Asian treats can be a bit out of the ordinary

Now, you might think I am addicted to KitKats but indeed I am not too keen on chocolate at all but curiosity always gets the better of me.

I love the quirkiness of the flavours – and the beauty of this store is that they have the mini versions in a pack so you can try different flavours without having to eat a whole KitKat.

This time I had to do a bit of translation work as three of the minis were only in Japanese. From what I could figure out, I tried two different types of bean flavour and one ‘adult’ flavour (please don’t ask any questions at this stage).

I am rather fond of red bean flavour and one of the minis was definitely that of the red bean variety – to be honest, the ones called just bean and adult didn’t taste of anything particular (at least not to my tastebuds).

The others were banana caramel and caramel pudding – now I do love a good caramel and it was the main reason I picked this particular pack. The banana caramel had a good banana flavour but was overpowered by the dark caramel (I prefer my caramel sweet rather than burnt bitter) – the same goes for the caramel pudding as the flavour was too strong for me. If you love dark caramel, these will tickle your buds.

Now, I am not only interested in KitKat so I went for some other snacks as well – it seems that sweet potatoes are a huge snack option in Asia as I got candied sweet potato which included yellow and purple potato and was cut in strips.

The result was an interesting chewy semi sweet snack – I preferred the yellow one as it was softer than the purple variety. It is unusual but I liked it.

I also got dried sweet potato which was not as sweet as the candied version and was cut into slices. It was filling, so you wouldn’t eat a whole pack in one go. I would definitely buy the yellow potato snacks again.

I also got rice cakes with taro filling. The first time I came across taro was in a bubble tea shop in London where I tried it just to see what taro is. Taro is a root vegetable which can be roasted, baked or boiled with a sweet nutty flavour.

I love how vegetables can be used to make sweet treats (it needs to be cooked as it is toxic in its raw stage).

When I opened the pack of rice cakes, I thought of something like fig rolls but was surprised that what we consider a cake is not what these rice cakes were about.

They had an almost jelly and chewy texture with a soft centre filling of taro. The flavour was on the sweet side which wouldn’t be my preferred option but as a treat I liked it – I couldn’t eat too much of it though.

Last but not least I got dried mandarin skin – now this was a total new thing for me. I wasn’t sure what to expect – I do like candied citrus and orange peel dipped in chocolate (and who wouldn’t) but these were neither candied nor dipped in chocolate.

The result was a chewy almost bitter sour snack that took me some time to get used to.

Not sure if I would buy them again but if you like to snack but don’t like sweet stuff, this might be an option.