Furuta Torukeru White Chocolate Bar

"Torukeru" means "melty" or "melting" and is often used by Japanese candy makers to say that there is soft, ganache-like chocolate involved in their candy-making alchemy. Often, that means it's either oozing all over your fingers or soft, but solid. You can see by the illustration on the package above that they're trying to convey the idea that there is soft, creamy filling trying to escape the evil clutches of the brittle wafers in which they are trapped between. 

The problem with this concept is that you're putting something which is essentially absorbent between something absorb-able. Over time, the wafers are going to suck some of the moisture out of the cream and disable all of its capacity to be anything resembling "melty". That is what happened to my bar, if indeed it ever was full of soft, melting cream in the first place. Fortunately, this in now way detracted from the textural elements which included the easily cleaved exterior chocolate coating and several crispy wafers with a very thin layer of chocolate cream between them.

This was surprisingly good considering its white chocolate exterior and my general aversion to said substance. The not so sweet and slightly bitter interior wafers and chocolate filling balance out the fairly sweet white chocolate exterior. Surprisingly, at room temperature, the outside is quite firm. I've had problems with Sequoia chocolate bars being too soft, but this was good and reminded me of one of the better KitKat variations that I've experienced in the past.

One can pick up Sequoia bars for near a dollar at Japanese markets in California and they're quite cheap in Japan as well. The "specialty" bars like this one tend to be about 50 yen or about 50 cents at convenience stores. They are a cheap way to try something a little off the beaten path and I was not disappointed in this. At 141 calories for a single large finger-sized bar, it also offers good portion control.

Though I liked this quite fine, it wasn't exotic enough or "good" enough to make me want to have it again. As a one-off sampling, I have no regrets, but I wouldn't recommend you go out of your way to try it. Though it's a nice enough wafer-chocolate combo, it's probably not worth choosing over more interesting options. Still, if you're in Japan and crave a KitKat, but don't want to have a whole bar around to tempt you, this is a really good alternative and better than the regular chocolate Sequoia bars (which are actually pretty good, too) by a small margin. 

H & H Trading Milk Stick Wafers

I saw these "milk stick wafers" on offer many times at local 100 yen shops like Lawson 100 as well as the hybrid market/100 yen shop "My Basket". I generally had bigger fish to fry and turned up my nose like some snack food snob at this pedestrian offering. Actually, the truth wasn't that I was too good for cheap wafers, but rather that I'd been burned far too often when it came to wafers in Japan. Sure, they could deliver a nice crunch, and often they were calcium fortified, but generally there wasn't much going on in the flavor department.

Image from Amazon Japan.

While I hate to be one of "those" Americans who whines about Japanese sweets in comparison to what I could get back home, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to turn to that sort of loathsome behavior in the case of what we commonly call "sugar wafers" here. In Japan, they rarely put enough cream or sugar between them, or the wafers were too thick and tough. There was one type which was bland, but I liked it anyway and that is the vanilla whole grain ones pictured above. Before I realized that Japanese sweets that were "healthy" and not especially sweet were still packing enough carbohydrate calories to increase my pants size, I used to buy these all of the time and polish off a package in no more than four sittings (sometimes in as few as two). These had a nice earthy whole grain taste that I enjoyed, but they were not what one would call a "sugar wafer", despite appearances to the contrary.

The cookies that I picked up an Hankook Korean market may not look like a traditional sugar wafer, but that is what they taste like. They are just a little unusual in their construction. The outside is standard crispy wafer material and the inside is sweet filling. There are two differences, however, between this and other types of wafers. One is that the thicker construction of this tube style wafer makes it less crispy and ever so marginally tougher. I'm guessing this is intentional to stop them from being brittle enough to shatter at the drop of a case of them being loaded onto a truck. They are surprisingly resilient to clumsy treatment.

OK, there are actually 3 differences... they also have a goofy slogan written on them in English. The Japanese above it just says "milk stick wafers" so this is not a translation.

