Fujiya Anpanman Korokoro Ball Chocolate

Though these balls are chocolate coated bits of crunchy cookie, they are kin of M & Ms in a way other than being small and a chocolate coated confection. They melt in your mouth, not in your hands according to Fujiya's web site. I'm guessing the fact that the claim is in Japanese will keep them from being sued for slogan theft.

These are fortified with Calcium derived from egg shells so you could claim these were healthy treats, but you'd be a liar because the first ingredient is sugar. Sugar is the great destroyer of nutritional value when it's quantity eclipses all of the others by a large margin.

The ball pictured on the box is about the same size as the actual candy. They're similar in size to a pea. The interior biscuit is the weaker of the flavors in this candy. It's such a tiny amount and mainly is there for crunch, but you can catch a faint hint of it on the first one or two of these that you eat (before your tongue is overwhelmed by the sugar and most of the subtle flavors are cancelled out).

The chocolate on the outside is firm and seems coated with something to help it not melt. It has a nice flavor, but it's not the strongest cocoa flavor that you're going to encounter in a candy. I loved the texture a lot, but I'm big into crunchy things. There isn't a ton of complexity there, but these are still fun to eat.

The boxes for this candy each feature a different pair of friendly characters from the Anpanman cartoon. There is something sweet about their expressions and it's probably a cool little bonus for fans of the show.

Note: These were part of my free sweets box from ZenPop.

Lotte Strawberry Chocolate Pops

This is another form of "dagashi" (kid's snacks) with some cute and inventive design. The pops are designed to look like flowers that are tethered at the base. You snap them apart at the root to eat each "pop."

These aren't actually lollipops though. They're small amounts of chocolate (about the size of a Hershey's kiss) stuck on the end of a plastic stick. There's also a-guitar pick-shaped sticker inside. Mine was a strawberry monkey (monkee ichigo) who wears the top half of a strawberry (with an strangely placed and long stem) as his trousers. Filthy monkey.

The packaging on this is cute, but also smooth as silk to open. There's a tab at the bottom which you peel apart then pull up and it comes off easily and cleanly. This is the sort of thing which is part of Japanese marketing and products which is rare in the U.S. It's an attention to detail which makes the experience of consuming something much better there.

The novelty element of this is high. It's clearly designed more for fun than as food. The sticker, the colorful and cute characters, and the sticks make that clear. I generally have pretty low expectations of these types of things.

You can smell the strawberry element immediately and it actually smells authentic. If you eat it with the strawberry side facing your tastebuds, you get a very present and good, sweet strawberry flavor. It's reminiscent of jam mixed with cocoa in a good way. The texture is soft and it's milkier than some other varieties. It's also fairly sweet, but not cloyingly so. The slight floral and tart notes from the strawberry help offset the sweetness.

For a kid's snack, this is quite amazingly well balanced in flavors with some complexity. Most kid's treats are one-note and too sweet, salty, or fatty to cater to their less developed palate, but this was one of the best strawberry chocolates I've tasted. I could have used a little more chocolate bitterness and it could have been a hair less sweet, but, overall, this was a winner.

This item was part of my free ZenPop Japanese snacks box.

Shimi Choco Corn and Anpanman Pero Pero Choco

I'm headed close to the finish line in my race to review all of my ZenPop box treats before I loose my free time to jury duty (which is coming up on May 2nd). I have to say that it's been quite refreshing to get back in the groove of steady reviewing, though I know that I'll run out of things to review pretty soon.

If aliens came to earth and looked at our food, would they be confused by the fact that we shape our food like humans and then eat them? There are chocolate Santas at Christmas in the U.S. Why would we want to cannibalize a jolly guy who wants nothing more than to give us free toys?

These are the thoughts that occur to me when I look at snacks like the Anpanman chocolate lollipop. He looks so happy, and I just snapped his head in half, took my picture, and then took a bite out of him. If it is any consolation, he didn't taste especially good.

Incidentally, "pero pero" means "lick, lick" which I guess refers to the fact that this is on a stick. However, this isn't really designed for licking. It's barely designed for eating at all because the texture is too soft and the chocolate flavor is fairly muted, especially toward the center where there is more pink chocolate. It's balanced in sweetness. It's vaguely milky, but mostly seems to be too adulterated with vegetable oil to have any sort of pure flavor elements. It looks cute, and it doesn't taste terrible, but this is largely for novelty rather than for flavor. I had my husband sample it and he said, "It tastes like inferior chocolate." That about sums it up.

