Tag Archives: Kit Kat

Junk Food

KarePax Snacks and Comics

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KarePax LogoKarePax is a monthly subscription service wherein you give them a monthly fee of $26 via the Internet and they send a box international snacks to your domicile.

Does this sound familiar? It should, because it’s the exact same premise as MunchPak!

There is one thing that sets Karepax apart though – they include comics!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with some healthy competition, and the idea of including comics sounded like fun, so when Karepax offered to send me a free box, I gladly accepted.

Let’s get the vanilla facts out of the way before we get to the contents: according to Karepax, for your $26, you get between 11 and 13 snacks from 3-4 countries, as well as a handful of small candies and 2-3 comic books.

Sounded like a good deal to me, but would it live up to the hype?

My box arrived promptly and, much like with MunchPak, I felt like I was having a tiny Christmas. The box was bigger than a MunchPak, and for good reason. Let’s get down to it, because this is going to be a big one.

KarePax Contents

As you can see.

Small Candies

KarePax Small Candies

Here are some of the small candies. I will admit that I have not tried them all yet, because there’s a lot of stuff here and I’d probably die if I tried to eat it all. I call this collection the “somewhat disappointing part of your trick-or-treat haul”.

There’s a little package of Whoppers. A hard candy labeled “lemon” but with coloring that looks confusingly like it should be lime. Some chocolate coins that look like Mardi Gras gelt. And some Japanese coconut candy.

Some More Interesting Small Candies

KarePax Other Candies

Here we have a Japanese corn candy, shaped so accurately like a cob of corn that it’s disturbing but also adorable, because it’s tiny, and candy.

Also Japanese are these Flower’s Kiss candies, one with a picture of a sunflower and one with…uh…well, I’m not a botanist and I don’t read Japanese, so I’m not sure.

We also have a package of Hi-Chew. I swear I get a Hi-Chew in every MunchPak. I have Hi-Chew coming out my ears. Hi-Chew is pretty tasty, but damn, one woman can only masticate so much. This time, I got mango.

Last but not least we have a Boyer Mallo Cup. The Internet tells me that these were first made in the 1940s, and the packaging looks like it hasn’t changed a lick since then. I love when manufacturers do that.

The Internet also tells me that Mallo Cups were the first cup candy made in the United States. Way to go, Mallo!

Japanese Kit Kats

Japanese Kit Kats

I would have included these as “small snacks”, but Japanese Kit Kats are way too fascinating to not have their own section. I don’t know why, but Japan makes Kit Kats in like, 700 different flavors. It’s amazing. I would subscribe to a Japanese Kit Kat-only snack program. Go Google if you don’t believe me.

Since I can’t read a damn word on these wrappers besides “YouTube”, I had to try to figure out what flavors I had using the power of the Internet and search terms like “Japanese Kit Kat green wrapper”.

This was surprisingly useful, as it seems my best bet was that the green wrapper one was green tea-flavored. The flecked moss green color of the candy supported this, as did the flavor. It tasted like white chocolate with a little green tea flavoring, and was actually really good. I felt lucky, because this is one of the JKK flavors I’ve always wanted to try.

It seems that the black wrapper Kit Kat is “otona no amasa” flavored, which I guess translates into “Taste of Adult”. Leave it to Japan to make a Kit Kat sound absolutely dirty.

What this actually means, however, is that this was a Kit Kat marketed more towards adults than children, which is supported by the snazzy-looking black wrapper that looks like it got dressed up to go to a charity ball.

The chocolate had a darker hue than a normal Kit Kat, and that’s exactly what it tasted like. Less sweet and more bitter than a regular bar, but not quite as bitter as most dark chocolate I’ve had. This totally makes sense, as most kids I know are not fond of dark chocolate.

I got no Internet love for the third Kit Kat, but luckily there were a few helpful pictures on the wrapper, namely a wine glass and a big ol’ bunch of grapes. I was surprised that Google turned up absolutely nothing on this one. Did I somehow grab a rare Kit Kat? Are they like Pokemons?