The other difference is that they have "milk" flavor filling. As I've said before, "milk" is actually a flavor in Japan. It either tastes like powdered milk that has been sweetened (that's when it's really bad) or like condensed milk (that's when it's not so bad). These resemble the latter. Every time I buy one of these, I yearn for some flavor depth of some sort. Would it kill them to add some vanilla? Seriously.

All that being said, these are perfectly serviceable sugar wafers. The main good point is the excellent portion control. When I have a proper bag of sugar wafers, I want to eat a lot of them, but two fingers (53 calories) are in one foil packet so you are discouraged from eating more than one serving. They are sweet enough without being too sweet, and the wafer design makes them far less crumbly than the plank-style ones (which tend to flake off everywhere).

All of that being said, and even given that they only cost $1.29 (119 yen), I wouldn't buy these again. For 99 cents, I can pick up a package of European sugar wafers at a discount store that will have more volume, less wasteful packaging and a better flavor (like hazelnut). It's not that these are bad. It's more that they aren't especially good.

Furuta Green Tea Sequoia

There's a video my husband and I shot in 1995 which we made to show our family and friends what it was like to live there at the time. I don't remember who we sent it to, but part of it includes a trek around our local shopping street (shotengai) and the shops that were on offer at the time. I recently watched that video again for the first time in a very long time and I was shocked at how few of the shops survived to 2012. In fact, I'm pretty sure that only the biggest markets (e.g., Peacock, Seiyu, etc.) made it to the present day.

One of the sites caught on camera on that video were several girls eating green tea "soft cream" (soft serve) in a tea shop. On the video, my response to the idea of green tea flavored sweets was "yuck!" At that time, the thought of bitter, grassy green tea being mixed with sugar rubbed me completely the wrong way. I think there are still plenty of Western folks out there who feel the same way.

I think green tea seems stranger as a flavoring for sweets as compared to black tea (English tea) or coffee because you don't see people putting sugar and milk in green tea, but you do find people adding them to those beverages which Western folks regard as more mainstream. Sweet coffee is common. Sweet green tea is unheard of, at least in Japan.

As time has gone by, the notion of green tea sweets has grown on me, though it still hasn't blossomed into the sort of passion that I've seen others display. I sometimes like it, and sometimes don't care for it. A lot depends on the intensity and the flavor mix. Generally, green tea plus chocolate isn't as good as green tea chocolate, if you know what I mean. That is, if it's white chocolate which has green tea flavoring, it's not as dangerous to the taste buds as milk or dark chocolate with some green tea component.

You can imagine my concern when I started to unwrap this Sequoia wafer chocolate bar and saw that the bottom was what appeared to be semi-sweet chocolate. The top is olive green (and had bloomed a bit to boot, that's the white stuff on it) and the illustration tells us that there is green tea cream between the wafers.

A sniff revealed a discordant mix of chocolate and tea aromas. A bite revealed that it was indeed semi-sweet (or bittersweet) chocolate on the bottom. This meant that there was a turf war on my tongue for which bitter flavor got to dominate, the tea's or the chocolate's. Neither one. They kicked up a lot of dirt, made a mess, and it was a draw. I really didn't care for the mixture of these two flavors. Though there is ample sweetness on hand to off-set them, it just tasted "wrong" to me.

On the best of days, Sequoia's wafer-based chocolate bars can disappoint, but this was really more unpleasant than usual from my viewpoint. I think that my reaction was an extremely subjective one. This isn't a bad bar overall, and I'm sure some people will enjoy it, but it simply was not for me. I ended up throwing the rest away after eating a little less than half.

KitKat Air In White

My husband recently went home to visit his family and take care of some business in the U.S. Being your faithful snack blogger, I remained in Japan all alone so that I might purchase junk food and write about it. Okay, you know that is a big, fat lie. I stayed here because the fuel surcharges are so expensive that we couldn't afford two tickets to paradise. The point is that he brought me back 6 boxes of meringue cookies from Trader Joe's. For reasons I can't explain because they go beyond the love of crispy, marshmallowy cookie goodness, I am crazy for meringue. I know a lot of people find them chalky, too sweet or lacking in flavor, but I adore them.