The other item in this double review is best known for it's tasty animal crackers. The "shimi corn" like is made up of various flavors of a cereal like corn base. It sounds very unimpressive, but it actually was very satisfying. The flavor of the chocolate was excellent and the texture of the star-shaped corn tube was perfect. It was neither too dense nor too crispy. If you like eating sugar cereal dry out of the box (and I do), this is going to be the bee's knees. This was unexpectedly tasty and I wish I had a case of them around for future noshing. It just really played into my tastes.

So, the moral of the story? Cannabalism is wrong in every way. Don't go around eating the heads of fictional characters. It will not be nearly as much fun as you anticipate. The other moral? Corn is always king!

Anpanman Pero Pero Choco:

Shim Choco Corn:

Harajuku Mochi Chocolate

Getting old is a weird experience because you find yourself stepping into the experiences that you used to snicker at your parents for having. You get those weird yellow toenails that are hard to cut so there is nothing you can do about how you're now getting "old people feet." You look in the mirror and see your parents' faces more clearly because you're moving into the age range that they were when you were a kid growing up. You find that normal things, like sleeping in a bed for an entire night, will result in pain. Of course, that assumes that you sleep through the night at all as the body actually forgets how to sleep as you get older.

Why am I talking about age in a review of Harajuku Mochi Chocolate? It's because I missed last week's posting because it was my 53rd birthday. I had plans to go to a very nice hotel with a jacuzzi on the Southern Oregon coast, but the fires in that area rained down ashes and filled the area with smoke. I'm not really complaining because people who lived just north of my hotel had to evacuate their homes. I'm not a fan of arguments of relative privation (as I think they are just a way of invalidating the feelings of others), but it's hard to cry too hard over a cancelled vacation when people are fleeing their homes due to a nearby inferno threatening to rob them of everything they have.

Another aspect of aging is that my appetite for any food isn't as high as it once was. It has been taking me far longer to get through my stash of traditional Japanese sweets from Nippon-ya than I would have expected. Despite that, I have to say these sweets have aged very well. They aren't as soft as the first box of these that I reviewed, but they are far from stale. They are just a bit chewy and less pillowy soft after four months in the closet. Frankly, I'm impressed.

In terms of flavor, these are very potently chocolate-y, while not being too sweet or bitter. It's quite an impressive balance between the two as most strong chocolate flavors have the bitterness of a dark chocolate or they are washed out by overly sweet milky flavors.

While these are awesome as a delivery system for chocolate and as a way of enjoying the texture of mochi, they aren't especially unique. I think they are a great choice for someone who is squeamish about exotic flavors who you want to share a mochi sweet with, but I don't think I'd get them again despite how good they are. I enjoyed them greatly, but I'd rather have something more unique and I can get good quality chocolate in cheaper delivery systems than this. However, if you like chocolate and you like mochi, these are a big winner.

Where I bought it: Nippon-ya (San Francisco)

Weight: 11.6 oz.

Price: $9.99

Pocky Orange Peel

I was watching a video on "shows that should never have been made" and one of the abominations that was featured was a show that I had the faintest recollection of from my youth. That show was "Pink Lady (and Jeff)" and I personally never watched it, but saw it advertised. I've watched a little bit of it on YouTube. This is the sacrifice I make for my readers. I fall on the grenade so you don't have to.

It stuns me that any network attempted to sell Japanese pop stars to the American audience in 1980. If you watch the clips that I linked to, and keep in mind that it is #35 on the list of the 50 worst television shows of all time as chosen by "TV Guide" so consider yourself warned, you'll be treated to some incredibly culturally inappropriate material. If you've taught English, you'll also recognize immediately that the singers in Pink Lady can't actually speak English and learned their lines phonetically.

Though this was a disaster in all respects, it is important for people to have foreign cultures stuck in front of their noses on occasion. Small bits and pieces of information prime people to be more open to that culture in the future. In 1980, sushi was just raw fish to Americans. In the present day and age, it's something they're willing to fork over a lot of money for a bastardized version of in places as pedestrian as their local supermarket. That's some cultural infiltration.

When I returned to the U.S., I was stunned at how ubiquitous Pocky had become. I think the versions I see are from Korea for the most part and not the same as what I had in Japan, but the brand is recognized and consumed as a Japanese product. It started to be sold in Japan in 1966, and a U.S. division of Glico was established in 2003. November 11 is "Pocky" day and this year will be the 4th one that is celebrated in the United States. It took awhile, but it gained some traction. Pink Lady, apparently, was too early for the times.

