Izumi Seika Mugi Mugi Cocoa Cereal Snack

When I was a child, my mother used to buy "Popeye's" puffed wheat and rice cereal. It came in plastic bags with a picture of Popeye smiling his bizarre grimace in the middle. Both of these cereals had several things in common. One factor was that they were very simple types of cereal. There were no heart-, clover-, or star-shaped marshmallows. They didn't turn your milk funny colors or leave a sugary sludge in the bottom of the bowl. They didn't even crunch. The primary reason my mother bought them was that they were insanely cheap. While they were also very low calorie (about 50 calories for 1-2 cups).

The Japanese aren't much for cereal. In fact, they have the puniest cereal sections you're likely to see in any developed country. I've spoken to many Japanese folks about what they eat for breakfast and why they aren't fans of cereal. Mainly, I'm told that it doesn't fill them up. You know what? They're right. Cereal doesn't fill me up either and I rarely eat it. My husband loves to eat it as a late-night snack, but I tend to just avoid it altogether.

Though the Japanese aren't eating their puffed grains cereal for breakfast, they do sometimes eat it as a snack, especially if they're still among the short pants wearing set. Enter this puffed wheat snack, which doesn't have Popeye's ugly mug on it, but it has an apparently animate stalk of wheat that is interested in enjoying a cup of cocoa.

Unlike the spinach-loving, muscle-bound sailor's puffed wheat cereal, this stuff is not low calorie. A 40-gram serving has 170 calories. It's not only the carbohydrate goodness adding much need bulk to your fat cells, but the ton of sugar and vegetable oil they add to the recipe. Not to worry though, this also includes your RDA of Sucralose so that it's sweeter without adding in more calories.

As for as snacks go, this is, essentially, chocolate cereal. The back of the bag shows that you can add milk to it or sprinkle it on ice cream. However, it's also intended to just be eaten out of the bag as a somewhat crispy, somewhat soft snack. It's lightly sweet with a mild, but appreciable cocoa flavor. It's sweet enough without being cloying so that you won't have that "icky" overly sugary feel in your mouth if you do just eat it out of the package. It also has a nice "wheaty" kick to it that adds some depth to the flavor. I like that sort of whole grain flavor, even when mixed with chocolate and sugar.

The strange thing about this product is that the manufacturer seems to have very recently terminated its confectionary division. That means that this may well have been their last foray into making chocolate cereal treats. Given that this is nothing special, I wouldn't be surprised if sales weren't over the top spectacular. The company's main deal seems to be simply selling wheat.

I liked this fine, but I wasn't over the moon about it. If I was still a kid and eating cereal, I'd be all over this compared to my bland, boring Popeye options. Since I'm not a child anymore, this is okay, but nothing to get excited about.

Random Picture #113

As is the case in all countries, there are various categories of snacks. I tried to sample from a variety of types including otsumami (snacks to be consumed with beverages, especially alcoholic ones), kid's snacks, grandma's snacks, cheap snacks, traditional snacks (bean cakes, sembei), and modern snacks that riff on Western things. Because of that wide range of things, it was impossible for me to try everything, even within a discrete category. One of the things that I wanted to try, but never got around to was these tiny little snack sticks. On the left are salami sticks and the right are cheese sticks. Each is about an inch long and about the width of a pencil. At only 9 yen (11 cents), I knew they weren't going to be high grade snack food, but that was part of what made me want to sample them. I like to try potentially bad stuff as much as potentially good stuff. Unfortunately, I didn't buy them when I took the picture, and forgot which convenience store was carrying them. Time ran out on my opportunity to try these low-grade snacks, sadly... well, perhaps not so sad. ;-)

If you've tried these, please leave me a comment and let me know what you thought of them. 

Lawson VL Jumbo Dorayaki

I've always been curious about the origin of various foods and wary of the notion that any food was solely invented by one particular culture. Long-time and attentive readers will recall that I question the notions of “Japanese bread” and “Japanese cheesecake” as these are not Japanese at all, but minor variations on European cuisine (as are many other baked food items). All of that being said, I think there are some things which make sense as food concepts which likely were "discovered" simultaneously in various cultures. Pancakes would fall into the category of things that you could easily see being created all over the world without input from other cultures. How imaginative does a person have to be to think about adding (any type of) flour to liquid and then deciding to pour into onto a hot, oiled surface?

Dorayaki is something which I haven't reviewed before because it is most often sold filled with chunky sweet red bean paste (tsubuan) and I'm more of a fan of koshian (finer paste that has had the skins sifted out and has more of a smooth fudge-like texture). As time has gone by, I've grown a lot mellower about coarser versions and as our departure from Japan approached, I became more and more attracted to traditional Japanese sweets including those with chunky-style sweet red beans.

