Matchaya Seasonals: Valentine's White Chocolate Parfait

And so Matchaya does it again. Not very long after their CNY Yuzu Parfait which I loved very much, they've tempted me back to their Icon Village outlet with their Valentine's White Chocolate Parfait at $6.90.

White chocolate soft serve, homemade raspberry sauce, cocoa powder, langue de chat cookie

Come to think of it, I've never had white chocolate ice cream of any kind. So this was definitely a unique experience. The first bite was very refreshing. The soft serve tasted exactly like white chocolate, just in ice cream form. It's rather interesting actually, because it's kind of like eating a new kind of white chocolate. There's also very little taste of the regular vanilla creamy ice cream flavour, which I find sometimes interferes with the taste of the ice cream.

The ice cream is very very sweet though, and I think it's definitely something you have to split with your valentine (if you have one). Like how it's pretty difficult to eat an entire 250g bar of white chocolate in one sitting, you will feel pretty tired of the overwhelming sweetness of this white chocolate ice cream by the time you're done. Since I shared this parfait with my boyfriend, and I do love white chocolate very much myself, I felt that my last bite was just nice, right before I had reached the turning point of the law of diminishing marginal returns.

The tartness of the raspberry sauce very nicely cut through the sweetness of the ice cream, when it was there. I really think Matchaya could have been slightly more generous with their raspberry sauce. (It perhaps looks like a lot in the photo, but there's no raspberry sauce on the other side.) Perhaps with more raspberry sauce, the sweetness of the ice cream would be more palatable.

The langue de chat cookie is a classic with Matchaya parfaits. Delicate, buttery, crisp. It added much needed texture to the ice cream. And on a white chocolate parfait especially, it recalls the Shiroi Koibito (white lovers) cookies that Hokkaido that Japan is famous for, that are conventionally made with two square langue de chat cookies and a thin layer of white chocolate in between. Very on theme I must say, considering Matchaya's Japanese concept and the season of Valentine's.

The cocoa powder is just there for decoration, and I think it would have been nice if the cocoa chocolate element could have been slightly more pronounced, just to add more complexity.

Overall, it's a good ice cream for what it's meant to be, a Valentine's ice cream, to be shared with someone else. But it definitely did not impress me like the Yuzu ice cream. While I don't hate it, I definitely won't miss it either when it leaves the seasonal menu.