I've not had as much Pocky as most in my career as a person who consumes food, but I can say that this is unique amount the few handfuls that I've tried. The main point about this is that the little bits of peel are chewy. They are clearly candied bits and they bring a nice, bright, authentic citrus flavor to each bite. The chocolate is milk bordering on semi-sweet. It has enough strength to be present, but not so much as to be bitter. The flavor combination is very well-balanced. I believe part of what helps this is that the organe peel bits appear to be coated in dark chocolate so they carry some of that flavor through as well. If you look at the sticks, you'll see they look more like Oreo cookie parts than orange peel, but orange peel they are indeed.

This snack came with advice to refrigerate it before consuming and I ignored that advice when I ate all but the last packet. So, it was only with my last experience that I had the most optimal one. The lesson here: Do what you are told blindly without question, at least when it comes to Pocky.

When not refrigerated, the coating is a bit too soft and the chewy peels feel as if they are in a slighly greasy chocolate in terms of the textural experience. It's still good, but it is a lot better when the coating is chilled and much firmer. The standard, bland, Pocky pretzel stick seems more orange in color to me on these than what I recall, but my memory could be going. I am getting on in years, after all.

I like the combination of orange and chocolate, but these seemed a tad rich for my tastes as well as having a cumulative sweetness that I found cloying by the 5th and final stick in a packet. I don't regret having these, but I wouldn't go out of my way to have them again. If you're interested, and I would act fast if you are because these are seasonal and likely to vanish at some point, the Asian Food Grocer is currently offering these for $3.58. Yummy Bazaar has them for $3.05 and Economy Candy has them for $2.99. I got mine from Bokksu as part of a premium box, but they are currently sold out. It wouldn't matter anyway since Bokksu was selling them for $4/box and would have pricier than the alternatives anyway.

Source: Part of the Bokksu premium summer citrus box

Crunky (mini) and Hello Kitty Choco Marshmallow

Last week, I talked about the Dagashi box that I purchased from Oyatsu Cafe and this week I'm going to start reviewing the contents. I'm beginning with the two tiniest items and I have to say it's good that I've already had a lot of experiences with them in the past or I wouldn't have enough of a taste on hand to do a proper review. Yes, I'm winging about how small these were. I've gotten bigger freebies at sample hand-outs at events in the U.S. and attached to tissue packets given away on the streets of Tokyo.

First, there is the itty-bitty, teeny-tiny Crunky that appears to have been designed to be left on the Lotte Hotels pillows en lieu of a mint. The candy inside is literally about the size of an Andes Candy so you can get two tiny bites before it's all gone. On the plus side, I was impressed with how Lotte shrunk the whole thing down and made it look perfectly like its older brother with all detail intact.

I didn't expect to be reviewing this item at all as I was sure that I'd already reviewed the standard issue Crunky bar in the past. However, a search of my archives revealed that I had overlooked this Japanese version of a Nestle's Crunch or Hershey's Krackle bar. I covered a ton of variations, but never the regular bar and though they all have the same crispy bits, all Crunky are not created equal.

To illustrate this, I'll tell you an anecdote from back when I was working at Japanese office, one of my more obnoxious coworkers, a would-be Lothario (or, as they're sometimes called in Japan, a Charisma Man) who looked like Bruce Willis's "Mini Me", asked another of my coworkers, a man who spent all day day-dreaming of his own aikido dojo, to pick him up a Crunky bar at the convenience store on the first floor of the building we were working in. Dojo-boy brought Charisma Man a box of "Crunky Kids". The "Kids" version are like a nugget type of Crunky with a shiny exterior and the shape of a square pellet. Upon receiving his box of Crunky bits, Charisma Man exclained, "Aw, I didn't want the kids!" What he was saying was that no spawn of Crunky is as good as the original.

Incidentally, I'm happy to say Dojo Man is now in charge of his own dojo and doing well in life. I don't know what happened to Charisma Man, but it's possible he's actually functioning as Bruce Willis's Mini Me for all I know. Chances are he is off somewhere battling an STD of some sort though as one of the things he loved to brag about was how he only had intimate relations with "nice clean girls" and therefore didn't need to wear a prophylactic. At any rate, he didn't get his regular Crunky that day, but I got mine (albeit a tiny one).

The main thing that separates a Crunky from it's American crunch bar brethern is that it uses malt puffs inside instead of relatively bland rice puffs. This gives it a greater flavor complexity as the malt brings a nice depth to the mix of somewhat coffee-like, sweet milk chocolate in the bar. The texture really is the thing and the Crunky is nice crunchy with soft chocolate that melts quickly in  your mouth and has a silky, rich mouth feel.