It's important to say at this point that I didn't go 23 years in Japan having never eaten dorayaki. It's a very common treat and I'd been exposed to it before, but didn't really pay much attention to it when I ate it. My first really positive experience with it came at a Japanese all-you-can-eat buffet that had a dessert bar which included some damn fine dorayaki. This 100 yen ($1.22) super large (about the diameter of my open hand with splayed fingers) “jumbo dorayaki” wasn't something that I expected to live up to that aforementioned red-bean-filled pancake, but it certainly was more accessible since it was on sale at the local Lawson 100 shop a few minutes from our apartment.

Dorayaki is basically two pancakes sandwiching some sort of filling, usually bean paste. The main question is not what it will taste like, but what the textures will be like. Will the cake be sticky and weird on the outside (sometimes they are), dry (ditto), or tough (double ditto)? Will the beans be too sweet or too bland? In the the case of this dorayaki, the pancake had a very nice flavor and texture and was only slightly tacky on the outside. It was tender and appropriately sweet for a relatively bland wrapper for the bean filling. The beans themselves were quite sweet and lacked a strong “beany” taste. I could have done with a bit more flavor depth on that front, but I can't say it was terribly disappointing and I felt that it was sweet and had a satisfyingly dense texture.

I can't say this is the best dorayaki ever, but I can say that the value for the size and price is on the amazing side. It is quite tasty and I'd definitely buy it again if I had the chance. It's important to note that this really is a "whole lotta dorayaki" at 490 calories for the entire thing. A quarter makes a serviceable snack, half makes for a nice continental breakfast, and the whole thing for an enjoyable pig-out. You can guess which I went for.

Riska Moist Chocolate Corn Snack

There are a lot of things about actually living in Japan rather than acquiring Japanese snacks through various channels in another country which make the experience unique. One is that I can never help people out when they ask me how to find something outside of Japan. I have many opportunities to feel profoundly useless to people on multiple occasions. Another is that I have tastes which are "normalized" to Japanese food such that they don't strike me as profoundly unique compared to other reviewers. I've noticed that people who infrequently review Japanese snacks tend to rate them more highly than I do. I think this is because they are comparing them to a different standard than me.

This notion comes to mind as I review this snack because I'm sure I'm experiencing it differently than those who haven't sampled most of Riska's line of products. If you've never tried their salty corn snacks, you won't realize that this is simply a chocolate-covered version of their basic corn puff recipe. In fact, it tastes almost exactly like their corn potage snack without the savory powdery coating. These are covered with a very satisfying layer of chocolate which is quite sweet, but still potent. Quite often, these cheap (80 grams for 100 yen/2.8 oz. for $1.30) snacks have very weak chocolate flavor, but these are quite good and flavorful. The initial taste is a burst of milk chocolate sweetness, but it is chased by the corn snack flavor which feels like it just doesn't belong. I'm not sure if I perceive them that way because I so strongly associate this taste with salty snacks or if they really aren't a great pairing. It feels like something like chocolate-covered Doritos, only not nearly as gross.

I'm rather torn about these. They're soft and crunchy at the same time and very satisfying on a textural level. They're sweet and strong, but the flavors don't quite match on my taste buds. Frankly, they strike me as  the sort of "junk food" that I could easily see eating the entire bag of and then being filled with regret that I spent 466 calories (about 12 calories per piece) on something that wasn't completely worth it. Then, I could see doing it again in the future. This is classic "good" bad food (including processed fat) which is easy to gobble down in great quantity, but if you pause and attempt to savor every bite, you'll probably not be nearly as happy with the experience. So, I'm offering this a conditional "happy" rating. If you're looking to pig out, these are great. If you're looking for a high quality experience to linger over, there's nothing to see here, move along.

Lawson VL Choco Pie

There are a lot of things in Japan called "choco pie". One of the most popular resembles a moon pie. It's a couple of cakey slabs with vanilla cream in the center and covered in chocolate. Even though they're not very good, I used to eat them regularly when I first came to Japan. I think I did it because they were relative innocuous looking, and I had not yet developed the high level of gustatory "courage" that I have now.

These Lawson VL Choco Pies are different because, well, they are actual pies. They're puff pastries with a toothpaste squirt size stream of chocolate "cream" down the center. For a mere 100 yen ($1.24) for 4 small pies, I'm not exactly complaining about that or the fact that the pie is rather pale and anemic-looking.

