People who go to Hawaii for vacation often bring boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts to their offices as a souvenir treat. Back in the early days of my stay in Japan, this used to be quite novel as it was expensive and relatively uncommon for one to find anything with macadamia nuts in Japan. These days, people still bring the same souvenirs from sojourns to paradise, but more often than not the exact same boxes of sweets can be bought at various shops around Tokyo.
So, the creamy, tasty macadamia nut has gone from exotic siren of the souvenir world to the plain girl down the street who you'd only take out on a date if you were invited to a wedding and couldn't sucker anyone else into accompanying you. There's no clearer indication of this than the fact that you can pick up a plethora of varieties of macadamia-based sweets at 99 yen shops. That's where I ran across these small gold foil packets.
I'm not sure what the deal is supposed to be with the caramel on these since there is no visible indication of anything other than a nut and chocolate. They smell like chocolate. They taste like super sweet, rich chocolate with a good, fresh, crispy macadamia nut. There are no detectable caramel notes, but I'm guessing that the nuts are probably cooked or rolled in caramel syrup such that there is a paper thin layer on them. What little caramel there is mainly makes them sweeter than usual and richer.
I love almost any sort of chocolate covered nut, and my affection for these was greater than usual. The only "problem" is that there are only 8 candies in a 43 gram (1.5 oz.) bag and 254 calories or 32 calories per chocolate-covered morsel and it's incredibly easy to just eat all of them in one sitting. I would definitely buy these again, but only if I think I can exercise some judicious control or decide to throw caution to the wind.