The only difference between this mini version and the standard bar seems to be the size of the puffs. Either the usual puffs have been chopped up a bit to fit the low profile of the bar, or they've got tiny little elves crafting miniature versions of them for this version. Either way, this is tasty and it was quite a(n extremely brief) walk down my taste memory lane.

When I opened the little marshmallow packet and looked at the nicely formed little wad of mallow, I was transported back to my memories of the Japanese version of a treat I love in the U.S. One of the things that rarely worked for me in Japan was the basic marshmallow. They seemed like they were all formulated and injected into molds and were quite rubbery and had a funny taste which I couldn't identify.

Though this little wad had a nice and potent tiny dollop of intense bittersweet chocolate in the middle, it doesn't escape the all-too-common weaknesses of other Japanese marshmallows. It is too firm and chewy and brings to mind a pencil eraser when you compress it between your fingers. It's sweet and has a decent flavor, but the texture is just all wrong.

I think that some people have remarked in the past that Japanese marshmallows are different because they don't use animal-based gelatin and instead use agar agar (from seaweed). That may indeed be the issue, but, if so, I'd rather eat hooves and bones and enjoy a soft, tasty marshmallow. Yes, I am a horrible, horrible person. And, yes, this is a sub-par marshmallow even for a kids' snack. I'd probably rate it a bit better keeping in mind that this is dagashi (kid's snacks), but it's actually not so different from all the other marshmallows I had in Japan. I did have some nice marshmallow snacks in Japan, but only if the marshmallow was a lesser component in the mix. The best thing about this marshmallow was the adorable package it came in.

Source for both products: Oyatsucafe "Dagashi box" (part of a $15/month subscription box)

Haitai Choco Flavor Homerun Ball

I'm not a person with a plethora of bad habits. In fact, I'd say that I have far fewer of them than the average person. I don't procrastinate. I don't smoke or drink alcohol. I maintain good sleep hygiene habits. I don't watch much T.V. nor engage in any activity to excess. I do appear to have one habit which I might want to consider breaking. That habit is making decisions about food based on how amusing I find the names of the products to be.

I picked this snack up at a Korean market because the idea that it was named after baseball struck me as funny. Now that I have tried them, nothing about them is the least bit entertaining. I'm not even sure now why I found the name amusing, but I guess it's because it seemed weird for a Korean snack to be named after something related to baseball.

Incidentally, if you look at the picture, you will note that their is a graphic of a gold emblem in the upper right which says "premium". Now that I think of it, that is the most hilarious part of this. The product contained inside is about as far removed from being "premium" as I believe a treat can get.

The picture on the outside shows you what looks a little like a chou ball filled with chocolate cream. The little balls of dough contained therein are reminiscent of a choux pastry. They are airy and actually taste similar to those French delights. The point at which they diverge is the texture. If you bought a choux and left it sit in a closet for 6 weeks or until it reached a desiccated state more akin to Styofoam packing peanuts then injected it with a bit of chocolate, you'd have these. In fact, the major failing of these, and it is an incredibly enormous one, is that the balls are so dry and the texture is spongey and lacking in all delicacy.

It could be that there is some truth is advertising involved in this product. I've never chewed on a homerun ball and these might actually have verisimilitude with a baseball if you tried to eat one. I can't imagine it could be a whole lot worse than one of these.

Tirol Cafe de Brasil Chocolates (product information)

The whole World Cup thing is a bandwagon that I am not jumping on. That being said, it's one which people around me seem to be hauling themselves onto. People who have shown no interest whatsoever in soccer are suddenly watching it. I was sitting outside a cafe in Palo Alto several days ago and a bar across the street was emanating yells about goals and I assume missed goals. I may not be interested in it, but I can't avoid it.

Even in Tirol's news, I can't avoid seeing soccer-related things. They're offering a coffee chocolate in a special soccer-themed box (which you can dump all of the chocolates out of and use two candies to play a game with, or so they make it seem with the above photo). The candy uses authentic Brazilian coffee beans (roasted). You can buy these for 32 yen (about 30 cents) at Circle K/Sunkus for the time being, though I don't know how you're supposed to get one of the boxes without buying up a ton of the candies (or if you can have the box at all).

Fujiya Milky Mont Blanc Chocolate

I have reached an important conclusion about the Fujiya brand's versions of chocolate. Well, it's not important in a global sense. It certainly isn't going to impact climate change, cure cancer, or end starvation. It's also not important in a local sense. It won't end the California drought or lower the local taxes. No, it's only important in helping my readers relate to the status of this particular brand in Japan relative to the status of a similar brand in the U.S. Saying it like that sort of undermines the sense of my conclusion having any importance at all, even in my estimation. Oh, well.

