05.13.06
Crepe Chocolat
What do you get when you raise a Kit-Kat in Japan? Why, you get this fella! This is another sampling from the Big Box of Japanese Snack Foods (which, I promise, does come to an end. Eventually) and I’m crazy in love with them. They are so cuuuuuute! And chocolaty. And crunchity.
Kawaii!!
Actually, I should have asked, “What do you get when you let a bunch of Japanese Snack Scientists genetically alter a Kit-Kat?” because that’s pretty much what’s going on here. The Crepe Chocolates are a scale size bigger than the original Kit-Kat and covered in that tasty almost dark cocoa-y bitter sweet Japanese chocolate, but deep down this is the Japanese Kit-Kat. With improvements, of course.
The first improvement is chopping the Kit-Kat into square pieces to get a top lopped pyramidal look. Like if you took a giant chain saw to the Giza plateau and trimmed off the upper third of the pyramids, except with more chocolate and less mummies. And on a much, much smaller scale. That’s the shape we’re working with and it’s a beautiful shape indeed. Anytime you can improve on an almost perfect design is good by me and making Kit-Kats bite sized with a higher chocolate to crunch ratio (lopping creates more surface area with which to coat in chocolate) is a beautiful thing.
Next, put the Kit-Kat bits through a steroid induced iron pumping regime on some fantastically sunny Japanese beach for a couple months. Just enough so they bulk up and get gorgeously tan. Now they are ready to ship out in their individually wrapped packages snug in the larger bag. Because a tiny god of Kit-Kat perfection should never…or always…ahhh…you know, I have no idea. The packaging within packaging is a very Japanese thing. Maybe it’s just coded into their Kit-Kat DNA to hop into a small individual wrapper and await deployment instructions into the bigger bag.
It sort of makes you feel sorry for the American Kit-Kat bite with its pasty, puny toneless arms and that northern European “won’t ever tan” complexion. I suppose it’s a good thing that the Crepe Chocolat is half a globe away, otherwise there would be some serious self confidence issues going on in the Kit-Kat bites aisles. I wonder if the jumbled together packaging of the bites makes it easier for them to commiserate with each other, maybe form some sort of support group or something.
Anyway, having munched on quite a few of the Crepe Chocolats (is that the right way to pluralize that?), I was completely convinced that these were the better, stronger, faster, rebuilt Kit-Kats that it never occurred to me to look at their construction until several munches in to the review. Lo! What should I find inside but a whole bunch of…crispity things packed into a shape of a lopped off pyramid. Instead of layered wafers of Kit-Kat fame, these had what looked like a bunch of tasty, crispy breakfast cereal flakes that had been micro miniaturized and then crammed into the Chocolate Crepe shape. Color me surprised because these fellas sure did taste like they had the Kit-Kat thing going on (but better). How’d they do that anyway?
As good as Crepe Chocolate were, and as better than Kit-Kats (which are a fine thing indeed) as they are, I can’t really say that they were epiphatastic. Incredibly good, yes, but not quite the coveted 5 pea of ecstasy good. I’d so give them a 4.75 pea rating if I fractionalized peas like that but alas, I do not. This means they will have to settle for the next category down from 5, but know when I rate them, it’s a really, really high
Rating of 4.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