If you've ever made meringue cookies (and I haven't since it requires running the oven at low temps for a long time and I'm so impatient), you know that it is made by beating air and sugar into egg whites then baking them. It struck me that eating something which incorporates air is really paying money for nothing, yet I will still most likely gobble down all of my Trader Joe's vanilla meringue cookies in record time. It does beg the question of why something should be more desirable with air when it is perfectly fine without it. Of course, I speak of the KitKat, not meringue, which absolutely requires air to be anything more than just egg. The answer to why there's air in these KitKats is obvious to me: Nestle Japan is out of any other ideas.

This is a box of mini KitKats weighing in at about 40 calories per and each is about half the length of a single finger, but a little wider. There are 7 in the box (lucky 7? too cheap for 8?) and they cost 150 yen ($1.98) at convenience stores. That makes them on the expensive side, but pretty much normal for this type of special release.

These smell rather different than usual KitKats, but it is hard to pin down why. Since there is both white and darker chocolate, you get two different tastes and better depth of flavor. The base is bittersweet and the top is buttery white chocolate. The wafers only lend texture and crunch, and less than usual because of the need to make a higher "air" portion on the top caused a few wafers to be sacrificed. Sometimes airy chocolate has a bit of a crispy feel to it, but it really doesn't seem to be doing much here besides lowering the total calories.

I liked this a lot because the chocolate flavors came together well. A little more crispy wafer would have been good, but I'm not complaining. I ate two of these at one time and it didn't seem incredibly sweet in the build-up. For any consumer-level chocolate, and one with a white chocolate component, that's pretty impressive.

Though this isn't the most bizarre or exciting KitKat Nestle Japan has come up with, it's still pretty tasty and is the first one that I think competes favorably with the original bar. In fact, I'd say it beats it in terms of the chocolate, but falls just a bit short on the wafers. The air aspects absolutely does nothing for it. However, I'd definitely buy this again.

Bourbon Kinako Wafers (Petit Series)

The word "petit" when rendered into katakana English becomes something akin to "poochie". Because I automatically translate po-chi into English and read "petit", I forget  how goofy it sounds. "Poochie wafers" sounds like a dog biscuit rather than a cookie for humans.

The Bourbon petit series is available everywhere in Japan. Boxes of these snacks in their long tubular packages are often placed on the top shelves in convenience stores and supermarkets. You can get a decent portion for about a hundred yen ($1.20). In addition to the tiny chocolate cakes I reviewed previously, they also offer a large range of small cookies and rice crackers. Whatever your fancy, you can get a night's snacking worth in one of these packets without totally pigging out. In the case of these wafers, 45 grams (1.6 oz.) provide 229 calories, or about 12 calories per cookie.

These don't smell like much of anything, despite being liberally covered in kinako powder (toasted soy bean flour). Each little cookie is about 2.5 cm (a little under an inch) square and looks more like a flat biscuit than a wafer. However, inside are layers with firm cream filling. They're nicely sweet without being overbearing and have a lovely toasted soy flour. Sometimes kinako comes across as very peanut buttery, but these are much closer to the soy side in flavor.

I absolutely loved these. They are fresh, crispy, sweet, and flavorful. If you like kinako, absolutely try these.

Fujiya Peko Wafers

There's a new blog which I started following a few months ago called "Food in Real Life". It takes pictures of the box illustration of a dish and the way the food actually looks and then rates both how closely the real food resembles the illustration and how it tastes. I must say that Japanese processed food as it appears on the package generally resembles the food as presented inside.



That being said, these Peko wafers as pictured don't look anything like the way they are portrayed on the bag. In fact, they look further from the illustration than most things I've reviewed. They look thick, airy, and have a clearly defined filling on the bag and are rather compressed and dense in real life. The looks don't really matter though. It's going to be the taste and texture.


There are 16 individually wrapped bars in the bag. I picked these up at a local supermarket for 198 yen ($2.22). Each is about 7 cm (2.7 in) long and slightly wider than a KitKat finger and is 42 calories. So, the bottom line is going to be whether or not I enjoy these enough to pay 12 yen (13 cents) apiece and view the calories ingested as worthwhile.

