Kabaya Jersey Milk Candy

I grew up around cows, and I always thought they were cute. To this day, seeing the image of a cow warms my heart a little bit. I just realized that, if I were a former farm boy instead of a woman, that last line would seem mighty creepy. Trust me when I say that I never had an inappropriate relationships with a bovine, unless you consider the one my family had as a pet until my parents sent her off to become a freezer full of steaks and burgers. (Yes, I cried.)


There are a lot of "milk" flavor treats in Japan. I'm never sure what they're supposed to taste like, and some of them don't seem to taste like anything, but when I unwrapped one of these candies, I knew by the color what it was going to taste like. The candy tastes like sweetened condensed milk. It isn't creamy, chewy, or silky despite having cream powder and cream cheese and boasting a content of 8.5% milk. It is nice hard candy though which you can suck on for awhile and fill your mouth with the flavor of the type of sweet condensed milk that you can buy in tubes in Japanese markets and squeeze on strawberries.

There are 26 candies (at 20 calories per candy) in the bag and I found it for 98 yen (about a dollar). In fact, the price was one of the biggest reasons that I decided to sample these. Normally, I'm not really drawn to this sort of thing, but I thought "what the heck" when I noticed how cheap it was. I was really on the fence with my rating on this, but not because it isn't well-made or enjoyable. "Happy" ratings are reserved for things which I think I'll buy again, and I'm not sure I'd buy this again because I'm just not a huge fan of condensed milk. However, if I were, I'd certainly get these again.