Among the ingredients are flour, "chocolate flour paste" (yummy sounding!), margarine, and shortening. It's pretty clear this is both a carb and bad fat festival. Still, they're only 151 calories of nastiness as long as one limits oneself to one pie.

The pie itself has an extremely familiar taste.There are other types of puff pastry pies on the market which either use the same pastry (but cooked a bit crisper and darker). I'm guessing Lawson's obtains the basic pie material from that company, or that this is the equivalent of "store brand" varieties back home. That is, the store name is slapped onto something which may be sold under another brand elsewhere.

The chocolate cream tastes a little like consumer-level chocolate pudding. This doesn't really matter since there is so little of it that you don't get much of a taste of it at all. That being said, the pie part isn't bad at all. It has a nice "baked goods" flavor to it with a certain floury nature and fatty moistness. If you like the flavor of raw pie dough, there may be something in this for you.

I'm rather torn about this. It's the sort of bad food that I might crave once in a blue moon, but not the sort of thing I'd seek out early or often. I will definitely finish the packet, though I'll probably toss the remainder in the freezer and eat it rather slowly when I get a particular craving for white flour carbs.

Yaokin Yaki Imo Youkan

Only after typing the name of this blog post did I realize what a tongue twister it might be. Perhaps it would be an enjoyable exercise to attempt to say it five times fast. Perhaps, not.

Youkan is a traditional Japanese sweet which is usually made of jellied beans and sugar. It's sold in brown, green, or yellowish bricks in a variety of shops. I have had red-bean-based youkan before (which looks brownish), though I have never purchased it myself. Salesmen at my former office used to buy it occasionally and give it to the office staff who remained in the office as a treat from whatever city they traveled to for business. Note that this sort of procuring of regional treats for the office-bound coworkers is a very common thing in Japan.

I remember feeling that youkan was okay, but too sweet and lacking in strong flavor. Sure, it tasted like beans, but red beans don't necessarily carry a strong taste by themselves, and less so in youkan form. I think the fact that youkan is made with agar (a seaweed derivative used for gelatin-style foods) dilutes the overall concentration of whatever the main flavoring element is. If you look at the youkan samples on the Wikipedia page, some of them are translucent rather than opaque, which shows that the beans or whatever are thinned and therefore not as intense in taste. To me, youkan tasted a bit like intensely flavored sweetened water drained off of beans you'd cooked.

Since I can't imagine buying youkan in a large quantity (which is how it's generally sold, though not always) for myself, I jumped at the chance to sample this single-serving (26 grams/.9 oz.) sweet potato version when I found it at Seiyu department store. I can't remember the price, but this was in the kid's sweets section and couldn't have been more than 50 yen (55 cents).This is made by Yaokin, a company whose kid's snacks I have reviewed on several previous occasions.

It annoys me that there is no nutrition information on the package or in the company's catalog (which I downloaded specifically in the hopes of getting such information) since I like to keep tabs on the calories of snacks I eat. I found a web site which offers basic nutritional information on Japanese foods which asserts that youkan in general has 89 calories per 30 grams, which would make this snack weigh in at 77 calories (if their stats are correct). The site also asserts that youkan is rich in fiber.

This youkan actually tasted like, well, sweet potato. It's a bit sweeter because it's made with sugar, but it also has an intensity or aftertaste to it which is either a result of the processing of the youkan, or the way in which the sweet potato itself is handled. It's not a bad taste necessarily, but it takes some getting used to and may not appeal to everyone. It tastes like concentrated Japanese sweet potato skin, though only as an aftertaste, so it's not too overwhelming but I could easily see how some might actively find it unpleasant.

The texture is one of the main reasons to choose to consume youkan. It's smooth, easy to bite into, and a bit like very firm, finely grainy gelatin. I think that it's supposed to be appealing in summer if you chill it, though I ate this at room temperature. It's good, but may be an acquired taste.

I was rather torn about this as a treat. I enjoyed the flavor and texture, and felt the sweetness balance was just right. The main problem I have is that the second ingredient (after sweet potato) is sugar and the aftertaste issue. That being said, if I were in the proper mood, I could definitely seeing buying this again. I can't say that it has inspired me to sample all sorts of youkan, but this sweet potato version is worth a revisit.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment.

Sequoia Chocolate Milk Bar

Some products come across as the "poor man's" version of a better-known brand name item. Drinks like RC Cola or Shasta cola come to mind as Coca-Cola wannabes. The Sequoia chocolate wafer bar comes across as the poor man's KitKat, though I don't know if it actually came before everyone's favorite chocolate-covered wafer. The company that makes Sequoia, Furuta, has been in business since 1952, but Furuta doesn't have a full product history on its site so I can't give them credit for being first if credit is indeed due.