The candy bars looked exactly like white chocolate. And holy shit, they tasted exactly like white chocolate and wine. Actual wine! Not just grapes, but wine, with all the acidity and a lot of acridness. So, not good wine. But my taste buds were completely transfixed. I’ve never tasted any candy remotely close to this. I kind of want to save the second bar for posterity or something.

Now we’re going to move on to the “big” snacks.

Jammie Dodgers

Jammie Dodgers

Jammie Dodgers are a popular British cookie, or biscuit if you live there. They are made of shortbread and raspberry jam, and are apparently named after Rodger the Dodger from the comic The Beano. I can’t do any more research on this because this review is already taking me about 20 hours.

The package proudly touts that Jammie Dodgers have “no added nasties”. But they are “full of jammie mischief”. Fucking adorable.

Shortbread cookies are less sweet and more crumbly than most American cookies, and the raspberry jam was more like a thin layer of raspberry glue. Jammie Dodgers aren’t my cup of tea, but who am I to go against an entire country of snackers? I’ll blame it on different palates.

Štark Smoki

Stark Smoki Flips

Smokis are a Serbian snack known as “flips”. If you’re intrigued by the idea of Serbian snack food, you’re not alone. But hey, everyone’s gotta snack.

Flips are peanut-flavored, peanut-shaped snacks made of cornmeal grits. If this doesn’t sound appealing, again, you’re not alone. They don’t taste appealing. They taste and feel like styrofoam packaging with some peanut flavoring that has a bad aftertaste. I guess it’s appropriate that a Serbian snack would taste depressing.

Kinder bueno

Kinder bueno

Kinder bueno is made by Ferrero, which technically makes it an Italian snack. I figured it was most popular in the UK, but it turns out it they didn’t start marketing it there until 2004. It’s really an international snack, popular from Germany to Gibraltar. We’re just a little slow here in the States.

I’ve had Kinder bueno before, and I think it’s one of the most delicious and well-crafted snacks that you could pick up at the store. (If you lived in another country.) The chocolate is delicious, the wafer is thin, light and crisp, and the cream hazelnut filling is smooth and wonderful. These really need to catch on here.

Delicje Orange European Biscuits

Delicje Orange European Biscuits

Delicje comes to us from E. Wedel, a Polish confectionery company that is apparently very well-recognized in Poland.

While you might think “European Biscuit” just means “cookie”, especially after reading about Jammie Dodgers, you’d be wrong. In this case, it’s actually more like a Jaffa Cake.

What’s a Jaffa Cake? I was about to go into it, including some interesting details about old tax laws regarding cakes versus biscuits, but holy shit, I’m getting really deep down the snack food rabbit hole here, so just read this.

Delicje are a wonderful combination of soft, dense sweet cake and orange jelly goop covered in chocolate that doesn’t taste at all cheap. I would have much more preferred a berry as opposed to orange jelly, but the overall concept is high quality and highly snackable.

Churritos Fuego Hot Chili Pepper & Lime

Churritos Fuego Hot Chili Pepper & Lime

Churritos are made by Barcel, a rather prolific Mexican snack company. At first, I thought it was funny that they would boast the “same spicy flavor as Takis”, until I realized that Barcel also makes Takis. Given that Takis are rolled corn chips, doesn’t that make Churritos the exact same thing?

I should have read the bag better, because I would have seen that these are “corn snack sticks”, not rolled corn chips. They look sort of like shoestring fries, and they’re crunchy without being gum-stabby, which Takis can be.

If you’ve ever had Flamin’ Hot Cheetos con Limon, that’s pretty much exactly what Churritos taste like. Hot chip flavoring with a hint of tart lime. These were tasty.

Nestle Sütlü Cikolatah

Nestle Sutlu Cikolatah

Check out my umlauts, ladies. This one was a little tougher to research because most of the websites were in Turkish. Which makes this from Turkey, heads up. “Sütlü” translates to “milk” and I’m going to go out on a limb with cikolatah, so it looks like we’re dealing with a milk chocolate wafer bar.

This is your typical chocolate-covered and chocolate layered wafer bar. It’s pretty good, but there’s nothing particularly special about it.

