Häagen-Dazs’s Japan hardly ever disappoints, but hardly any ice cream has ever made our taste-tester this happy.

On the Japanese seasonal desserts schedule, sweet potato’s time comes in autumn. So does chestnut’s, though, and rather than split their attention between the two flavors, for the last few years Häagen-Dazs Japan has chosen to focus on only one of them. In years when it released a sweet potato ice cream, it didn’t release a chestnut flavor, and vice-versa.

This had our Japanese-language reporter and sweet potato fan K. Masami feeling a little bummed out recently. Since Häagen-Dazs put out a chestnut flavor last month, Masami figured she’d have a year of waiting before she could get her sweet potato fix. To her overjoyed surprise, though, this year Häagen-Dazs has broken its pattern, and we’re getting a new sweet potato ice cream from them too!

Called Sweet Potato Butter and Cookie, the new flavor went on sale October 14, and is priced at 399 yen (US$2.70). Once she had hers back home, Masami wasted no time in popping off the top, and this beautiful sight was what was waiting for her underneath it.

Laid out across the top of the tub are butter cookie and purple sweet potato cookie bits. The contrasting colors were almost equal parts enchanting and mouthwatering. “Almost” because as much as she was enjoying looking at them, Masami did, of course, ultimately decide to eat them, and this was definitely the right choice. The sweet potato cookies were fragrant and flavorful, with the non-sugary sweetness that make sweet potato fans swoon, and the butter cookies had a touch of sophisticated saltiness. Their crunchy texture was exquisite as well.

Making her way down underneath the cookie bits, Masami’s spoon passed through a solid layer of sweet potato cookie coating and down into the base of butter sweet potato-flavor ice cream, through which runs a ribbon of sweet potato syrup sauce. Each and every one of those elements was fantastic. The ice cream is rich and filled with sweet potato flavor, but comes to a clean, refreshing finish, with neither the sweet potato nor the butter notes overpowering the taste buds or forcing the other into the background.

From top to bottom, Masami doesn’t have a single complaint about how Häagen-Dazs’ Sweet Potato Butter and Cookie tastes. It is, in her opinion, a perfect ice cream flavor, and far and away the best sweet potato ice cream that Häagen-Dazs has ever produced.

The only potential downside, aside from its limited-time availability, is that the Sweet Potato Butter and Cookie flavor is exclusive to Japanese convenience store chain Family Mart, and can’t be purchased anywhere else. On the plus side, though, Family Mart is one of Japan’s biggest convenience store chains, and with branches all over you won’t have to go too far out of your way, if at all, in order to find this sweet potato treat.

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[ Read in Japanese ]