You can buy Sequoia bars in 3-packs for 99 yen ($1.16) or as single bars for about 40 yen (47 cents). The multi-packs are available only in certain types of stores. A single Sequoia is about the size of 2.5 fingers of a KitKat, so they cost quite a bit less.



Since I last tried a Sequoia chocolate bar, they seem to have changed. I remember them being coated in thing chocolate which had little flavor and was rather thin. I recall the wafers being very brittle and overly flaky. To be fair, this was 18-19 years ago so they may have changed a long time ago and I just took a long time to revisit one.



The bar now is covered in relatively thick, solid chocolate. It is covered in typical Japanese milk chocolate (marginally bittersweet) which includes cocoa butter. When you look at a cross section, it seems to have a layer of a different sort of chocolate above the top wafer, but I couldn't taste any difference in texture or taste. This is unlike the caramel Sequoia which had a rather softer bit of caramel above the top wafer which yielded easily when bitten into.

The bar smells faintly of cocoa and has a fairly strong, but somehow flat flavor. Some chocolate has a nutty, milky, or fruity flavor, but this doesn't. It's like a strong cup of hot chocolate made with cheap cocoa powder. It's quite sweet, though rich and slightly bittersweet and that helps offset the sugary nature. The wafers are crispy, but you lose the sense of them in the firm chocolate. I think that the KitKat formula works better to reveal the nature of the wafers because it's softer and yields as you bite into it.

In my opinion, this bar could do with less chocolate coating and more wafer and with a softer chocolate coating, but it's fine overall. The portion control is pretty good. One bar is 131 calories and it feels substantial enough that you won't want another. I think this is a resistible bar which wouldn't be bad to keep in your desk or kitchen for times when you really, really want something sweet. I'd buy it again, but only if I were trying to make it easier on myself not to indulge and intentionally bought a less than optimal bar. So, I can only provisionally offer a "happy sumo" (would buy again) rating.

Shoei Delicy Crunch Chocolate

One of my earliest memories of shopping for snacks in Japan is of this particular chocolate bar. It used to be sold at a convenience store nearby that was called "L & W". Those initials stand for "Liquor & Wine". The store was about a two-minute walk (tops) from our apartment and in addition to booze, they sold various snack foods.

They were one of the few shops two decades ago that was open past 7:00 pm and we were on a "English school (eikaiwa) teacher's schedule" at the time. That means we started work at 1:00 pm and finished around 9:00 or 10:00 pm. While the markets were long-closed by the time we got home, the liquor shop was usually open and a popular place to browse for our early experiences with Japanese food. They converted to a "Sankus" ("Thanks") convenience store after about a decade. Eventually, the elderly owners went out of business entirely as the glut of convenience stores in our area pushed them out. It was rather sad because they were in business for about 15 years of our time here and we frequently went to the shop. It's funny the things one little candy bar can make you remember.

When we first purchased this bar, for what I'm guessing was about 30 yen (33 cents) as that is about what it costs now, we couldn't read Japanese and it was a surprise to learn that it was a small chocolate crunch bar. It's pretty small at 9 cm x 5 cm (3.5 in. x 2 in.) and kitschy with its Japanese money motif. I don't recall if we bought it often, but I do know we bought it at least several times because it was so approachable among Japanese snack foods. We bought this bar at Seiyu supermarket, but you can probably find it in any store with a fairly large kid's sweets section.



This candy is small and cheap with a little card in it that is a fake 1000 yen bill that is a good miniature representation of a real bill, except for the fact that the fake bill says "kid's bank" on the back of it. So, it's pretty obviously designed for children. That means that one can't expect much from the quality of the candy. A lot of kid's candy is too sweet and poorly made.

When you open the package, the chocolate smells like sweet chocolate, and has a surprisingly appealing scent. The texture is a little soft, but firmer than many Japanese chocolates. I noticed that cocoa butter is not on the ingredients list for the chocolate. It has "cocoa powder" and "cocoa mass". My guess is that it is, perhaps, not as fatty as some other brands, and the flavor is definitely not as intense as some other Japanese chocolates. The crunchies are quite good, but not terribly crisp, and there could be a few more of them.

It's actually quite a decent candy and pleasantly mild. It's a better quality, less sweet candy for kids than the usual kid's sweets, though it's certainly not on par with the big ticket company's (Meiji, Lotte, Morinaga) consumer chocolates that are designed with a broader market in mind. For a cheap candy though, this is not a bad crunch bar at all, and makes for a nice Japan-specific souvenir to parcel out to more timid sorts back home. I'd certainly buy this again if I was in the mood for a crunch bar. In fact, I'd buy it before a Crunky because it's smaller and the puffs are just regular corn puffs instead of malt puffs and carry only texture and no flavor.