At any rate, despite the less than earth-shattering nature of my revelation, I will finally offer it. Are you ready? Fujiya is the Hershey's of Japan. By that I mean that they make sub-standard chocolate products which are popular mainly because their taste is familiar, their packaging and logo can be related to, and their mascot a long-standing icon in the culture. Their products aren't great, but people know them so they like them.

This is not exactly a criticism of Fujiya. I like Hershey's kisses despite their chalky texture and sour milk/yogurt-like flavor profile and less than endearing chocolate notes. You can enjoy something and recognize that it's not the greatest quality version of that item on the market. Bad pizza is a case in point. I love bad pizza because it is familiar to me as someone whose mother would purchase an enormous quantity of bread-like squares with some form of ketchup and vegetable-based cheese-like product on it. It was a fast food meal from our freezer that provided a welcome alternative to the disgusting sloppy mess of canned vegetables, stacks of day-old white bread, and meat stuffs cooked into a grey, tough mass that my mother used her very special culinary skills to create. Yes, I like things because they were introduced to me in my childhood when I had a very different frame of reference.

The chocolates look cute with the adorable little embossed faces.

You may guess from that introduction that this box of twelve "Milky" mont blanc (a chestnut-paste-based dessert pictured on the lower right of the product's box) candies let me down. Indeed, it did. There is a particular flavoring in all of the Milky chocolates which I am not a fan of. I don't know what it is, but it is like the sour milk flavor in Hershey's chocolates. You either like it or you don't, and I don't.

The bigger sin than this weird taste is that the chestnut/mont blanc component, which was the part of this candy which compelled me to buy it at Nijiya market for about $2.20 (224 yen), is quite weak. It tastes a little like caramel at first, but it dissipates too quickly to really detect any greater depth of flavor. Mostly, you're just getting the very soft, fatty weird chocolate exterior. I should note that this is not because it is fake chocolate, or at least I think it's not. Fujiya uses cocoa butter and cacao mass. It also uses vegetable oil and "artificial flavor", which may account for the strange taste that I dislike. This is not horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but I'll turn to this when I'm out of other candy or want a tiny portion (each square is 20 calories) and only have big amounts on hand.

I have to try to remember that I don't care much for Fujiya's products. I buy them so infrequently that I forget and make mistakes like buying this. That being said, the chestnut part would probably have sucked me into buying it even if I remembered Fujiya's freaky chocolate recipe. Besides, if I keep eating it, I may get used to it and actually learn to like it. It worked with Hershey's, after all. 

Daiso (Meito) Kuchidoke White Chocolate

Most Americans grew up knowing the difference between Coca-Cola, RC Cola, and a store brand cola. We know that the store brand is a knock-off of Coca-cola and that it will be much cheaper, but inferior in taste and likely mouth feel (because of a variation in carbonation). RC Cola wasn't as bad as the store brand, but still a big step down from "the Real Thing" (aka Coke).

When you encounter brands from another country, you have little idea what is what. The big cheeses will eventually reveal themselves if you pay attention, and the lesser brands may or may not build their way into your brand awareness consciousness. Glico (Pocky), Lotte (Koala's March and Crunky), and Meiji (Hi-Chew and Meltykiss/Meltyblend) emerge as the premium consumer-grade snack makers. Meito, the manufacturer behind today's item, is definitely closer to the RC Cola level than the Coca-cola level. In fact, they're just a few steps up from store brand.

Rather ironically, Meito created this chocolate as a store brand item for Daiso. For those who don't know, Daiso is a 100-yen shop in Japan and has branches in the U.S. at which it typically sells items for $1.50. It is an awesome store in Japan with a lot of utilitarian and cool items. In the U.S., it's still pretty great, but the selection isn't nearly as good.

This product is clearly designed to have the look and feel of Meltykiss/Meltyblend chocolates. The packaging is similar as is the square-shaped chocolate in individual foil packets. Both are also dusted with cocoa powder on the outside and meant to resemble truffle-like chocolates. The main difference aesthetically is that the cocoa powder on the outside of these is much lighter in color than Meiji's Meltykiss. The use of "kuchidoke" or "melt in your mouth" is also meant to evoke the image of the more popular brand name product. Meltykiss is only sold in the winter because it's supposed to, well, "melt".

The first thing I noticed about this was that it was harder than a Meltykiss chocolate. The outer coating seemed more like a crisp shell dusted with cocoa powder that surrounded a core of plain white chocolate than the ganache/truffle-style experience of the competitor it seeks to emulate. I could tell by how hard it was to cut through and how the outer shell shattered that it was definitely not the same as a ganache or soft truffle chocolate. It does melt in your mouth, but not as a soft, yielding, fatty chocolate. It melts in the way that nearly any kind of chocolate would do so if you held it on your tongue long enough.