Both types of bars are light and crispy. The wafers are what I'd call "softly crispy" like sugar wafers rather than crispy in a brittle way. They yield more easily when you bite them. This isn't a bad thing, just different. The vanilla bar smells very much like nougat to me. It also has some caramel notes. It mainly tastes like nougat with very, very weak chocolate flavor. It's more of a sense of a chocolate "wash" than serious chocolate flavor. The chocolate bar smells weakly of chocolate and has a mild chocolate flavor, but is quite pleasant. Neither is overly sweet.

These are actually quite pleasant for someone who likes wafers, but doesn't want something as sugary or as heavy as a KitKat or Sequoia bar. These are lighter and I liked them a lot, but I adore wafers without too much smothering sugary coating. I'd definitely consider buying them again since I like lighter treats and things that are not so sweet. I prefer the chocolate ones over the vanilla though. The caramel/nougat notes don't do as much for me. I think someone with similar tastes would really enjoy these, but they may not be bold enough for some people.

"Adult Sweetness" KitKat

There are so many jokes a reviewer could make about an "adult" KitKat in terms of marital aids, pornography, etc., but as someone who has been an adult for a long time, I'd say that there are bigger realities associated with adulthood. I'm talking about things like paying taxes, being fully responsible for any crimes you commit willfully or unwittingly (not that I've ever committed a crime...), and realizing that you are neither immortal nor invincible. If eating this KitKat conveyed the sense of your own mortality, it'd truly be "adult".

In the end though, this KitKat is a brilliant example of what most Japanese KitKats are these days; they are the product of a better team of marketers and graphic designers than creative cooks. The thing that makes this "adult" is that it isn't supposed to be as sweet as most KitKats. This is achieved solely through using a very mild dark chocolate coating instead of a milk chocolate one. If you are a fan of dark chocolate that gives you an intense hit, this isn't a bar for you. It's the sort of dark chocolate flavor that cocoa sissies can find palatable.

When I opened the package, the scent reminded me of the sort of dark chocolate that I used to get at Halloween time in the form of a Hershey's  miniature that someone tossed in my trick-or-treat bag. It tasted good, which is to say that it tastes like a KitKat with marginally less sweet dark chocolate. It's really such a subtle variation on the classic presentation that it's hardly worth noting.

If you like KitKats, you'll like this. It's good and costs the same as all Japanese KitKats (120 yen ($1.43) in convenience stores, 100 yen ($1.19) at Okashi no Machioka, where I got mine), but I would avoid it at all costs if you're considering paying a premium price for one via an importer. It's simply not interesting enough to pay more for. That being said, if you're living in Japan, it's about 5% more interesting than a regular KitKat and worth picking up as a change of pace.

Crunky Wafers

If you have worked in a Japanese office, then there is a very high chance that you have had the experience of being given snacks or treats. Most of the time, such food items are purchased as souvenirs (omiyage) when a coworker travels for business or personal reasons. Often, you get seasonal or regional foods.

During the 12 years I worked in a Japanese office, there were many occasions on which I was given such snacks. I often asked the office ladies (it was always women who doled out treats as men did not serve food or drinks in a Japanese office), known as "O.L." in Japan, what I was getting because the packages did not describe the contents. The information about the food was usually on the box that it came in and I never saw the boxes themselves.

One day, I was handed something and asked the O.L., Tomomi, what I was being given. Tomomi was well-known for wanting to practice and improve her English and this gave her a chance to try and come up with the right words for a fairly simple conversational exchange. She told me that the food she was handing me was what sounded like "way-haas". After some good-natured confusion, I figured out that what she was saying was "wafers". In Japanese, wafers are ウェハース (we-haa-su). Now, every time I see wafers, I think "way-haas" instead of wafers.



Since I love way-haas, I was pleased to see this Crunky bar at an AM/PM convenience store. I don't remember exactly what it cost, but I think it was around 60 yen (66 cents). The bar is quite small at 6 cm x 5 cm (2.4 in. x 2 in) and has 75 calories.