Tochoco Rice Chocolate

In our early years in Japan, my husband and I sampled a few bits of candy from local supermarkets, and I swear this tiny rice chocolate bar was one of those things we tried. It's about 8 cm (3.1 in.) long and 2.5 cm wide (.98 in.), and clearly marketed for kids. These sorts of candies are usually found in the sections of supermarkets with cheap candy in small packaging. This one sells for about 30 yen (33 cents).


As is so often the case with small companies, I spent an inordinate amount of time doing research and came up with little in the way of results. The maker, Tochoco, has no web site. However, I did find a 2007 "Confectionery Directory" which included a little information on the company such as the fact that they are located in Kanagawa prefecture and only have 70 employees. It's rather remarkable that they seem to have quite a lot of on-line outlets selling their candy (and this one in particular) given their small size. Besides this rice chocolate bar, they sell chocolate-covered corn snacks and a sort of puffed "cocoa ring" which resembles a chocolate Cheeto shaped like a flower without a center.



I think early sampling of this type of chocolate is why my husband and I sought out imported candy early on in our stay. While there are many very fine types of high quality consumer candy in Japan, there are also some pretty lackluster offerings. This bar represents some pretty low quality chocolate. The chocolate is gritty, grainy and super, super sweet. The flavor is bittersweet even though these are marketed as "mild chocolate". The rice puffs add some texture, but they are not crispy rice puffs. They're like puffed rice cereal that is relatively soft. The calorie count for this wisp of a bar, is given per 100 grams at 560 calories and the weight of the individual bar is not given. I'd guess this is about 50 calories though.

Everything about this bar screams "cheap". It's not just the price, the package design, and the poor quality chocolate (which does list cocoa butter as an ingredient, but you really can't detect it). There's also the fact that the bar itself looks very slap-dash in its presentation. This is rather unusual in Japan. The picture of the bar above may look like it has been damaged, but there were no fragments in the package so this is the way it came off the assembly line.

This was an interesting curiosity, and I did eat it all, but I wouldn't buy it again. If anything, this bar is worth sampling for some perspective about Japanese sweets. Based on my reviews and experiences with big brand bars, one might conclude that the consumer snack market is a paradise of high quality treats. That really isn't so. If you buy the "right" (or "wrong") products, you'll find that there is substandard fare out there as well.

Daiichi Chocolate Cream Bar

Armies of snacks go unnoticed by me when I shop. I bypass them for the same reason that most people do, their packaging doesn't do anything to grab me or illustrate the food contained within very well. The chocolate ice milk bars pictured above have been in the freezer case of the local 99-yen shop for ages, but I never gave them a second glance. Part of the reason for this was that I always saw them from the side and I thought they were these tubes of liquid that you freeze to make Popsicle-like treats (an ice pop). It also didn't help that these were shoved in a corner of the freezer case as if they were trying to hide from customers.

These are made by an ice cream and ice milk manufacturer named Daiichi. It's a very small company which only has 40 employees and was established in 1950. They have several interesting looking confections, few of which I have seen in my local markets. Their line includes monaka (ice cream or milk wrapped in a cake-cone like shell), cones, ice milk and frozen confection bars, and daifuku-style frozen treats (ice cream or milk wrapped in mochi). They also make ice cream for store brands on consignment. If you've ever been to the Peacock or Co-op (Coop) markets and bought their brand of vanilla ice cream in cups, it was made by Daiichi.


They also make ice cream products for Lawson's 99-yen shops. I saw the package of bars that I'm reviewing today in the frozen foods case at our local Lawson's. There were both chocolate and vanilla varieties and I was drawn to them after investigating the calorie information on the back and finding they were the "cheapest" treat among the ice cream and ice milk selections. There are 3 servings with only 84 calories per bar. I decided to buy the chocolate one because it looked like Fudgesicles. As is so often the case in Japan, things aren't always as they appear.


The inside of this bar is actually ice-cream-like ice milk. It's very soft and creamy with a firm shell. The shell is fairly thin and is clearly there to allow the ice milk to be eaten on a stick instead of out of a cup with a spoon. It's a very interesting concept and has one drawback; the stick isn't inserted into the shell but directly into the ice milk so it's easy to yank the stick right out if you try to slide the bar out of the wrapper by pulling "down" on it. It goes right back in though, and seems to hold just fine while you eat the bar.

