Back when I was working for a company that dealt with a lot of manufacturers, I used to talk to students who worked in food sciences. Part of their work was learning how to prepare, process, and package food so that taste was preserved or enhanced. From listening to those students, I got a sense of how hard it must be to perform the proper alchemy to produce a tasty food product.
I know from experience that incorporating any sort of fruit flavor into various foods is tricky at best. Too much and you're overwhelmed by unpleasantly intense flavor and too little and the taste whispers so softly that you can't get a sense of it. You might guess that these cookies have erred on one side or another or I wouldn't be bringing the whole thing up.
These berry gateau cookies are similar to the cocoa version that I reviewed earlier. There are 8 individually wrapped cookies for about 170 yen ($1.90) a box and each cookie is about 33 calories. From external appearances, the berry cookies seem to be identical to the cocoa versions except that the cookie portion is pink.
The cookies smell of chocolate and faintly of strawberry. The cookie portion looked a bit rough compared to the nice, smooth cocoa cookies. It's as if the dough had been overworked or raggedly cut. The cookie is crisp and the chocolate on the soft side. The first taste is one of intense dark, slightly bitter chocolate along with strong, tart strawberry. The two flavors appear to be battling to overpower each other and the result is fairly unpleasant. Since the second bite is less strong than the first, it becomes more bearable after the first bite, but not necessarily good.
For my tastes, the chocolate is just too deep and intense, particularly when paired with a strong strawberry flavor. What was worse was the fact that I was left with a strong, unpleasant aftertaste that lingered for quite awhile after eating the cookies. I definitely would not buy these again.
5 comments:
So, the chocolate part is the cookie and the strawberry is the cream? I sort of don't get it. It looks like only half of a regular cream cookie to me.
Something you might consider on the ratings system is adding a label that matches the rating so that it can be searched by rating.
Kelly: There's no cream part at all. It's just a strawberry cookie embedded in a chocolate medallion. It's not a cream cookie at all.
Sharon: I thought of that back when I first started considering the ratings system, then I completely forgot to put in the labels!
Thanks to both of you for your comments!
I just started a new food review blog. :) I love yours...i see that some bloggers have stores online to sponser them and send them snacks that they might not otherwise get. How might I work that to get foreign snacks to review on my website? Thanks.
Hi, Jess, and thank you for your kind words.
Regarding your question, I'm afraid that I don't know how other reviewers do that. I buy all of my own stuff for review and no one has offered me anything for free. ;-)
I think you have to start by having a lot of site traffic and showing that your voice is worth their efforts. You have to build up your readership over years (I think) so you're recognized and then people may start offering you stuff. However, that's just a guess!
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