Hori Corn Chocolate

EG's parents took a recent trip to Hokkaido, and bought us back some local treats. So let me present one of the specialities of the region, Hori Corn Chocolate.

The gift box contains the same chocolate done two ways - in a long finger and a bite sized nugget.

It was a rather interesting snack consisting of popped corn and other chewy corn kernel bits smothered in Hokkaido milk white chocolate. It apparently comes in a regular milk chocolate variety as well.

And taste? Well, my feelings are a little ambivalent. The puffed corn is a little on the stale side, although it does amazingly taste corny (in a good way). The chocolate is also sweeter than we would probably have it here.

I give it points for uniqueness, but wouldn't be too fussed not to have it again.

Three More Kit Kats

This is the 20th different flavoured Kit Kat I've managed to sample (not including versions we get in Australia), and I'm restraining myself from jumping on ebay to order more to fuel my sick obsession (there is apparently a soy sauce flavoured version!). The first two in this post were sourced locally from Great Eastern on Russell St.

First up is Strawberry flavour, which is not my favourite. It is a little too sweet and fruity and kind of like doing a triple shot Strawberry Quik.

Simple white chocolate Kit Kat - simple in design and taste.

This Bitter Green Tea Kit Kat came via EG's parents who recently came back from Hokkaido. They found it at Narita airport, and apparenty it is limited to the Tokyo region.

I absolutely adore the green tea flavour, which happens to just go ever so well with chocolate in the Kit Kat form. I think this version was done in conjunction with Itoh Kyuemon, a famous sweets shop in Kyoto.

You can look at my other Kit Kat posts here, here, and, oh yes, here.

Collon

A rather unfortunate choice of product name, especially when this version comes chocolate flavoured.

For those of you who are interested, this is what your collon looks like on the inside. Scarily accurate isn't it? ;-)

Taiyaki Ice Cream Fish

I do have somewhat of a penchant for trawling ethnic food stores for weird and wonderful ingredients and products. Today's find was care of Green Mart at 297 Exhibition Street, Melbourne.

Taiyaki is traditionally a Japanese cake shaped like a sea-bream, filled with things such as adzuki red bean paste, custard or chocolate. In Korea, it is known as Bungeoppang, and it comes as the ice treat version I had today.

The casing is like a communion wafer - thin, crispy and somewhat holy. Inside, a highly manufactured vanilla ice confection (you know...the one that tastes really good), is generously smeared with a sweet strawberry-like red bean jam.

So in summary - it was funny to look at, yummy to eat, and on a 39 degree Celsius day, damn satisfying. And at $1.80, what more could you ask for?