Holiday Crispie Pop

Holiday Crispie Pop

I was going to call this “Mysterious Snowman Lollipop Dude” but then I spotted the name on the back of the wrapper. It is made by the Long Grove Confectionery Co. in the good ol’ USA, which looks like an adorably wholesome little company. And that’s all I know about it.

I was delighted to discover that Holiday Crispie Pop is a Rice Krispy treat dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with big sugar crystals. The chocolate was fairly good quality and it was a fun eat. Good job, Long Grove!

Walkers Simply Roast Chicken Crisps

Walkers Simply Roast Chicken Crisps

If the Walkers logo looks familiar to US residents, that’s because it highly resembles the Lay’s logo. This is no accident, as juggernaut Frito-Lay acquired the UK brand in 1989. And, Frito-Lay-style, they have a huge corner of the crisps market across the pond.

Roast Chicken probably sounds like one of those wacko flavors that Frito-Lay is always tossing on shelves for a few months for hype value, but in reality it’s one of the staple flavors of the Walker brand. If you think that’s crazy, consider some of their other current and former flavors, like Prawn Cocktail, Marmite and Lamb & Mint Sauce, just to name a few. Roast Chicken is relatively tame by comparison.

Roast Chicken boasts that it’s made “with free range chicken from Devon”, which is impressively specific for mass-manufactured potato chips with flavor dust on them. The flavor dust does, in fact, list Devon Free Range Dried Chicken Breast as an ingredient. Disturbing, but authentic.

Upon tasting, “weird” is the first adjective that comes to mind. Unsurprisingly. There’s hints of garlic and onion, but the main ingredient I taste is “what?” If I pretend, I can taste chicken, but I’d never guess that’s what they were if the bag was blank. They’re not inedible, they’re just really odd.

Nongshim Honey & Apple Honey Twist Snack

Nongshim Honey & Apple Honey Twist Snack

If the name Nongshim sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably eaten, or at least seen, their Bowl Noodle brand of ramen on store shelves. They’re the big styrofoam ones next to Top Ramen that say “I can afford ramen that costs more than ten cents” or maybe “I don’t own a bowl”.

Nongshim is South Korea’s largest processed food manufacturer. I don’t have a full list of their products, but I figured they were only in the noodle biz. I guess they’ve got a lot of foods floating around out there, including Twist Snacks.

Honey Twist Snacks are very crunchy and have too little sweetness at first, but the more I chewed, the more the light honey glaze came through. I didn’t taste too much apple, but the honey was sweet without being cloying.

Swoffle Caramel Filled Stroopwafel

Swoffle Caramel Filled Stroopwafel

Swoffle Stroopwafel is easily my favorite snack name out of the whole bunch. It is, apparently, a “traditional Dutch treat”, but the brand Swoffle is wholly American, based out of Massachusetts.

Swoffle apparently decided they needed to make a gluten-free, healthy, organic, non-GMO stroopwafel. I’m sure the 19th century bakers who used leftover ingredients to make their stroopwafels would just shake their heads at this.

The stroopwafel smells like pancakes and syrup, which is awesome. It’s like a big, flaky, chewy piece of sugar and molasses. Not the best travel snack, but worth the sore jaw from chewing if you want a sugar fix.

Comics!

KarePax Comics

I’m not going to review the comics, because this is not Comic Book Betty. But my two comics came in a nice sleeve. It’s a super fun idea, and I could totally imagine flipping through the pages while I munched on a stroopwafel.

Wacky Packages

Wacky Packages Bumpkin Dimwits Ditz Stickers

I’m going to turn into an 8-year-old now, so bear with me. Wacky Packages are the best thing ever. They’re not just stickers, they’re trading cards. My first reaction when I saw these was “What the shit?” Then I looked at them for a few more seconds and said, “Oh my god…they’re like Garbage Pail Kids for food.”

I had to sleuth out that their true name is Wacky Packages. They’re made by Topps, and, to further blow my mind, they’ve been around since 1967 and I’ve never heard of them. They don’t just parody food brands, they parody all brands, from toothpaste to motor oil.

I got Bumpkin Dimwits, a parody of Dunkin Donuts, and Ditz, which is obviously Ritz. They’re completely juvenile and groan-inducing and I want to collect every single one of them that ever existed.