The bar has a light cocoa scent and the outer shell, which I licked at first because I thought it was like a Fudgesicle, has very little flavor at all. The taste when you bite into the bar and get the ice cream is rather mild cocoa and not very sweet, but both the chocolate flavor and sweetness compound on your tastes buds as you eat more and more. You can tell they skimped on the cocoa to some extent, though fans of mild chocolate may prefer this over the intense bittersweet flavor of some Japanese chocolate.

Each bar is 85 ml., and the same size as a standard Popsicle. This is not, by far, premium or fabulous ice cream. It is, however, a really nice frozen treat for someone trying to watch their weight and their wallet. It's sufficiently sweet and enjoyable, and may even quash a chocolate craving for some. I wish the chocolate flavor was deeper, but I have no quibbles about the soft, light texture. The texture was super creamy and reminded me of a marriage between whipped cream and ice cream.

I compare this directly with the Glico Calorie Control line of frozen treats when I evaluate it. That line of treats, which include monaka as well as cups of ice milk, sell for 160 yen ($1.77) each and have 80-some ml. of ice milk (similar to one of these bars). The Calorie Control line chocolate ice milk is very similar to these bars in flavor, that is weak, but serviceable. Given the choice of buying chocolate cream bars for 99 yen ($1.10) and getting three 84-calorie frozen sweets or just one Glico chocolate chocolate chip cup of ice milk at 80 calories for 160 yen, I'd choose these in a heartbeat.* My high rating is based on a combination of price, calories, and texture more so than a stellar taste experience (and the fact that I expect to buy these repeatedly).


*Note that I didn't compare ingredients since neither the Glico ice milk nor this is very impressive. They're not nutritious or good for you, but rather attractive as occasional frozen treats to fill an urge for ice cream without a ton of calories. This has sugar, grape sugar, and palm oil (all bad news) and the Glico is chock full artificial sweeteners.

Taiko Sembei

When Japanese people explain sembei, they sometimes call it a cracker and at other times a cookie. It turns out that sembei is one of those words like "biscuit" in English. That is, it can apply to more than one type of food. Taiko sembei is not a rice cracker, but a dense cookie.


The reason these are called "taiko" (Japanese drum) sembei is that two cookies are wrapped together in a little shrink-wrapped package. The cookies are meant to resemble the two ends of a drum. I bought a big package with 10 double packets in it for about 200 yen ($2.22). That means that each generously sized cookie is only 10 yen (11 cents) each. That makes these much cheaper than Japanese-made Western-style cookies.

These are made by a company named Nanao Seika. The company started doing business in 1957 by making "crackers" (these cookies are called crackers on their web site). Their main products continue to be hard cookies and crackers, but they also make doughnuts and fruit gelatin snacks (called "jelly" in Japan, but they are essentially what we call gelatin or "Jell-O".) Their line of products is limited, and as far as I know they have no "signature" products which are commonly exported, though I'd be surprised if their peanut sembei or these taiko sembei didn't make their way into Asian supermarkets in other countries.


These cookies are dense, dry and brittle. There are three or four roasted and unsalted peanuts in the center of each cookie. The cookie itself is lightly sweet and tastes of toasted flour, margarine, and mild sweetness. They are incredibly crunchy and have a flavor which is just a bit shy of being burnt.

The only thing which I'm not necessarily happy about is that they're a little dense in calories for a cookie which isn't very sweet. The calorie information states that there are 475 calories for 100 grams, but they don't give the weight of the entire bag. My unreliable kitchen scale places 6 cookies at 100 grams. That makes each cookie about 70-80 calories, and I'm always going to eat two because of the packaging style and the fact that they will most certainly be no good if they are stale.

I really like these, but texture often factors more strongly into my enjoyment of things than taste. These are not very sweet and they lack the flaky nature of most butter cookies. They remind me of what might happen if you flattened some yellow cake batter into as dense a disc as possible and then cooked it to the "dark" toast setting. I'd definitely buy these again, though not incredibly often, but I can't guarantee that others would find them as appealing as I do.

Sequoia Tiramisu Chocolate Wafer

Sequoia wafer bars (made by Furuta) have a lot to offer which is attractive to me. For one thing, I like the size and the bars look great and are nicely packaged. It's about the size of two and a half KitKat fingers combined. It also carries a fair amount of heft to it and has a more prominent wafer component than a KitKat. It's also cheap. One bar is between 40-60 yen. I got mine for 53 yen (about 50 cents) at a Family Mart near my apartment.


The main problem with the Sequoia bar is that the cheapness carries a lot of the same issues that cheap chocolate worldwide has. That is, it tends to mistake sweetness for good quality and flavor. I've tried 4 types of Sequoia previously (chocolate, strawberry, caramel, and salty vanilla), and the only one I was really pleased with was the caramel one. My expectations were pretty low of this bar.

