H & H Trading Milk Stick Wafers

I saw these "milk stick wafers" on offer many times at local 100 yen shops like Lawson 100 as well as the hybrid market/100 yen shop "My Basket". I generally had bigger fish to fry and turned up my nose like some snack food snob at this pedestrian offering. Actually, the truth wasn't that I was too good for cheap wafers, but rather that I'd been burned far too often when it came to wafers in Japan. Sure, they could deliver a nice crunch, and often they were calcium fortified, but generally there wasn't much going on in the flavor department.

Image from Amazon Japan.

While I hate to be one of "those" Americans who whines about Japanese sweets in comparison to what I could get back home, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to turn to that sort of loathsome behavior in the case of what we commonly call "sugar wafers" here. In Japan, they rarely put enough cream or sugar between them, or the wafers were too thick and tough. There was one type which was bland, but I liked it anyway and that is the vanilla whole grain ones pictured above. Before I realized that Japanese sweets that were "healthy" and not especially sweet were still packing enough carbohydrate calories to increase my pants size, I used to buy these all of the time and polish off a package in no more than four sittings (sometimes in as few as two). These had a nice earthy whole grain taste that I enjoyed, but they were not what one would call a "sugar wafer", despite appearances to the contrary.

The cookies that I picked up an Hankook Korean market may not look like a traditional sugar wafer, but that is what they taste like. They are just a little unusual in their construction. The outside is standard crispy wafer material and the inside is sweet filling. There are two differences, however, between this and other types of wafers. One is that the thicker construction of this tube style wafer makes it less crispy and ever so marginally tougher. I'm guessing this is intentional to stop them from being brittle enough to shatter at the drop of a case of them being loaded onto a truck. They are surprisingly resilient to clumsy treatment.

OK, there are actually 3 differences... they also have a goofy slogan written on them in English. The Japanese above it just says "milk stick wafers" so this is not a translation.

The other difference is that they have "milk" flavor filling. As I've said before, "milk" is actually a flavor in Japan. It either tastes like powdered milk that has been sweetened (that's when it's really bad) or like condensed milk (that's when it's not so bad). These resemble the latter. Every time I buy one of these, I yearn for some flavor depth of some sort. Would it kill them to add some vanilla? Seriously.

All that being said, these are perfectly serviceable sugar wafers. The main good point is the excellent portion control. When I have a proper bag of sugar wafers, I want to eat a lot of them, but two fingers (53 calories) are in one foil packet so you are discouraged from eating more than one serving. They are sweet enough without being too sweet, and the wafer design makes them far less crumbly than the plank-style ones (which tend to flake off everywhere).

All of that being said, and even given that they only cost $1.29 (119 yen), I wouldn't buy these again. For 99 cents, I can pick up a package of European sugar wafers at a discount store that will have more volume, less wasteful packaging and a better flavor (like hazelnut). It's not that these are bad. It's more that they aren't especially good.

Zackly Choco and Banana Cream Crackers

In addition to eating junk food on a regular basis, I also cook healthy food and investigate new recipes. In fact, I have an ambivalent relationship with food porn sites like Tastespotting and Foodgawker. I dislike their snobbery and picky nature when it comes to their pictures (that means they never accept my pictures and I'm bitter). That being said, I can't fault them for being high-handed about the types of food they'll show because on multiple occasions, I've seen what could be called recipes for what is often called "magic pudding". This is saltine crackers with chocolate pudding and whipped topping that is allowed to sit awhile and then you're supposed to think is a tasty pastry dessert.

I mention this because I've actually sampled the monstrosity of magic pudding before and the truth is that there is something appealing in the mixture of salty and sweet that comes from layering instant pudding on a cracker. The main problem with magic pudding is the part where it sits around for awhile and gets soft kills any sort of texture enjoyment. You essentially have soggy cracker with crappy pudding.

The Zackly cracker makers (made by a company in the Philippines called H & H) probably never heard of magic pudding, but they've got the basic notion down in this offering. Take three saltine crackers and layer chocolate between a pair and banana between the last and middle one. This equals sweet plus salty with subtle banana and chocolate flavors. The fact that the banana isn't too extreme is good since it's so easy to overdo fake banana.