So there you have it. One KarePax box, two comics, two Wacky Packages stickers, and 28 snacks of varying sizes. I had my doubts about this service and its ability to rival MunchPak, but after doing this review, I am completely sold. I hate to fawn, but I have to admit – I’ve switched my loyalties and my subscriptions, at least for a few months. KarePax has won me over.

I also like that there’s a level of customization – you can opt out of comics for some extra snacks, or request youth-oriented comics. You can also specify peanut allergies, meat-free, or just give them a couple of flavors you don’t like so they leave those out.

If you’re interested in a box of your own, the company has given me a discount code for $10 off a 3, 6 or 12-month subscription. Enter KPXRV459 at checkout.

[Disclaimer: I received these snacks for free from KarePax. This in no way effects the objectivity of my review.]

KarePax

  • Score: 5 out of 5 Bumpkin Dimwits
  • Price: Free
  • Size: One box
  • Purchased at: Delivered for free; available at http://karepax.com/
  • Nutritional Quirk: There’s so many snacks in here, you would probably die if you tried to eat it all in one sitting. Or at least vomit.
Junk Food

Canadian Candy Cornucopia! (Part Deux)

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Today we conclude our glorious examination of some Canadian candy, courtesy of a generous friend of mine. To read part 1, put your eyeballs over here. As with the previous post, this won’t be a review, but it will have some fun stuff that will bore Canadians but might interest Americans. This post has lots of pictures, so for those of you who don’t like words, enjoy!

Nestle Kit Kat Creamier Chocolate

 

A Kit Kat.

Look at that pretty packaging! So much more shiny and attractive than the United States’ packaging. It almost looks like it’s designed for Valentine’s Day. “Here baby, I got you a Kit Kat!” Romance is different in Canada.

Also a Kit Kat.

Beyond the package difference, there’s not much more to say here. It’s a Kit Kat bar. Break me off a piece of that.

 

Still a Kit Kat.

Bars of crispy wafer stuff with chocolate. If you’re looking for freaky Kit Kats, you’re going to have to look at Japan, not Canada.

Nestle Coffee Crisp Crispy Wafer Bar

Coffee Crisp!  According to Wikipedia, this is a truly Canadian candy. You won’t be finding it anywhere else, minus a few specialty stores in Australia. Apparently, Canadian ex-pats love this candy bar so much that there was a petition on coffeecrisp.org to market it in all US cities. Flying in the face of all that we know about Internet petitions, this one apparently succeeded. However, it gets a little murky after that – long story short, citations needed, and you’re still going to have to get past the Mounties to get yourself a Coffee Crisp.

Doesn’t look like much, I’ll admit. But Coffee Crisp is the shit.

Large layers of crispy wafer goodness lovingly surround a thick middle layer of smooth coffee cream, all wrapped in the embrace of a thin chocolate coating. The coffee flavor is subtle; it doesn’t really hit you until after you’ve swallowed, and even then, it’s mild but still delicious. Even if you don’t like coffee (you heathen bastard), you might still like this candy bar, because the coffee flavor comes with the sweetness of the cream and the chocolate, so it’s like eating a crunchy sissy mocha latte whatever drink, which may sound gross but is totally awesome.

The textures are executed perfectly. Crunchy wafer with smooth cream and chocolate? I couldn’t ask for much more out of a candy bar. The ratios are also perfectly balanced. The coffee flavor is just icing on the cake. In retrospect, I’m lucky this candy bar is restricted to Canada only, because I might switch from salt vampire to sweet tooth, and I don’t think my metabolism or my dental insurance could handle that.

Coffee Crisp – possibly the best candy bar you’ll never taste. Unless you’re Canadian.

Kinder Surprise

I’ve saved the best for last. And by that I mean, I spent an inordinate amount of time taking pictures of tiny toys, so you better fucking appreciate it.

Kinder Surprise has a long and storied history in pretty much everywhere but the United States. I could read the entire Wikipedia article and sum it up for you, but I seriously spent a really long time with these eggs, so go educate yourself here. I’ll break down the most salient points: they are egg-shaped chocolates with toys inside.