Unfortunately, this was an okay candy bar, but not great. A really good tiramisu candy experience should have complexity to it. It should offer the coffee, chocolate, and Mascarpone cheese flavors in layers. Since this bar has a chocolate shell, a white chocolate filling, and wafers, you'd think it'd be possible to pull this off. Unfortunately, it all just tastes like coffee-flavored chocolate. If it was good, smooth, and deep coffee flavor, that'd probably be enough, but it tastes like instant coffee chocolate.

On the bright side, the texture of the bar is great. The chocolate is smooth and the wafers are fresh and crispy. The inner white chocolate is a little soft. The only thing is that my front teeth hurt after eating half of it from where the sugar built up on my teeth. It's that sweet.

If you like really sweet chocolate covered wafers and cheap coffee chocolates, this might really do something for you. If you want something with some depth of flavor, you might want to look elsewhere.

Sequoia Strawberry

There's something about a multi-pack that makes food more attractive. I'd normally refuse to buy a strawberry Sequoia bar, but seeing 3 of them for 100 yen (a dollar) at the local 99 yen shop lured me into an impulse buy. It must be the aesthetic of the repeated packages lined up so nicely. It helps that my husband will at least try almost anything that is strawberry flavored and sweet.


The main problem for my husband is that a lot of Japanese sweets aren't sweet enough. He's pretty much in line with the market that makes candy bars back home whereas I'm always whining about things being too much. At any rate, anything that is based on white chocolate has a higher chance of meeting his approval and a lower chance of meeting mine. With that in mind, let me say that he liked these quite a lot, and me, well, not so much.


A sniff of these bars revealed the vague smell of strawberries and sugar. The flavor was decently of strawberries, but it's very sweet. There's not quite enough of a tart strawberry edge to offset the sweetness. The texture was pleasant enough because the wafers were nice and crispy. The pink and white coating though was quite soft.

For my tastes, this was too mild on the strawberry front and too strong on the sweet chocolate going on. It reminded me quite a lot of the Senga Sengana KitKat, though it actually didn't possess the same throat burning sugary qualities. I wouldn't buy this again for myself, but if you love super sweet candy and strawberry, it may be something worth sampling.

Pucca Chocolate Biscuits

The is a plethora of tiny cookies with thin shells and a cream filling on sale at supermarket checkouts in Japan. The only one I'd sampled before was Koala's March vanilla, and I was not a fan of it. Since most of these cookies are designed for kids and are quite cheap, I hadn't really felt compelled to sample another until I read ebidebby's review of Pucca creamy caramel. The fact that the Pucca cookies are covered in pretzel rather than a thin cookie shell piqued my interest. Pucca seem to be a sweet version of Combos pretzel snacks, albeit ones with a thinner pretzel portion.


A 58 gram (2 oz.) box of these cookies costs about a dollar (98 yen). There are 272 calories in the whole box and the ingredients include cocoa masses, cocoa butter, rye flour, butter oil, and cheese powder. Fortunately, the cheese powder didn't lend any bizarre flavors to the cookies as was the case with my previous experience with chocolates that had cheese powder. The rye flour, no doubt, makes the brown pretzel shell.

The shell is bland and unsalted, but carries a distinctive taste and smell. Before biting into one of these, they smell just like your average pretzel. Despite how thin the shell is, it lends a good flavor to the mix. This is unlike the white cookie shells on similar cookies which don't seem to do much other than hold the cream filling. The chocolate center is soft, but not liquid. It's a bit like a firmer, less sweet, and milk chocolate version of an Oreo cookie center. The sweetness level is perfect and eating a lot at once does not take you up to a cloying level of cumulative sweetness.

I really enjoyed these, much to my surprise. I'd very much recommend sampling them and would buy them again if I was in the mood. I could see having a craving for Nutella fulfilled by these in a pinch. The filling doesn't have hazelnut flavoring, but it does have the same satisfying sense of chocolatey richness as Nutella.

If you like the little characters in the Pucca commercial, you can download some desktop pictures featuring them here.

Hungry's Maple Caramel Chewing Candy

Sometimes I run across something which makes me very curious about exactly what it is. This item appealed to me on two fronts. First of all, what the heck is "chewing candy"? Second, it has a weird name. Why would anyone name this "Hungry's"? One of these questions could be answered by making the purchase and sampling the product. The other will remain a relative mystery.

