Nagozo Choco (Japan) By @SpectreUK

I used to write about import snacks a lot in the past. I used to frequent the Indoor Market and other Chinese supermarkets in the city centre where I used to work. I browsed around in those stores that many times that I ran out of snacks and drinks that I wanted to blog about. A friend of ours brought back a few snacks from his trip to Japan. Cinabar wrote about the Macha tea flavoured chocolate sweets sometime ago (matcha sweets). These caramel chocolate sweets are my snack for this week's blog.

 

I probably sound more than a little bit 'old school' when I say this, but I was rather impressed by the Google translation tool that Cinabar used to take a photograph of the original Japanese packet, which translated onto a new photograph for you to see. I haven't seen that translation tool before on photos. It makes me think back to those blogging days of import foods in the past and wonder how many more snacks I could have tried if I'd had the App then, rather than wondering what some of them were on about!

I remember tasting one of Cinabar's mocha tea flavoured chocolates, which had a squidgy texture. I'm expecting these caramel chocolates to have that same squidginess. These Nagozo Choco chocolates are like an eclair with a milk chocolate filling and caramel chocolate coating. The inside is a milk chocolate jelly. On unwrapping the first sweet you can see from the photograph that they have a pretty design on the top. The outer coating is more like Caramac, which is a favourite of Cinabars. The inner jelly milk chocolate complements this outer coating flavour. However, Caramac and jelly milk chocolate aren't really my thing, so I passed the rest of the packet onto Cinabar to devour rather than me waste the calories!

Information on the packet; Each sweet is 32 Calories, with 0.5g of protein, and as far as I can tell from the photos; 1.6g of fat, 3.9g of sugar, and 0.007g of salt. Please see photograph for the ingredients.

Mr Kipling After Dinner Chocolate and Orange Fancies (Sainsburys) By @Cinabar

One of Mr Kipling’s iconic products are their French Fancies, a cube of sponge, a light fluffy topping and a layer of fondant icing. These cake are traditional at afternoon tea or picnics. This new product, Mr Kipling After Dinner Chocolate and Orange Fancies, is giving them a modern make over and a bit of an upgrade.

 

The box is very posh looking and these do look a bit more special than the usual picnic item you might pick up. There are still eight in the pack and they are in individual paper cases. The flavour is lovely too, there is a lot of chocolate and the orange is strong sweet and with plenty of citrus. The sponge is soft and these are a fairly light feeling bite as they are quite small. I think with a cup of coffee, after dinner, one of these would make a perfect light dessert, especially as each one only has 106 calories so aren’t too guilt inducing. I also picked up a mint version of these Mr Kipling After Dinner Chocolate Fancies too which I can’t wait to try. They are milk chocolate and mint, just in case anyone was interested. ;-)

Kelloggs Crunchy Nut Peanut Butter (Sainsburys) By @Cinabar

I tried this Kelloggs Crunchy Nut Peanut Butter before reading the ingredients, I think that is important to note because I found the latter rather disappointing. What is the first thing you think of when you Kelloggs Crunchy Nut, breakfast cereal. My instinct was this ‘butter’ was going to be made up of cornflakes, honey and peanut spread and that had me very excited. I love the flavour of cornflakes, especially honeyed ones but alas this is peanut butter with a touch of honey and a lot of branding. Shame.

I liked the flavour, there was loads of peanut and that nice mix of gentle sweetness from the honey. I like that mix of sweet and savoury ot worked very well. The product is good, this is thick peanut butter with a nice crunch from plenty of chopped nuts. I really enjoyed my toast with this spread. The negative part is it had very little to do with its name, you can’t call it Kelloggs Crunchy Nut and not have a flavour of the breakfast cereal or indeed the main ingredients. These are as much Kelloggs Crunchy Nut as the are Honey Puffs.

3 Three's Egg & Cress Style (Vegan) Sandwich via @toogoodtogo_uk (by @NLi10)

Style.  Style is very important - in most cases it's all about a unique signature that denotes a membership to a specific group or faction.  Here it means fake.  A colleague of mine picked up some cheap sandwiches from 3 Three's Coffee using a waste reduction app (called TooGoodToGo) and had some lovely meaty ones - which were vegan alternatives.  

I'm very happy with meat alternatives - they are pretty much all we cook at home - but this one is a new one to me.  A vegan egg sandwich.

It certainly looks like an egg sandwich - and had my friend fooled - he'd not even considered that while it is veggie - an egg sandwich isn't vegan.

There is all kind of stuff in here - but the important one is the tofu for that is what the white bits are.

It'd certainly pass the plate test.  You could feed this to non vegans and they may not spot it.

The cress is indeed real (we checked).

And the bite?  While a little softer than my favourite egg sandwiches it's certainly passable.  The texture is a little wrong for eggs, but is a really nice crumbly tofu instead (which is great for me - but may freak out non tofu lovers).

The 'yellow' appears to be a light mustard/turmeric blend and is also pretty awesome.  

Overall - I like this style - This is something that I could definitely pick up for lunch again should I be in range of the cafe, and a great advertisement for their business and the waste reduction app.