Toppo – Lemon Cheese Tart

Do you ever get the feeling like time is drifting away from you? No matter how hard you try to catch up to it, it eludes you at each turn? Perhaps time is my white whale, the one that got away, the one who haunts me in my dreams. Oddly enough, the thing that anchors me most readily these days is expiration dates. They help me give context to the time that has passed, or the time that has yet to come. Mostly though, it forces me to do mental math to see how much time I have left before the food item I hold in my hand goes from perishable to perished. Thankfully the snack I hold in my hands is not one I have trouble consuming.

Yet another one of the many limited edition flavours that Toppo releases each year, this one is a regional variant of their cheese tart flavour – Setouchi lemon. Unsurprisingly, the region of Setouchi is known for their many citrus fruits, in particular their lemons. Being someone who isn’t a huge fan of citrus in general, I wouldn’t be able to give you too much detail on what sets a good lemon apart from a bad one, but I can at least speak to the flavour itself.

Lots of cheesecakes use a bit of lemon juice to help balance out the richness and fat of the butter and cheese. These are a lot like that, but they lean in a bit harder with the lemon to make for a refreshing aftertaste to the cake instead of just being cheese. I find the right balance is somewhere between the just enough lemon to have a refreshing flavour without getting tart or leaving that weird residue in the mouth, and the creamy richness of the cheese. I may be in the minority here, but a good crust makes all the difference in cheesecakes. If a cheesecake has a graham cracker crust, it gains +50 bonus points right off the bat.

As with the prior standard stick releases, this comes with 2 pouches with each having about 12 thinner sticks. If you’ve never had the pleasuring of smelling a Japanese cheesecake, these smell just like it – it has a very cheesy, buttery smell to it. This one in particular has a very zesty lemon smell to it, which should come as no surprise since this is a lemon cheese tart. Of the lemon cheese tarts I’ve had though, they tasted so much like certain styles of cheesecake that I sort of group them together.

This tastes just like the Japanese style cheesecakes I had back in Japan, with the zesty tang of the lemon in the aftertaste to give it a bit more complexity, as opposed to just being cheese. The lemon is just the right amount to enhance the whole thing, as opposed to overpowering it or being non-existent. Actually, the chocolate filling of these sticks reminds me a lot of the panda cheesecake Tirol chocolate that I really enjoyed, so no surprise I’m enjoying this flavour as well. I actually prefer this to the actual Japanese cheesecake, largely because the jiggly nature of them, although fun to play with, aren’t dense enough and don’t feel substantial to me. Cheesecake is one of those things that I want to go all out with; if it doesn’t feel substantial or heavy, I feel a little cheated. But again, that’s purely personal preference.

Texture is pretty standard for the regular sized Toppo sticks – it’s a nice buttery biscuit like pretzel on the outside with the cheese tart chocolate on the inside. It has a nice clean snap to them, but not soft enough that they are easy to break apart without some force. Just how I like them.

The texture and flavour of these come together pretty well, and kind of remind me of those lemon creme cookies I had as a kid. Though this has more cheese flavour to it, and the lemon isn’t as forward or in your face. They have just the right amount of cheese flavour followed by lemon to keep it from feeling too rich or tart, and is a nice light snack. If this is anything like the actual thing, I’ve got yet another thing to add to my food bucket list.

I sincerely hope this is a flavour that makes a comeback each year, or at some regular interval. This flavour is too tasty to not come back at least annually.