The flavor is actually quite good with a deep flavor of chocolate hitting you after it melts on your tongue for a moment. That is, I imagine, the outer coating melting away and the effect of the cocoa powder. The second flavor is less impressive and that's the white chocolate coming through. For at least a short time, it let's loose some cheap white chocolate flavor before it yields to a richer, creamier flavor. All in all, it's fine, but a mixed bag and certainly not on par with Meltykiss/Meltyblend in terms of quality.

There is absolutely nothing "wrong" with this chocolate taken on its own except for the fact that it doesn't live up to its promise either as a knock-off of Meltykiss or as a "melt in your mouth" experience. Given that Meltykiss in the U.S. costs $4.00 (usually) and this is $1.50, it may be unrealistic to expect better for such a low price. However, you can spend your money on something domestic which will be just as good if not better. Though I enjoyed these on a certain level, I definitely wouldn't buy them again and am not inspired to try the other varieties in the Daiso line - at least not at this time.

Tirol Sakuramochi Chocolate

You probably don't know this, but the packaging on this candy is attempting to pander to different regional audiences. You also probably don't care, but it's my job to, as the tag line says, "tell you more than you need to know about Japanese junk food." It's not just my blog's motto. It's my lifestyle.

Let's start with what sakuramochi is. It's a Japanese sweet which has red bean paste in the middle and is surrounded in some fashion by rice cake - not the sort of rice cake that Quaker sells in stores which looks like popcorn that has been fused together in some sort of horrible industrial accident and tastes like Styrofoam packing peanuts. No, no. This is Japanese stuff, mochi, which is rice pounded into a stretchy, somewhat taffy-like substance which people can more easily choke to death on (especially old folks).

At any rate, there are two styles of sakuramochi pictured on the lower right of the package. The rolled up one with what looks like a bit of a turd poking out (such elegant prose from my keyboard) is Tokyo- or Kanto-style. The kind that looks like an innocent pink blob of fuzz is Kansai-style. Each has a sakura leaf wrapped around it. Mainly, they have textural and aesthetic differences, or at least I think that is the case because the truth is that I never ate sakuramochi in Japan. I ate plenty of wagashi (Japanese sweets) and lots of mochi and red bean stuff, but never that particular type. So, I'm not going to be checking this candy for verisimilitude to the real thing. I'm guessing that is actually for the best.

This is, obviously, one of the spring releases from Tirol. Well, it's obvious to me because spring is when everything "sakura" pops out of the marketing woodwork in Japan. It's all green tea and sakura now, with great lashings of strawberry thrown in for good measure. It's a thing in Japan. It's similar to how pumpkin flavored everything starts flooding the market in July in anticipation of Halloween in October and how it sticks around until March of the following year because they can't possibly sell a million products in pumpkin flavor in the span of time that encompasses the winter holidays.

At any rate, I didn't know exactly what flavor to expect from this, but the smell caught me by surprise. When I gave it a good whiff, it smelled distinctly of red beans. There really wasn't much else to smell. The first bite into the candy yielded a moderate amount of red beans with some flowery sakura flavor. As I chewed into the little gummy center, the bean flavor asserted itself much more strongly. It tapered off and revealed a fairly sweet taste at the finish that developed the sakura flavor a bit more and made it border on, but not cross over the line into being "perfumey". The final taste left in my mouth was a mixture of both the red bean and sakura.

For a tiny little candy (33 calories, about the volume of a Hershey's kiss), this packs some complexity both in terms of flavors and textures. The chocolate part on the outside is soft and yielding. The gummy is quite chewy, bordering on a little bit too hard to bite into. There are earthy, sweet, and perfume-like elements, but you have to either eat slowly and pay attention or eat more than one to really pick up on the multiple subtle flavors.

This is not the sort of candy that you eat to stuff your pie-hole with sweeties. It's the sort of thing you eat for a unique experience. You pair it with tea, one little package next to your cup, and take the tiniest bite possible and try to discern the mysteries in your mouth. Take a drink of tea and give it another go. Repeat until you're done.

This is a good candy in a way, and a less good candy in another. It's one of those things which you would never find in the U.S. because it's complex and not necessarily easily accessible by most palates. This doesn't make it a bad thing at all, but it does make it something that you absolutely have to either already have a taste for or be in the mood for. I'm glad I bought this, especially at the relatively modest price of $2.19 at Nijiya Japanese market (for an eight-piece bag). However, I would not buy another. Once is enough.

