I love trying new Japanese candies, especially ones with great names. Today’s is スキッピー, or Skippy in English, which is a perfect name for a peanut confection. Skippy are mainly milk chocolate, mixed in with peanuts and dried crepe—which looks and tastes a bit like corn flakes. They actually look a bit like pre-baked cookie dough, and they taste just about as good. They come in a large black and gold box, which opens to reveal silver foil, which holds a surprisingly small amount of the candy. I was expecting fifteen or twenty, and instead I got no more than ten, which is quite disappointing, because the box cost about two hundred yen.

But they are really delicious. Fujiya never skimps on the chocolate, and the stuff found here is first-rate. The peanuts aren’t too bad, either. The important thing is that the chocolates are really packed full of the ingredients, which makes each bite enjoyable.

As I’ve mentioned, the big let-down here is that you get hardly any in each box. I went through the entire thing in a couple minutes, and I could see doing it absent-mindedly in half that. They melt really fast, too. Unlike, say, Pocky or M&Ms, Skippy are not the sort of candy you want to eat on a hot day. They’ll leave chocolate all over your fingers, and force you to rush through your box.

But on the whole, I’d mildly recommend Skippy. I’ll certainly get another box or two, mainly because they remind me of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I’m not sure they’re worth importing, though, especially as I’m sure they’d melt to a solid clump by the time they reached the States.

3/5

First up is the 充実野菜 (Full of Vegetables) Kit Kat from around last summer. I must admit that I skipped this one on purpose, but my coworker picked it up for me and I don’t want to be ungrateful. Plus its such a weird idea for a flavor. The flavor of the Kit Kat is based on a juice made by Ito En of the same name. The juice is a mix of vegetable and fruit juices that is supposed to be vitamin packed. The Kit Kat, though only two hundred calories per box, has no health benefits. It smells like apple juice and tastes like apples and salad. Its not bad, but the smell is overpowering and the color is off putting. I’ll stick with the juice. 1/5
Read Pretty Pretty Yum Yum’s review of Vegie Galore Kit Kat.

During the winter months in Japan it’s quite common to find vendors selling 焼きいも (roasted sweet potatoes) at events and out of the backs of trucks. I guess it was inevitable that Nestle would make a yakiimo Kit Kat. I could only find these in bags mixed with original chocolate Kit Kats. The yakiimo are super sweet, don’t smell like much, and mostly taste like vanilla frosting. As a lover of Japanese sweet potato, I found these disappointing. They are just too sweet. 1/5
Read Orchid64′s review of Yaki Imo Kit Kats.

This is the first of more recent Kit Kats (as in the last few months). ミルクコーヒー (milk coffee) Kit Kats are for those poor souls preparing for entrance exams. People outside of Japan have heard about hell-ish Japanese entrance exams through anime, movies, and news stories for a few years. I don’t know much about the process, but I will attempt to explain for anyone who doesn’t know. Schools of all grades will give exams to prospective students to weed out anyone they don’t want. I’m under the impression that the exams range in difficulty depending on the quality of the school and it’s often said that the hardest part of Japanese university is getting in (ie. passing the exam). Students in Japan will study long hours to pass their tests and are usually supported by their family and peers. Kit Kats are often given as gifts to students taking their exams and this one was specially made for the occasion.

I misplaced the picture of the actual candy, but the Kit Kat is white chocolate with a coffee cream wafer and looks almost identical to a white chocolate Kit Kat. The exterior chocolate is sweet and milky with a little bit of a yogurty tang. The wafer snuck up on me because it is extremely bitter. I think the idea is that the exterior is the milk and the interior is the coffee and the two flavors will meld in your mouth. I didn’t enjoy the contrast in flavors too much, but overall the Kit Kat was good. I have a feeling that coffee lovers will be buying up the rest of these. 3/5
Read Jen’s review of Milk Coffee Kit Kats.

桜抹茶 (Sakura Matcha) is the most recent Kit Kat to hit Shelves. I have yet to see it anywhere but Sendai Station. I was a little hesitant on this one because matcha is a flavor that can go either way. On the one hand it plays nice with sugar and loses some of its grassy flavor in sweets. On the other it can be too strong, to grainy, and too, umm well, green. I’m just going to say it: This Kit Kat is freaking amazing. The matcha is mellow and the wafer has a graham and cinnamon undertone. There is no grassy aftertaste and the chocolate and wafer are smooth. I highly recommend these to everyone, even those of you who don’t like matcha because this Kit Kat is just so different compared to other matcha incarnations. 5/5

Buy Japanese Kit Kats from Jlist.com.