It smells like a Crunky bar with a plain wafer scent mixed in. The texture is very crispy and it's quite dry. It's more solid than a regular wafer because of the relatively thick and firm chocolate filling. The filling is not a cream like most wafers. It's actually thin layers of Crunky chocolate crunch bar. It's not too sweet and has a nice chocolate flavor with a wheat-like wafer flavor. You can't really detect the malt puffs in the Crunky filling.

I liked this, as did my husband. It is a very "utilitarian" kind of treat because it's not exotic, super sweet or rich. A lot of the pleasure is in the texture and the lack of heavy sugary sweetness. If your really like wafers, this is definitely worth giving a try, but this may not be for everyone.

bon o bon Chocolate and Vanilla Cream Bonbons

All 100-yen shops are not created equal in Japan. Some of them mainly carry food and are like tiny, cheap supermarkets selling food in small portions. Some carry novelties, housewares, and other things that you're not supposed to put in your mouth (let alone swallow). One chain which has a blue sign with the words "100 yen" written on it in white carries both snacks and a large number of housewares. That was the shop where I found these varieties of bonbons. It's a bit further afield than my usual haunts, but it had things I don't often see so it was work the trek.

These are distributed by snack manufacturer Yaokin, which I know well from it's salted snack foods designed for the Japanese kid market. At the time that I researched the company for other reviews, I downloaded a catalog in .pdf format which included a plethora of snacks that I had never seen before and these bonbons were amongst those previously undiscovered treats. These chocolates were produced in Argentina, and are sold under the brand name Arcor. They are sold in the South American market, and are a bigger deal there than they are in Japan. There is a cute animated commercial for them on YouTube.


So, it ended up being the case that these are not Japanese, but they are marketed in Japan so that makes them fair game for me. Each is about 4 cm (1.6 in.) in diameter, and there are 6 of them in each bag (for 99 yen or about $1.10). There is no nutritional information on the bag, but I'd guess they're 80-100 calories each. The ingredients include sugar, peanuts, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, and cocoa mass.

I first bought the chocolate cream variety and my husband and I gave them a taste. They're a little like a cheaper, bigger version of a Ferrero Rocher hazelnut chocolate. They smell like cocoa, with a hint of peanut. Each is a nice blob of soft, creamy filling with a thin wafer shell dipped in chocolate. The chocolate flavor is rather weak, and you can tell it's either designed for a market which is dissimilar from that in Japan (where chocolate is bittersweet) or it's just cheap chocolate. That doesn't make it bad at all. It just makes it a better choice for those who like milk chocolate than those who like dark or strong cocoa flavors. The chocolate is creamy, but has some grain to it.

The peanut element is much more present than I anticipated. In fact, it borders on a chocolate peanut butter candy which makes it fantastic in the eyes of us foreign folks who are missing our Reese's peanut butter cups. Mind you, this is no peanut butter cup, but at least the peanut and chocolate combination can be tasted. For the record, peanut butter and chocolate combinations are extremely rare in Japan. Most Japanese people respond to the idea with the equivalent of "ewww".


The vanilla cream flavor bonbon is very similar to the chocolate one, but the flavor is a little "cleaner". I wanted to try the vanilla variety mainly to see if the peanut butter shined through more intensely when the filling wasn't full of cocoa goodness. It turned out that it wasn't any stronger, but it still was good. It was sweet, creamy, and had mild but detectable hints of peanut. There wasn't much of a true "vanilla" flavor, but it was still good.

I really liked these, though they clearly are not a premium candy and lack the refined quality that Japan-made chocolates have. They have a lot going for them in terms of the textural elements and the peanut and chocolate flavor combination. The center is rich and fatty, but rather light. The wafer makes a nice contrast with the soft center.

I can not only say that I would buy these again, but that I went out and bought three more bags of them after the first one was gone. For 100 yen each, these are really great. The only down side is that you might want to eat the whole bag and regret it.

Sequoia Baked Apple Chocolate

While Nestle is grinding out new KitKat flavors as if the bar's consumers had the gustatory attention span of a 2-year-old, Furuta releases a couple of new and unique Sequoia chocolate wafer bars a year. Even though I have been less than thrilled at times with the Sequoia offerings, the scarcity of new variants always makes it more exciting to come across one. Perhaps absence does actually make the heart grow fonder, even when the one you're missing is the red-headed stepchild of the wafer-based chocolate family.