This is made by mega-food maker Meiji, but it appears to be a separate division which handles gum, hard candies, caramels, and small children's toys that are sold in the candy section of Japanese markets (among other things). The fact that Meiji is so huge that they separate out their candy and gum section from the chocolates and other products is a good indication of how huge they are.


I found this candy at a discount snack shop. This was the first time I had ever encountered it. It's smallish, about 10 cm long (about 4 in.) and 2 cm wide (.8 in.) and only cost 28 yen (about a quarter). I noticed that the package doesn't really give you a good idea of what the candy is going to look like. You can see an illustration of a portion of it hidden behind the logo on the right. When you see the candy, you can see why they are trying to draw more attention to the maple syrup aspect on the left. It's not a pretty sight.

I didn't take a picture of a cross section of this because it looks the same inside as the end you can see in the picture above. You can see that little bits of something are studded in the "log" of stuff this is made of. The ingredients include almonds, hazelnuts, pineapple, and mango. I'm guessing that these little specs are a mixture of those things.

This smells vaguely sweet with a whisper of maple. It's quite tacky to the touch so it's best to eat it from the wrapper. When I took my picture, I put it on a tissue and it stuck to it (but I was able to pry it off). The texture, smell and general sense of this is like a softer Bit-O-Honey bar. If you've never had that, the texture of this is like a nougat crossed with taffy. It's easy to bite into and chew. It neither goes down like a caramel because it doesn't tend to have that slick, melting away feel nor like a Hi-Chew because it lacks that latex-like chewing gum feel. The flavor doesn't really carry much of the fruit bits or nuts. It has a nice maple flavor. It's sweet, but not throat burning or overbearing. Since maple sugar is the first ingredient, this is not surprising.

As for the name, I believe it is supposed to imply that you can eat this when you're hungry. The fruit and nuts bits are supposed to make this a more fortifying experience. I don't know if that is actually true, I only know that I liked it and would definitely buy it again. For 28 yen, it's a steal.

Nico Nico Niccori Jelly

These Japanese "jelly" candies are really just gelatin in disguise. This is something which I sort of forgot when I bought this bag of "jellies", but was quickly reminded of when I sampled them. These are essentially prepared, all weather (as in they require no refrigeration), individually wrapped tubs of gelatin made from kelp instead of animal parts. I must say, looking at it that way either makes these much more attractive (hurray! no animal died in the making of these gelatin treats) or less attractive (yuck! eating seaweed derivatives).

I don't know many people who make their own gelatin desserts in Japan. There are boxes of gelatin as well as plain gelatin available in shops, but the variety and quantity is very limited. Most people buy these individually packaged versions. I guess that the joy of slowly moldering Jell-O in the fridge and it's fake fruity jiggliness hasn't caught on here.

back row: orange, melon, pineapple front row: grape, strawberry

You can get about one-cup-size tubs or ones with tiny amounts of gelatin like the ones I sampled. If I had to guess at the volume in one of the containers in the package I bought, I'd say it's about a tablespoon. The bag I bought lured me in because it was incredibly cheap. It contains 27 itty bitty tubs of gelatin for only about a dollar (98 yen). There are five flavors, grape, orange, melon, strawberry, and pineapple.

The first ingredient in these is grape sugar and puree, fruit sugar and puree from the various fruits represented by the flavors, and kale. The fact that there are a lot of sugars in them is a clue of what is to come. These are very, very sweet. In fact, they're far sweeter than any Jell-O I've ever made from a mix or gelatin I've had back home.

An unmolded orange jelly, with a small deformation from pushing it out of its tub.

When I opened the bag, it smelled like lollipops. Even though the tubs look airtight, they clearly are not or the bag itself wouldn't smell so fruity. Eating these requires you to tear back the top and then push the bottom to "pop" the gelatin out. The size, shape, and mechanics make it clear that you're meant to pop them directly into your mouth. No utensils, no mess, no fuss, but a lot of trash for a tiny bit of gelatin.

I was going to review each flavor individually, but the truth is that I can sum up the flavor of each of them in the same manner: super sweet and intense. The fruit flavors are real, but concentrated. It's a lot like eating a spoonful of cheap, off-brand jelly (yeah, the type you spread on toast) on the flavor front and slightly soft gelatin on the texture front.

It wouldn't be bad to toss these in the refrigerator (Nanao Seika recommends you eat them cold) and have one on a hot day as a quick, sweet pick-me-up, but I really am not a fan of the super sweetness or the concentration of the flavor. Frankly, I think these might be marketed more towards children rather than adults. More expensive and larger size versions of these types of gelatin desserts tend to have bits of fruit in them, which adults might favor. I gave away the rest of the bag and I don't plan on buying them again.