W Purin (Double Pudding) Tirol Chocolates

Japanese manufacturers often get props for their packaging and I can say for certain from experience that how a product is presented is very important to Japanese people. This box of Tirol chocolates is a pretty good example of clever and inventive packaging that can lure you into making a purchase, though the cleverness of it may escape you if your aren't already familiar with the company's standard product packaging.


The box for these candies is shaped like a big version of their conventional wrapping on each individual candy. The box contains 18 small candies and sells for about 300 yen ($3.30). Their usual plastic bags of small candy are 100 yen ($1.10) for 9 candies. That means you're paying 33% more for this attractive box and, with any luck, the better quality candy than usual inside. When I opened the box, I noted that the there's an inner bag which has hearts printed all over it. I believe this means this is intended to be bought for Valentine's Day gift giving, though there is no external indication of such.

Click any picture for a version which is larger and has more detail.

There are 4 different designs for the individual candy packages, but only two kinds of candy. I'm not sure why they bothered to do this, but my husband and I sampled them all to make sure. The two flavors are custard (orange and white labels on the left) and chocolate pudding (white and brown labels on the right).


The custard flavor is an approximation of "purin". This is creme caramel or custard with a slightly burnt or bitter caramel sauce on top of it. The chocolate one is supposed to be the same thing only made with chocolate custard instead of plain. Each candy has a chocolate coating which is a bit on the soft side (no snap or crumbling when bitten into) and a soft center with a little flavored sauce on top of it.

The custard flavor is an excellent approximation of the type of purin you buy in little plastic containers in markets and convenience stores in Japan. The sauce is liquid and tastes of burnt caramel. The interior looks like and has the texture of pudding. It smells vaguely of coconut, but there is no coconut in the ingredients list. My only problem with it is that it was just a bit too sweet for me, as is often the case with white chocolates. My husband, who has a far greater tolerance for intense sweets than I, loved it.


I was a much greater fan of the chocolate version, which was smooth, creamy, and tasted just like chocolate pudding to me. The coating on the chocolate one is a little firmer, as is the center. The chocolate flavor is very deep and I'm guessing that the sauce in it is chocolate syrup. At only 40 calories per candy, they're a not too naughty indulgence with a ton of flavor.

These are the first soft center pedestrian (available in supermarkets and convenience stores) Japanese chocolates I've felt had a very nice ganache-like center. Most of the soft-centered candies tend to have something missing or something added. A lot of them are too firm or chalky. These were nice, soft, and creamy. They aren't premium candies, but they have the smooth feel and deep flavor of a designer chocolate. I'd definitely recommend these as a Valentine's gift for someone who you don't want to send a strong message of love to, or just buy a box for yourself and eat them slowly.

"(Year of the) Ox" Chocolates

This year is the year of the ox on the Chinese zodiac and though the Chinese New Year hasn't quite kicked in yet, the Japanese one has. Many people sent out their New Year's postcards with ox designs on them, and there are also a variety of ox-themed goods to buy and give as gifts.

The box of chocolates above is the size of a postcard and was given to my husband as a gift. They were made by SoEi Foods Corporation, a company that is mainly concerned with wholesale unrefined products as well as running its own agricultural concerns. They do make a few finished products under the "Sheer Delicacy" brand which I've never seen in my local markets including something called "Moco Dome" which is a little dome shaped bit of pressed corn flakes with a base of chocolate or strawberry chocolate. There's also a few varieties of little cocoa-powder dusted chocolates full of ganache which I'd like to get my hands on, but they are either not marketed in Tokyo or to the stores near me.


Though the box looks like it should contain one large postcard-sized bar, it contains 10 tiny little bars individually wrapped with the same picture as the box. The packaging is quite attractive and I could easily see a salesman picking up a box or two at a far-flung station while he's out visiting a client and giving them to the people working in the office to snack on. That is often the market for these sorts of things.