I found this bar at Family Mart for about 50 yen (55 cents). It's the same size and weight as regular Sequoia bars which is about 10 cm x 2.5 cm (about 4 in. x 1 in.). These bars are pretty solid, but the weight is not given on the wrapper. The package describes the composition of the bar as an outer shell of baked apple chocolate (including cinnamon), "milk cream" around the wafers, and milk chocolate on the bottom. When you open the packet, you can smell the apple flavor.

This bar is good on some levels, and less so on others. On the plus side, the flavor has depth and the texture has complexity. You can taste apple, wafers, sweet white chocolate, and bittersweet chocolate to varying degrees. Unfortunately, the overly sweet white chocolate flavor dominates such that there are only hints of the apple and bittersweet flavors. The texture is an interesting mix of almost fudgey or ganache-like interior filling, grainy sugary goodness, crispy wafers, and a slightly firm chocolate coating. Both my husband and I were disappointed that cinnamon did not figure very much at all in the flavor profile despite it being mentioned as a relevant component.

I liked this despite the indifferent rating I'm giving it. The main question I have to ask myself though is, 'would I buy it again?' The answer is no and that's mainly because it's just too sweet. I only ate about 1/3 of it for this review and I consumed it in 3 bites with a cup of tea. I could easily see this being just too sweet if I didn't have a beverage or ate more at once. I would recommend this as a curiosity to anyone inclined to sample it, but I doubt anyone will be missing it when it's finished with it's run on convenience store shelves.

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.

Maple Monimo Chocolate Wafer

I love small portions for sweets, and I definitely live in the right country for buying things in small quantities. One of the reasons I review so much Tirol chocolate is that it is sold in roughly one inch (30 mm) square blocks that are individually wrapped and sold for a small price. This means two bites, a few calories, and no temptation to overindulge. By and large though, Tirol has been the only manufacturer to regularly offer such small morsels for individual sale.

Because I like a company that offers its products in a fashion which saves me from myself, I was happy to come across Monimo brand squares which appear to be a knock-off of Tirol types of candies. They are the exact same size as Tirol Premium chocolates and about the same price. The company that makes these is Nikkoh Co., Ltd. which is located in Gifu, Japan and was established in 1954. In addition to a small line of chocolates, they make jellies (what we call gelatin) and bottle beverages like ramune (a kind of Japanese soda) and cream soda.


These chocolates come wrapped in the exact same fashion as Tirol candies. That is, they are wrapped in foil-lined paper and then in a thin layer of plastic with nutritional information large folded under the candy. This particular chocolate was 59 calories. Unlike Tirol, it's not stamped with a design but rather with a message to "Relax!" I have no idea why it says "Modena" on it, but it is interesting to note that it is the name of a breed of "fancy pigeon". Let's hope that has nothing to do with the candy's ingredients.


Since spring is here and it's warm and humid all the time, my candy melted just a little en route to my apartment. I put it in the refrigerator immediately, but the chocolate is on the soft side even when kept quite cold. The candy smells like regular chocolate. There isn't a hint of maple in the scent at all. The chocolate itself tastes somehow cheap. Even though it is made with cocoa butter, that ingredient comes pretty far down the line.

The chocolate has that familiar bittersweet chocolate aftertaste that one often finds in Japanese chocolate, but it's a bit stranger than usual. I think that slightly funky aftertaste comes from the maple flavor in between the wafers. The problem is that there is so little wafer and so little maple flavor, that you can't tell exactly what it is. The wafer is crispy and nice, particularly as a pairing with the soft chocolate coating, but ultimately it's just not that impressive.

This wasn't bad by a long shot, but I definitely wouldn't choose to revisit it. If I had known what it was like before purchasing it, I probably wouldn't have bothered. It's not the least bit offensive or anything. It's just not all that exciting or delicious. On the bright side, it didn't appear to taste anything like a fancy pigeon.