Starbucks Banana Chocolate Cream Frappucino (product information)

Bananas are one of the most accessible types of fruit in Japan. They're cheap and you can buy them nearly anywhere including conveninece stores. Of course, they tend to not be very tasty or sweet compared to some of the bananas you can get in other places (at least the Tokyo ones). I'm guessing this Starbucks concoction is going to be quite a bit sweeter and tastier than the standard imported banana (which I believe come from the Philippines). You really can't go wrong with chocolate and cream, though I'm guessing this won't live up to its potential if the banana is fake.

If you find yourself ordering one of these (I wouldn't try this as I love bananas, but not things flavored with banana), let me know what you think. 

Careme Delicia Strawberry Fromage Chocolate/Cookie

Stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld once did a bit about how cars were named to bring to mind certain words, but to not actually use them. One of his examples as "The Integra", which was meant to evoke thoughts of "integrity". This candy/cookie combination obviously took a page from the book being referenced by such car makers. It's not "delicious", it's "Delicia".

This is another in a line of sweets designed to bring to mind a much more complex confection. I love these in theory. In practice, I'm often disappointed. I never expect them to actually taste like a real strawberry cheesecake. My only hope is that they have complexity sufficient to distinguish them from something like a plain white chocolate bar flavored with strawberry. If you're going to make such a fussy treat, then at least make sure the consumer's experience is nearly as good as the candy looks.

The candy smells delicately of strawberry. Biting into it yields a textural wonderland with the crispy little cookie providing crunch and contrast to the somewhat soft strawberry white chocolate and the even softer white "cheese" filling. The textural complexity is accompanied by flavor depth including some sense of creamy whipped cream, ever so slightly floral strawberry, and a hint of earthy grain from the cookie. I'm not going to say everyone will pick up on all three of these elements individually, but they are there if you take the time to notice during the tiny sweets brief experience in your mouth to heed its attributes.

This is a pretty impressive little treat that offers layers of complex flavoring and texture though what I can only assume is the work of tiny little fairy folk. Each is about the diameter of a nickel/five-yen coin/your big ass thumbnail but is a cookie platform with freeze-dried strawberry encasing "cheese cream" which in turn has a tiny dollop of stawberry sauce and is topped with a disc of strawberry-flavored white chocolate. It sounds like it'd send you into sugar shock, but the sweetness level is very balanced with the blandness of the cookie and the tartness of the strawberry.

All of this weighs in at only 31 calories per bite. Yes, it's a small portion, but if you compare it to a square of Milka chocolate (22 calories) or a Hershey's Kiss (25 calories), it's got a lot of bang for the calorie cost. In terms of the monetary cost, I paid a little over $2 for this at Marukai market. For 8 pieces, that is somewhat expensive, but my husband and I look at junk food as much as the experience cost as the cash. If you can eat one of these and be happy with it, then it is well worth the higher price. I can say that I'm intrigued to try more of the Delicia sweets after this and would definitely buy this one again.

A Plethora of Tirol Choco Releases (product information)

All images come from Tirol.

I can't hit every single new snack every week because there just aren't enough hours in the day, but, when I finally checked Tirol's web site, I felt like I'd seriously fallen down on the job. They've got a little crazy for spring, so I'll get cracking on talking about what is out there.

At the top of this post, there are special bags of dinsaurs depicted in a game called AR3D. I had never heard of this game before, but it is an Android application and Tirol is more than happy to give you at directions for how to play if you're unfamiliar with it. They've also rather graciously posted all 100 of the graphics for you to see so that you know exactly which ones you still need to collect.

For the less game-happy set, they've got some releases that mimic traditional spring flavors and sweets. Sakura mochi, which includes green tea powder, a "mochi" gummi center, sakura (cherry blossom) pink chocolate and a chocolate base should set your inner office lady afire.

For the more conservative set, Tirol has a green tea mochi variety. This also includes a gummi center to mimic the chewy nature of stretchy pounded rice cake with green tea powder and white chocolate.

Finally, lest the traditional sorts feel over-catered to and the kids feel under-served, there's one more new product which seems geared toward the younger set. This is a rice puff chocolate which promises to be both crunchy and light. My experience with these in the past has yielded a fairly sweet chocolate base to cater to the palates of the diminuitive set.

It's clear that after the post-holiday lull, the push is on for spring releases. It'll give everyone something to nosh on while they view the cherry blossoms.