Over 80 jouets! I just learned another French word!

You get three of these per box. When you shake them, you can hear the toy rattling around inside. I’m technically an adult, but even I got excited after hearing that rattling. What would be inside my eggs?! I officially declare Kinder Surprise to be the best stocking stuffer ever.

Presenting: the egg.

The chocolate shell that encloses the toys is very thin. Let’s face it; kids love chocolate, but they’re really after what’s inside the egg. Of course, this means Kinder Surprise could use the shittiest chocolate possible, but I actually found it rather tasty. It seems that the outside is milk chocolate and the inside is white chocolate. It melts quickly in your mouth and is pleasantly smooth.  The milk and white chocolate work well together. I could be totally wrong about the white chocolate, but who cares? TOYS!

I bit into my first Kinder Surprise egg to get it open, but it turns out the seam breaks apart easily, leaving you with two intact pieces. I was surprised that the toy wasn’t just sitting there waiting for me; instead, I was greeted with a little pod with an unpleasant yellow hue. My friend sent me two boxes, which, to the math-impaired, equals six eggs, and all the pods were this sickly yellow color. I could think of about 80 different colors that would be more appealing to children. That’s the same number of jouets possible!

Kinder Surprise uses some sort of dark magic to squish all this shit into that little pod. The toys don’t come assembled; depending on what you get, they can range from 2-4 pieces, going off of my own Kinder eggs.

Included with each disassembled toy is a strip of paper listing all the warnings and dangers in every single goddamn language in the world. Seriously, I think I saw Ugandan on there. I don’t even know if that’s a language.

There’s also an insert that shows what…playset, I guess you could say, that the toy comes from. Eh, you’ll get the idea from the pictures.

Before I get to the toys, I’d like to address my earlier statement that Kinder Surprise is not allowed in the United States. There’s a very good reason for this, and I will let Wikipedia explain:

“In 1993 the Ferrero Group (the maker of Kinder eggs) applied to have the eggs sold in the USA, but was turned down because of a prohibition against having an inedible item inside an edible object. More recently, the US Consumer Products Safety Commission determined in 2008 that the product did not meet the small-parts requirement for toys for children under the age of three, creating a choking and asphyxiation hazard in young children. Since 1991, at least 7 children worldwide have died of choking after swallowing the toy inside the Kinder egg.”

This is no fucking joke. Each Kinder toy, even assembled, is no bigger than the size of a half dollar. Some of the components are smaller than an Advil tablet. Furthermore, you’re encasing these tiny toy components inside a chocolate egg. Put yourself inside the mind of a four-year-old: “This tiny, tiny piece of plastic smells like chocolate! I should definitely put it in my mouth!” I’m usually a proponent of natural selection in cases like this, but even my cynical ass can look at these things and say, “This is a very bad idea.”

Apparently, the rest of the world disagrees.

Eh, fuck it. Americans are pussies. Who cares. Let’s look at the toys!

Despite having a selection of over 80 jouets, I managed to get a duplicate toy amongst my six eggs. This was the duplicate. Here, you can also see what I mean by the insert showing the set that the toy belongs to. I got a…fire…hoverboat? With a giant fireman’s helmet on top? Is the rest of the world utilizing some sort of hoverboat technology to put out fires? The US really needs to get on that.

My firehoverboat came in three pieces. I could have swallowed any one of them with a glass of milk.

Here we have a different, yet similar, fire department scene. I guess this one is all about the tiny fire midgets who bravely fight the tiny Kinder fires. This toy only had two pieces, but here we see one of Kinder Surprise’s failings: the tiny nub on the fire midget that should have connected the fire pole to the base was too big for the hole in the base. Tiny fire midget is doomed to slide down a pole that never ends. He is also doomed to never stand upright.

Tiny fire midget is one of the bigger pieces I got in my Kinder Surprises. I would probably need something pretty viscous to swallow him. Maybe some V8.

Here we have Hockey Duck, who is a part of the Hockey Guy set. Hockey. Canada! Kinder Surprise likes to perpetuate stereotypes.

