Aero Setsubun Black Soy Chocolate Bar

The Aero black soy bar is Nestle Japan's second entry in the Setsubun marketing game.The red devil on the soy bean KitKat has been given a color job and been symbolically castrated by having his horns removed. This might be a girl demon. I'm not up on gender identification of devil and demon sorts.

I found this bar side-by-side with the Setsubun KitKat at Family Mart convenience store. Both bars are pretty much the same size, about 14 x 3 x 2 cm (5.5 x 1.2 x .8 in.) and cost 120 yen ($1.32). The bar has a bit of a rough-hewn pattern on the outside. I'm guessing this is supposed to resemble wood, but I can't imagine why. The information on the front says that this bar is .28% black soy. That small a quantity of a key ingredient seems to indicate that the people at Nestle Japan subscribe to the homeopathic notion that no matter how little of something you use, it can be effective.


The bar smells vaguely of soy flour (kinako) and has a gray bubbled interior. I ate my bar at room temperature, so the sometimes crunchy effect you get from eating catacombs of cold aerated chocolate didn't happen. Instead, I just got a soft, rich milk chocolate flavor and texture. It melts so quickly in your mouth that it seems like you've got a mouth full of warm fudge. It's a very sumptuous experience.

As milk chocolate bars go, this is very enjoyable. I've had Aero before, but mainly as smaller bars. I don't know if the tiny bit of black soybean in the bar enhanced the richness or simply that the thickness and room temperature chocolate made it seem more decadent, but I enjoyed this more than I remember regular Aero bars. That being said, I didn't taste the soy component at all.

Mister Donut Black Honey Soy Donut

Have you ever wondered why one particular variety of donut (or doughnut) is called "old-fashioned"? No, I hadn't really wondered about it either until I planned to write this post and started to do some research. Since the history of the donut can't be easily tracked. Let's face it, the concept of frying dough is one that could have occurred simultaneously all over the world once dough-making cuisine was common. It could have started with a clumsy pock-marked teen in a Dutch bakery in the 19th century who accidentally flung a bun ball into some oil nearby or it could have been a portly British fish and chip proprietor who ran out of things to fry.

At any rate, I never did track down why one particular variety is called an "old fashioned" donut. I found searching on the keywords to be too frustrating and it turned up too many results so I did what any good blogger would do: I gave up and figured someone smarter and more tenacious than me would give me the answer eventually.


One thing I didn't need to research was the fact that Mister Donut Japan pulled most of their old fashioned donut line some time last year. In particular, they removed their glazed old fashioned which my husband really liked. On January 6, 2010, they brought it back along with some new friends including the tasty number that I'm reviewing today. The old favorites that came back are plain, glazed, and chocolate and the new ones are green tea, green tea with chocolate, coffee, coffee with chocolate, and black honey kinako (soy flour). At present, there's a sale and all of these donuts are 100 yen ($1.09) each. That's about as cheap as they tend to get in Japan.

There's a Mister Donut about 9 minutes from our apartment, so we got super fresh ones. From a basic donut perspective, you really couldn't get a nicer basic bit of fried dough. The outside was a little crispy and the inside tender. The top was a little moist on mine where the black honey glaze had sunk in a bit. Before biting in, I gave it a sniff and it smelled like a regular, fresh donut.

At first, the black honey soy donut was sweet, but not incredibly sweet with a mild molasses and sugar-glazed flavor. The kinako added just a hint of soy. The donut became cumulatively sweeter as I ate it and by the end only felt a bit too sweet for my tastes. I had it with coffee, so I wonder if it might be too much if you just ate it without a beverage. I did note that this was one of the more fattening donuts at 328 calories.

Frankly, I don't know what black honey is, but I'm wondering if the glaze has anything to do with honey. Even the basic glazed donuts (both raised and old-fashioned) are called "honey". I wonder if the use of the word honey is just a naming convention. At any rate, this tasted like a mild "black sugar" (molasses/brown sugar) donut with kinako powder sprinkled on it. The flavor combination is very good, though I could have done with a little less sweetness and a little more kinako. I'd definitely recommend trying this though, and would get it again.

Mister Donut is offering desktop pictures for download here. If you'd like to put a food cue on your computer screen that will cause you to want to eat donuts everyday, you'll want to download them.