Meiji Meltyblend Fruity Strawberry

When I recently reviewed the chocolate version of "Meltyblend", I remarked that these are usually called "Melty Kiss" in Japan. What's in a name? In this case, I was thinking it might be the potential for a lawsuit between Hershey's and Meiji if they tried to called their small bits of individually wrapped chocolate treats "kisses". The truth is that I have no idea why this is called "Meltyblend", but a little research revealed the unlikelihood that the product has been renamed because of what I'm sure are Hershey's armies of industrial grade trademark protection lawyers. 

Research into how Hershey's came to call their little drops of chocolate "kisses" in the first place provided an explanation, but not a very credible one. Hershey claims that the sounds that the chocolate makes when it's plopped out of the machine resembles the sucking wet of a kiss. They neglected to mention that, back in old timey days, "kiss" was a common name for any small sweet and that there were products of all sorts referred to as a "kiss". My guess is that that origin is lost, but that the concept comes from the idea that it is a small touch of a confection on the lips - sweet and often short - and you want more.

This "Meltyblend", not "Melty Kiss", but they actually are the same product is the last of my "winter limited edition" Japanese sweets in stock. It's only limited to winter because of the low melting point aspects. It's not because it's strawberry. Trust me on this. If you're around for the random picture I'm planning to use on Wednesday, you'll know that strawberry is anything but "limited" right now. In fact, spring seems to have sprung in an absolute explosion of this particular fruit.

As for the candy, I'm sorry to say that this is the biggest "miss" I've experienced in the Melty Kiss line. It's not bad at all, but compared to the almost sublime varieties that I've sampled before, it comes across as humdrum and lacking in flavor power. They smell faintly of strawberries, and have a pretty decent strawberry taste at the start, but as the taste develops on your tongue, it becomes too strong and isn't balanced out by the chocolate portion. If it has had a ratio of 1/3 chocolate to 2/3 strawberry, I think the bitterness of the chocolate may have provided for an interested contrast. As it is, it just came across to me as 90% berry and with an almost inconsequential bit of chocolate. 

If you're a bigger fan of strawberry than me, this might be the bee's knees. It still has the soft, almost truffle-like, qualities of Melty Miss and melts nicely on the tongue. I just really need more chocolate in my chocolates. If this were a real kiss, it'd be the sort which didn't end up igniting much passion, at least in me. Perhaps it's more someone else's type.

Glico Bisco Caramel Cocoa

One of the first things I learned about feeding babies, a task I was never destined to actually carry out, was that Cheerios were a "safe" solid food when you were trying to wean them off of an all-liquid diet. I learned that from one of my aunts, who had recently had a baby pass the point of needing to suckle a bottle all of the time (my mother's family weren't about to breast feed - to them, it was barbaric). She had Cheerios stocked up and I asked her why and I learned something new.

When I took home economics, the teacher felt that we needed to be indoctrinated into the ways of baby-rearing. Since I'm 49, I grew up in an age where birthin' dem babies was considered my lot in life at least to some extent. Considering my utter lack of maternal qualities, this education was just short of an utter waste of time for the likes of me. I did, however, score some brownie points for knowing that Cheerios was one of the first solid foods that were safe for infants to eat.

At no point in my limited education did anyone suggest that sandwich cookies were a part of a baby's diet. Glico puts a happy baby on the package of its "Bisco" cookies, but I'm not buying that these are for babies. In fact, they seem more suited to calorie-conscious mothers looking to lose those last few baby pounds while keeping a sweet nibble on hand, ostensibly for their young child. One of the nutritional benefits of these, supposedly, is that they put lactic acid bacteria (the good bugs in yogurt) in the cookies and it's supposed to help with digestion.

I've reviewed these tiny little packets of Bisco before and I really liked them. Note that the regular version (vanilla cookie with white cream) is in a bigger box. The limited edition flavors come in tiny little five-packs. They're definitely well-suited for carrying in ones purse. Each packet has five extremely dainty little cookies that come in at 20 calories apiece.

If you sniff these, the caramel flavor is pretty intense. There is just a small amount of cream in between two cookies which are a hybrid between a cracker and cookie and are therefore pretty crispy and a little airy. The caramel flavor is the stronger first wave flavor when you bite into the cookie. The second wave is a bit of a floury, grain-like quality followed by extremely weak, nearly anemic, cocoa flavor. It's only on the second bite that the cocoa builds up to fairly discernible levels.

These are actually pretty good. They wouldn't be my first choice for a Bisco cookie, but I still liked them and I'm not a fan of caramel. It should be said that the caramel is very artificial tasting. I think it's only decent because there is such a small amount of cream filling that it is relatively diluted. The bottom line is that I'm good with having bought these and will eat the rest without reservation, but I can't see buying them again because of the strongish artificial caramel flavor.