Sorry for the washed out picture. I took 5 and this was the best one, but, really, it's just saltines with hardened goo between the layers... not much to see.

The cream doesn't extend out to the edges of the crackers so it's a very mild taste experience near the edges and only quite sweet and intense near the middle. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad one. As junk food goes, there's something oddly appealing about this. You know it's bad, but if you're in the right mood, it sort of works as a flavor combination and the crispy crackers are quite nice. One triple cracker combo is 135 calories, and it's a fairly good size snack for that. It's essentially the same calorie cost as a Pepperidge Farms Sausalito cookie, which most people are probably going to enjoy more than this.

My husband thought this was a bizarre combination and he wouldn't eat it again, but I liked it in the way that I used to like certain weird food combinations (e.g., cottage cheese with Doritos crumbled in it or French fries dipped in chocolate milk shakes) when I was a child. I can't recommend this, and I don't anticipate buying it again any time soon. It's the sort of thing I may develop a peculiar hankering for once every 3-5 years in a fit of hormonally induced craving or a revival of my child-like tastes in weird food. At only 100 yen ($1.21) for a whole package, it's hardly a financial risk to sample it if you spot it and the general description sounds interesting to you. Just keep your expectations appropriately low.

Peanut Cream Mochi Choco

When you first start shopping at grocery shops in Japan, your inclination is to seek out the familiar amongst the plethora of incomprehensible items. You don't do this because you are conservative about eating new things, but rather because you can't read a thing and don't want to end up buying something that is inedible. After all, it wouldn't do to pick up what you think is a can of tuna and find out it's really cat food.

When it comes to various sandwich spreads, there are shelves full of jams and jellies which are easy to identify. Occasionally, you'll find the odd jar of Skippy peanut butter, but it's more common to find paper containers of something called "peanut cream". Since it has pictures of peanuts on it and it's with the jelly and jam, it's natural to conclude that this is Japanese peanut butter. It's a mistake to reach such a conclusion. Peanut cream is a strange, glossy, rather sweet concoction which is the ugly, unpleasant cousin of peanut butter. It's no wonder that it's not very popular in Japan. I sent a carton of it to one of my friends in the U.S. to sample and he thought it was pretty disgusting, and I wouldn't call him a very fussy eater as long as the food is free.


My husband found the box of peanut cream mochi pictured at the top of this post at a 99 yen shop and we decided to give it a try despite the inherent danger of consuming anything which showcases the vile peanut cream. Our faith in the quality of the product should be enhanced by the statement (in English) which says, "Fashioned in a homemade style by a superb chef. Enjoy with tea or moments of relaxation!" There are 5 individually wrapped patties per box, each about 2 inches/5 cm. in diameter, for 99 yen (98 cents) so I doubt many superb chefs are on staff formulating these and it's hard to believe their claim.


The Japanese on the box promises "moist mochi with peanut", though when you open a packet, you mainly smell cheap chocolate with no dairy notes. When I cut open a patty, I could smell peanut butter. Mochi has little or no taste and mainly provides texture. To their credit, the mochi is moist and slightly chewy. It provides a marshmallow like texture, though it's not nearly as spongy and is not sweet. The chocolate on the outside is very thin and cracks easily. It's slightly bittersweet and rather flat and dull flavor wise. Surprisingly, the peanut filling is like super soft peanut butter and not peanut cream. The chocolate is cool on the tongue and does not melt in your mouth. It cracks apart. It's surprisingly enjoyable for such a cheaply made treat. The chocolate is substandard, but the peanut filling and mochi steal the show. Perhaps it's just as well that the chocolate is crappy because it allows the other ingredients to shine through more brightly. Each patty has 64 calories, 1.2 grams of fat, and 13.2 carbs. The main ingredients are maltose, sugar, mochi, starch, vegetable oil, and peanut cream. I'm guessing there are a lot of bad fats in it.

These are made by a company called H&H trading which has no online presence or company information. I've never seen these for sale anywhere other than the local 99 yen shop, so I wonder if they're not the sort of thing one could track down and are just something you find by fortunate happenstance. After these sold out, they were not restocked so I haven't seen them again. However, they're worth a sample if you stumble across a box.