  Can’t bear the things myself.

The yakiimo-man still does the rounds in our town with his little yakiimo cart (seen in the picture), calling out across the evening to any prospective buyers.  And I enjoy this nugget of culture, which is slowly dying out.

Potatoes of any description have never really set my heart racing, and sweet potatoes are a recent introduction to my rather resistant palate.  Sweetness and potatoes… no thanks.

But these KitKats are apparently quite evocative of the real thing, so yakiimo afficionados should enjoy.

It looks like the adults are back in charge of production at Nestlé Japan.  Milk chocolate, and proper flavours!  Lovely.

Nice sharp orange flavour with a slightly sour finish.  It seems like so long since I’ve wanted to eat more than one KitKat in one go.

Oh how we laughed.

We’ve done it, people!  We’ve found it.

The worst KitKat ever.

Fluorescent orange ‘chocolate’ with an indescribably cloyingly sweet flavour with a hint of chemical apple.   I was too polite to spit out the single mouthful that I could bare.

No stars

‘White’ chocolate…

But a disturbing shade of green.

Actually tastes more like melon…

With a little sourness at the end.

Nasty.

The makers seem to have started hedging their bets with recent new flavours.

Multibags’ contents are now often 50/50 – half are regular milk chocolate ordinary KitKat, the other half being the more outlandish flavour.

This is probably a good marketing ploy – I’d imagine consumers are less likely to want to buy a whole bag of a peculiar flavour if they think they might get stuck with handfuls of sweets they’re not going to eat.  But with half the bag being the pure, unadulterated original, the risk is instantly halved.  They’re evidently not all nutters at Nestlé Japan.

And after the dreadful summer that it’s been for KitKats, Mango Purin is not bad by comparison.

The partner of the ill-f(l)avoured Apple Vinegar…

A whole cauldron of competing chemical tastes.  When lemon flavour goes wrong, it goes really wrong – sharp enough to be harsh.  And while the ‘vinegar’ might usually offset the sweetness, there was already too much going on.

But we gave Apple Vinegar one star, and it would be unfair to say it was that bad.

Sounds like a weird concept, doesn’t it.  And which particular sports drink, you might be wondering.

Well, in Japan, ’sports drink’ is not as general a term as it might sound – it basically means ‘grapefruit flavour’.  Pocari Sweat, Aquarius and countless others are all ’sports drinks’, and they all taste pretty much identical.  They’re sweet, cloudy, and grapefruit flavour.

The best I can say for it is that it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be.

The very idea of making drinks with vinegar makes me pull that face. You know. That one.  But they’re ‘traditionally popular’ (which just means “not popular any more” doesn’t it?)

And there have been bad experiences with apple flavoured KitKats before. Those memories don’t fade.

And when you open this thing up, it’s white chocolate…

Oh dearie dearie me.