The chocolates themselves are very generic looking. They simply have the word "chocolate written on them. I imagine that ShoEi uses the same small bars in a vast variety of packages depending on who they are marketed to. The chocolates have no snap and are rather soft, but slightly chalky in texture. They aren't as fatty as many commercial chocolates such as those made by Morinaga or Lotte as evidenced by their slower melt in your mouth. They also don't have as sharp a chocolate flavor and are relatively mild milk chocolate.

For a generic chocolate, these are nice enough, but nothing impressive. They have less of a strong acidic or bitter aftertaste than Lotte's Ghana or Morinaga's milk chocolate bar. It's nice that even the generic stuff in Japan has cocoa butter. Most of these sorts of candy in the U.S. is made with vegetable oil because when the chocolate comes second to the packaging, the manufacturers seem to think they can slip in second-rate ingredients. I wouldn't buy these for myself because I'm guessing that the attractive packaging pushes up the price, but I'd probably be happy to buy generic bars for a reduced price if I had access to them in the store for about 80 yen (90 cents).

Dainagon Castella Cakes

When I review a brand or company for the first time, I like to include a little background information. This requires some research in Japanese and English, but I believe it's worth it to develop a deeper understanding of the product and to tell the reader something other than the nuts and bolts of how good or bad the food is.

With this particular brand name, I couldn't find out much. In fact, the only "corporate" web page I could find included only an address, telephone number, basic sales data, and number of employees. The product itself is featured as part of a site called "Omiyage Park" that showcases a variety of souvenirs. "Omiyage" is the Japanese word for souvenir gifts. To me, that suggests that the brand name is relatively new since most companies with a long history in a particular business go out of their way to showcase that fact. In Japan, a company with a long history generally breeds trust in the brand name.

This box contained 6 small cakes which are similar to castella. Castella is an immensely popular type of sponge cake in Japan which originated with the Portuguese hundreds of years ago. That's the reason the name sounds very un-Japanese. You can get castella anywhere including convenience stores. The quality is highly variable. Most of it is rather tacky to the touch, stickily sweet, and a bit dry and course. It comes in a lot of flavor varities though the most common is a plain type.

These particular cakes were given to my husband as a gift. There are 3 green tea and 3 red bean (adzuki) varieties. Each cake is individually-wrapped and quite small. They are not the sort of thing we would buy for ourselves since he actively dislikes green tea sweets and I'm indifferent to unattracted to them. My tolerance of green tea items depends greatly on the intensity of tea flavor. While I don't mind red beans, I don't crave them either. To me, they carry the texture of kidney beans, though not the taste.

I first sampled the adzuki bean cake and actually liked it quite a lot. It's studded with a lot of beans, but not so many as to weigh the cake down. The cake is moist and lightly sweet. When you smell it, it smells ever so slightly "beany". It's pleasant-tasting and the adzuki flavor is present, but not overwhelmingly strong.

The green tea cakes are a whole other beast. They smell intensely of green tea and are soft but slightly dry. They are studded with little green pea-type beans which may have been steeped in tea flavor. On the first bite, you are smashed over the head with a hard hit of tea at the start which mellows with initial bites. It's less sweet than the adzuki flavor cake, though only by the slimmest of margins.

These cakes were very, very fresh when the box was first opened, but they noticeably lose quality after a day or two. The web site that sells these encourages you to eat them quickly after opening and I'm guessing this is why. Note that the pictures of these cakes on the web site are almost certainly plastic food versions and not the real cake. Nutrition information is absent as it is for most snacks expressly for sale as souvenirs so I have no information regarding calories. The ingredients are mostly standard cake fare (flour, sugar, eggs) along with green tea and adzuki beans.

I'd never buy these for myself, but I certainly wouldn't mind receiving a box with only the adzuki flavor again. They are a nice change of pace and satisfy a craving for a bit of cake. The green tea ones are just too strong for me, but I'm guessing they'd be great for someone who doesn't mind feeling like they're licking some green tea powder. As it is, I'm going to give the two remaining green tea cakes away to one of my students who loves green tea sweets and will likely appreciate them more than me.