New Häagen-Dazs Story Time ice cream in Japan features famous fairytale flavours

We discover the taste of enchanted story book worlds.

Back in August, Häagen-Dazs Japan announced they would be releasing a brand new set of flavours for the local market, but this time they would be far from ordinary. According to the luxury ice cream brand, the ingredients would be inspired by fairytales.

After a two-month wait, the new ice creams finally went on sale yesterday, and we headed down to the supermarket to pick up the mini tubs for a taste test.

Before we even got to peel off the lids, we were immediately enamoured by the beautiful packaging. Featuring beautiful images that hark back to two of the world’s most well-known fairytales, each tub also gave us a hint of what flavours were waiting for us inside.

We decided to start off with the red tub variety, which is beautifully named “Snow White’s Apple with Custard“, and comes with an image of the shiny red poison apple from Snow White on the packaging .

The first thing that got our attention was the enticing, glossy layer of red sauce that was sitting atop the frozen dessert. This red apple sauce had a distinct sweet and fruity aroma of apples, topped off with a beautifully arranged white milk-flavoured heart decoration.

As we took our first mouthful, the taste of smooth custard ice cream made our minds dance with the sweet memory of the enchanted love story between Snow White and the Prince.

Then, as we bit into the small, juicy apple pieces, the texture and taste of the fruit shone through, making us feel as if we’d given in to temptation by eating the poisoned apple from the Queen.

This was a seriously decadent and delicious dessert, with every mouthful coating our tastebuds in creamy yet refreshing flavours. The slight astringency from the apple sauce was a great companion for the more sweeter flavours, reminding us of the bittersweet moments from Snow White’s fairytale love story.

While the Snow White ice cream is a rich tapestry of flavours based on the concept of love conquering evil, the next variety in the series has a somewhat lighter backstory and flavour profile.

Called Alice’s Tea Garnished with Cookies, this ice cream transports you to the tea party from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with a pale blue label and a deck of cards pictured alongside a dainty cup of black tea.

▼ Inside, there’s a top layer of white milk sauce, decorated with a cassis-flavoured heart shape as a nod to The Queen of Hearts.

Beneath the top layer lies a fragrant Darjeeling-flavoured ice cream, mixed with mascarpone ice cream and rich butter cookie pieces.

This cross-section shows the attention to detail that Häagen-Dazs has become well known for in Japan. Because of this careful placement of flavours, each spoonful delivers the perfect amount of darjeeling tea and mascarpone to your tastebuds, ensuring a toe-curling ice cream experience.

Alice’s Tea Garnished with Cookies is strong on the darjeeling, so if you’re a tea lover, you will fall head-over-heels for this ice cream. With delightful hits of tiny cookie pieces all the way through, this is a fun and delicious dessert that makes you feel like you’ve gone down the rabbit hole to join Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

Each tub retails for 324 yen (US$2.92) and is on sale now at stores around Japan. Given that there are just two fairytale flavours available at the moment, we’ve got high hopes that Häagen-Dazs will be adding more creative flavours to their Story Time range in the future!

Photos © SoraNews24

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