Morinaga Earl Grey Twig Chocolate (Product Information)

Image from Morinaga's web site.

On the Starship Enterprise, that's NCC-1701-D, not NCC-1701, you can imagine the ladies of Japanese descent wringing their hands and fretting about what to get Captain Picard for Valentine's Day this year. After all, the Japanese celebration of said holiday encourages women to give men chocolate rather than vice versa. Well, Japanese women of the distant future, Morinaga has your back and is proving that it is ahead of the times by offering an Earl Grey variety of its popular twig chocolate. Instead of having his usual cuppa, he can munch on one of these crispy treats and remember you when promotion time rolls around.

Of course, the women of the original Starship Enterprise had it easier as pleasing Captain Kirk was usually a simple matter of finding an alien babe of low moral fiber and setting them up for a coffee date. After that, nature would take its course and the Captain would be winking at you the next morning to let you know that you'd be moving ahead on the rankings in no time. The NCC-1701 was a swinging place and Captain Kirk didn't need a cup of Earl Grey to get his mojo started. 

Getting back to the matter at hand, I never reviewed Morinaga's Koeda (twig) chocolates because I tried them early on in my days in Japan and didn't really find them all that exciting. The chocolate tends to be on the soft side and not particularly exciting flavor-wise. I prefer chocolate with some good snap. They have little bits of almond in them and you'd think they'd have crispy bits, but they don't have enough to impart much of a strong almond flavor or a satisfying crunch. 

The "twig" name comes from the shape of the candy, which resembles the gnarly bark of trees in the eye's of some, and like something that may have come from a particular symmetrical bowel of an errant dog in the eyes of others. It wasn't on aesthetic grounds that I didn't have them, but simply that, while an adequate candy, they never really did it for me. They suffer from being rather insufferably boring, though the brand has been around for a very long time and I'm sure it has its fans. 

The earl grey flavor is a special summer variety and I'm sure it's meant to encourage people to enjoy a less "heavy" flavor in the heat. These are blended with bergamot to bring out the sense of Earl Grey, but even if I was able to buy this, I probably wouldn't. I tend to enjoy my tea best in liquid form.