As you can tell from my earlier Giant Rainbow Pocky review, I am no fan of Pocky flavored with something other than chocolate, or at least incorporating chocolate in some way, but these Pocky really impressed me. They’re sweet without being too sugary. I especially like the inclusion of cranberries. I never eat much of the red fruits, but I can detect them in the mix, souring it just slightly. I can safely say this are my favorite of the non-chocolate Pocky flavors I’ve tried so far. 3/5

The newest craze in combini-land these days seems to be something called ‘Sparkling.’ You can get Sparkling Tea, Apple Sparkling, and now even Sparkling Strawberry Kit Kat. I haven’t quite figured out what it means, although there always seems to be an over-exuberance of bubbles, so the derivation may be similar to that of sparkling wine. Across the divide from Nestlé’s multiplying Kit Kat brand is Lotte’s fantastic line of Crunky malt puff-infused chocolate, which now comes in 苺のチーズタルト, or Strawberry Cheese Tart. Both have bright pink packaging and juicy-looking stock photography of strawberries, and both are being reviewed today on Pocky Watch.

スパークリングストロベリー [Sparkling Strawberry] Kit Kats come in the same mini-box as many of the other Kit Kat brands I’ve reviewed, containing two packs each holding two long Kit Kat fingers. The packs themselves are Cute with a capital C: pink and red with understated gold rings indicating the bubbly confection inside. It’s worth noting that each pack contains only 99 calories, like the other similarly-sized Kit Kats, making this a mostly guilt-free mid-afternoon snack. The Crunky, meanwhile, comes in a slightly harder to slowly parcel 271 calorie bar, which, after being removed from its sealed foil wrapper, snaps into two squarish pieces of reasonable size. This treat is in the 食後のシアワセ series, which roughly translated means ‘post-meal good fortune;’ a worthy description for any dessert.

The Kit Kats have a strong fake-strawberry smell that really isn’t off-putting, but isn’t terribly appetizing, either. The cookie itself is very much a let-down. The promise of Sparkling is not delivered on except for a very slight bit of fizzing. But after my amazing experience with Meiji’s strawberry chocolate bar, nothing really saves this. If you really, really love strawberry candy, and think the idea of it fizzing on your tongue sounds fun, go for it. Otherwise, I’d steer clear until Nestlé goes back to the drawing board. 2/5

Glico has shown us how it’s done with cheese with their recent release of Chocolat Fromage Dessert Pocky, and Lotte seems to be going in a similar direction, flavoring this bar with cream cheese powder, imitating one of my favorite non-chocolate desserts, the strawberry cheese tart. Where this bar falls down is that tarts rely heavily on the ingredients, and Lotte has (necessarily) cut corners here. The bar is actually not bad, and actually manages to taste quite similar to its real life sister, but I fear the aim may have been a little high. Lotte simply left me wanting the real thing. 3/5

Buy Sparkling Strawberry Kit Kats from napaJapan.

Buy Strawberry Cheese Tart Crunky from napaJapan.

When I first started this blog, I would have said that Kit Kat was the king of limited edition flavors. They do have a wide variety, but Tirol has them beat when it comes to flavor and season turnover. Every time I walk into a combini (which is a little too often) there is a box of random new flavor next to the register, or a seasonal collection displayed by the door, or a bin of an old permanent flavor I’ve never tried. Trying every Tirol flavor may become a new goal of mine, but until Tirol sends us press releases, I think I’ll just stick with the random impulse buys.

The いちごがいっぱい (Full of Strawberries) pack is new, though the flavors may have been released in the past in different forms. There are three types of “chocolate” in this pack; Ichigo & Cookie Crunch (which is the pink version of White & Cookie Crunch), つぶつぶ練乳いちご (grainy condensed milk strawberry), and 濃厚いちごゼリー (concentrated strawberry jelly). All smell fake, floral, and sweet, similar to the Rich Strawberry bar by Meiji. Like other Tirol chocolates these candies are individually wrapped in foil and plastic and are about an inch square. I like the portioning of these flavors (three of each flavor) because I wouldn’t want to eat an entire bar of any of the flavors.

Ichigo & Cookie Crunch is crushed chocolate cookies, similar to Oreos, held together with strawberry flavored white chocolate type stuff. The strawberry flavor is easily overpowered by the chocolate from the cookies, and I don’t think the combo works as well as the White & Cookie Crunch. The color is kind of off-putting too, since the dark brown cookies turn the chocolate a sickly mauve color. 3/5

I’ve had jelly filled Tirol chocolates before, and though the combination sounds a little weird, it works really well. The chocolate is deep pink, and has a convincing strawberry smell and taste. The jelly is bouncy and firm, like other jelly filled flavors, and has a mild flavor. Again, the strawberry seeds detracted from the product and should have been left out. I liked this flavor the most because both the taste and texture were balanced. 4/5

I’m not going to comment on the wrapper for this one, because yeah… not going to go there on a family blog (but I will point it out for some of our readers). つぶつぶ translates to lumpy, grainy, or pebbly and I think it’s included in the flavor name because of the inclusion of strawberry seeds in the cream center. Personally I don’t think that the seeds add anything to the product and would have liked if they had been left out. The exterior chocolate is light pink and has a nice clean strawberry flavor. The interor is the consistancy of fondant and tastes kind of milky, kind of yogurty, and really fake. I did not enjoy these since they were a bit too sweet and the milk flavor is just weird. 1/5