They all appear to be different animals, although I would question whether or not some of the animals are real. I had to screw on his legs and then attach them to the base. It took me a second to realize that the other piece was a hockey puck on ice. I thought it should connect to the figurine, but try as I might, I could not find a way to fit the swirlies on the base to the swirlies on the ice. Maybe the ice connects with the ice pieces of the other toys pictured? I do not know. It will forever be a mystery, because I live in the United States.

I probably couldn’t choke down assembled Hockey Duck, but I could swallow his legs with a bit of water.

Now we’re getting to one of my two favorites: Crazy Ears Bunny. That’s his mobster name.

I haven’t addressed this yet, but each insert is two-sided: one side is a picture of the group that the toy belongs to, and the other side varies between just a boring picture of the toy enlarged (firehoverboat) or instructions on how to assemble the toy (Hockey Duck and this guy).

I’d been playing around with Kinder toys for a while at this point, and Crazy Ears Bunny frustrated the hell out of me. Perhaps all the assembling and picture-taking had fried my brain, but these instructions made about as much sense as the instructions to building an Ikea desk. The nose has a component that fits inside the two halves of the toy, and it took me a few tries to figure out how to fit it in there.

The ears were all folded up inside the pod, and they refused to straighten out, no matter how much I ran them across the edge of my fridge like someone trying to smooth out a dollar bill on the side of a vending machine. I also didn’t figure out for a while that you had to fold the base and then fold the- you know what, I’m still not really sure how that was supposed to work. I kinda like how they turned out, though. They look…jaunty.

Here we see Crazy Ear Bunny’s Crazy Ear friends.

…Wait, I just realized something. That’s not a bunny! It’s Crazy Ear Rhino! That is ten times more awesome and I am really unobservant. There’s even an actual bunny in the picture and I missed it.

Anyways, the entire Crazy Ear crew is awesome. There seems to be some indication that their ears work like helicopters and they can all fly. Considering I could barely keep the ears upright on my rhino long enough to take a picture, I have doubts about it flying, but they are still the coolest kids in Kinder school. I love that Crazy Ear Giraffe has no neck but super long ears. Now he can fly up to the trees to eat the leaves, and his neck will never be tired again.

I could probably swallow Crazy Ear Rhino’s horns after working up a mouthful of saliva.

And here’s my favorite: Dino Hatchling! I’m not sure what kind of dinosaur he is, but that’s okay, because none of them in the picture look very specific. If Dino Hatchling looks fuzzy in the picture, that’s because he is! He feels sort of like the felt on a pool table, and I love it. He also appears to be hatching from his egg in a very awkward way. Actually, looking at the illustration, it looks more like he’s already hatched, and has decided to hang out in his shell, rocking a casual paw-resting-on-tail pose.

Dino Hatchling only has two pieces, the Hatchling itself and a little purple flower looking thing that attaches to his back. I have no idea what it is supposed to be, but it is small enough that I could probably swallow it without even noticing. Seven children dead.

Dino Hatchling comes with a different kind of insert. You can color him! The picture obviously demands that you use a periwinkle colored pencil or else you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a bunch of dots, which would seem to suggest there’s also a connect-the-dots game involved, but they don’t seem to really connect…anything. Kinder Surprise, sometimes I don’t understand you at all.

Kinder Surprise has a real Pokemon “collect ’em all” vibe going, which is good for them but bad for parents and their wallets. I don’t know how much a box costs, but I know if I were a kid living in Canada, I would demand that they be bought until I had the entire fuzzy dinosaur collection. Complete with fully choke-able accessories. You’re a sly dog, Kinder Surprise.

And thus ends our tour through the wonderful world of Canadian candy. Today, we learned that Canada has more savvy Kit Kat packaging, Coffee Crisp bars are awesome and I will probably never have one again, and Kinder Surprise wants to kill your children unless you live in the US. They also have inscrutable assembly instructions.

Well, it’s been fun, but I guess it’s back to American junk food for me. I hope you enjoyed all the pictures and the mental image of a grown woman fumbling with tiny toy parts. A special thanks again to my Canadian friend for sending me all these lovely gifts. Poutine Alex Trebek Clearly Canadian.