Japan's Ice Cream Flavours Are the Best

I've always thought of Haagen Dazs as a high-end brand of ice cream. They had all types of flavours in Canada such as praline pecan, caramel, cookie dough, Belgian chocolate, mint chocolate chip, all very common flavours found at the grocery or ice cream stores. So when I came to Japan I was surprised to see the multitude of flavours available. You can of course find the most popular, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and matcha at any time, but Haagen Dazs puts out seasonal flavours that are unlike those I've ever seen before. Not only that, in Japan they come in cute little personal sized cups containing approximately 110ml or 250 calories, so there's no chance of guilty overeating.

Today I'll share with you two flavours I recently tried:

1. Black Tea Latte
If you've heard of Royal Milk Tea in Japan, you'll know what I mean when I say this ice cream is like that (think black tea with lots of milk and sugar). It does however seem to have a higher depth of tea flavour compared to royal milk tea though. This ice cream combines two different types of tea, assam and dimbula. They aren't mixed all together, rather each individual flavour of ice cream is swirled into the cup. The maltiness of the assam is great in this blend of tea ice cream.

You can see that there are two different teas in here

2. Cherry Custard Pie

This one is an interesting because it tastes like what it should by looking at the picture on the container. There are actually pieces of pie "crust" in this ice cream, however it's not the pie crust that you are probably familiar with. In Japan when they say pie, they usually refer to a light and flaky pastry similar to the French palmier cookie. It goes well with the creamy ice cream and swirl of cherry puree sauce. 

Both of these flavours are seasonal (you can tell by the characters 期間限定, which means limited). I will try to try and the interesting new flavours as they come out and update them on the labeled 'Ice Cream Series' in this blog!