Kyro-chan Cake (Milk)

Back when I was a kid in Pennsylvania, one of my aunts used to make "whoopie pies". For those who are uninitiated in the delights of the whoopie pie, it is generally regarded as a Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish) concoction and is very tasty, particularly to children. The filling is particularly yummy.

I haven't seen or eaten a whoopie pie in decades, but one immediately came to mind when I saw this box of Kyroro-chan (キョロチャん) Cakes (milk flavor). Kyoro-chan, by the way, is famous in Japan as a mascot for a candy called "choco balls". Choco-balls are tiny little fried peanuts covered in glossy milk chocolate and Kyroro-chan is designed after the shape of a peanut with a weird beak attached to it, hence the shape of the ugly bird on the box.

Not content to only attach his visage to small boxes of chocolate-covered peanuts, Kyoro-chan has been branching out and now his image is pasted on various sorts of candies of a similar size and shape to the original choco-ball. The only difference is that the body design changes to match the product. The reason he's looks like the unfortunate offspring of some odd coupling with a toucan and a holstein on this box is that the cakes are "milk" flavored and milk comes from cows.

With images of whoopie pies dancing in my head, I decided to take the plunge and buy this box of cakes. However, I know from experience that any product you buy in Japan that resembles an old home favorite is never going to live up to expectations. Hope springs eternal, however.

Click for a detailed image showing texture.

Six cakes come individually-wrapped in a cow-spotted package. This type of wasteful but very convenient packaging is very common in Japan. I can't remember what I paid for the box but it was around $2-$2.50 (200-260 yen). The cakes are very small, about 1.5 times the diameter of an Oreo cookie. They are exceptionally soft and have a good cream filling to cake ratio, though the filling is not nearly as generous near the edges as the box illustration makes it appear.

The filling is actually pretty good. It's very light without being airy though it has little taste of its own. It could definitely use a spot of vanilla, but it came close to approximating a whoopie pie's filling. One of the reasons for this is that the third ingredient for these cakes is "shortening" and whoopie pie filling has a lot of vegetable shortening in it. Unfortunately, that makes these cakes immensely fatty. One tiny cake is 140 calories.

What they aren't is incredibly sweet (sugar is the fifth ingredient, though I believe "sweet water/sugar water" is the second one). This is a good thing in some ways, but it also makes for a relatively flat taste experience. Cocoa is so far down on the list of ingredients at number 8 that you know that there isn't much chocolate in there. The cake portion has very little flavor and provides little contrast to the filling either as a deeper flavor or as a different texture. So, the super soft cookie plus soft filling with no deep flavors make it pretty disappointing.

I certainly wouldn't buy these again. It's not that they're bad, but just that they are really loaded with fat and high in calories for the portion size so that the pleasure to nutritional "badness" ratio makes them not worthwhile.

Vegips (Sweet Potato and Pumpkin Chips)

Vegetables are good. Sweet potato and pumpkin are even better when you're thinking of vegetables. In fact, I often think of sweet potato as the "candy" of vegetables. When I saw this bag of "Vegips", I thought it'd be tasty and nutritious. The claim on the package is that they are "light and delicious". It also lets you know that these are real vegetable slices rather than reconstituted vegetable product (a la Pringles). That'll teach me a lesson in checking the nutrition information on the back of the bag before buying the product.

The "chips" part of Vegips is out in full force. These are not dehydrated or baked healthy chips. They are deep fried like the dreaded potato chip. This small bag (45 grams/1. 6 oz.) contains 16.2 grams of fat, 26 grams of carbohydrate, and 4 mg of salt. This means they weigh in pretty heavy calorically at 256 calories for this bag which one can easily polish off in one sitting. To off-set the fat, you get a paltry 1.6 grams of protein and I'm guessing whatever nutritional gains from the sweet potatoes and pumpkin survive the frying process.


The bag contains about 10 of each type of chip in whole or in fragments. When you open it, it smells like squash. The pumpkin is definitely the more flavorful and dominant chip among the two. It's important to note that Japanese pumpkin, kaboucha (かぼちゃ), is not the same as American pumpkin. It tastes more squash-like and the flavor is a bit more intense. They're both good, but a different taste experience.

I tried a pumpkin chip first and it tasted nicely of pumpkin but there was an oddly familiar taste with it. I couldn't pin it down at first and then I realized that it's oil. In fact, it tastes a bit like "old" oil. The chip is super crispy and a little thick but not dense. It fact, it breaks off very nicely. I think that the oil flavor is so strong because they must be saturated with oil to get a proper texture. After eating a few, the oil flavor tends to become more muted. This might be because it seems to coat your tongue. I found that there is a bit of a residue in my mouth after eating these chips.

I was looking forward to the sweet potato more than the pumpkin and it had the same good, crunchy texture as the pumpkin chip and was cut slightly thinner. The first chip didn't seem to have much sweet potato flavor and seemed more like a regular chip but after eating a few, the sweet potato flavor emerged more strongly. The oil taste seemed less oppressive, but still present. The sweet potato chip loses a bit more in the translation from real vegetable to chip in my opinion. I found myself wishing the chip had retained more of its sweet potato essence. Both types of chips are very lightly salted and I think the sweet potato one probably suffers a bit for not having more salt. A bit more seasoning would probably give the flavor more definition.

These chips contain very few ingredients. Essentially, they consist of sweet potatoes, vegetable oil, and pumpkin. Note that the ingredients are in order from highest volume to lowest. That means there is more oil than pumpkin! There are no chemicals and no extra flavoring and that would be refreshing if they weren't so full of fat. A bag of these cost me 168 yen ($1.58 USD), which is slightly expensive for such a small portion. If these weren't so fatty, I'd happily have them regularly despite the oily aftertaste. They really are much tastier and more flavorful than regular chips.

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.

Caramel Macchiato Kit-Kat

There are so many different Kit-Kats in Japan that I could probably populate this entire blog with reviews of nothing but various Kit-Kats. While I enjoy Kit-Kats, I'm not prepared to consume them quite so regularly. Also, to be quite honest, many of the flavored Kit-Kats in Japan are simply white chocolate ones with artificial or real flavors and colors stirred into the coating or filling.

My expectations of any particular short-lived flavor of Japanese Kit-Kat are usually pretty low because I know the roots of most of them. Many of them are too sweet and come too strong. I approached the caramel macchiato variety with this apprehension out in full force.

This Kit-Kat comes with a big advertisement on the cover for a McDonald's McFlurry. This is related to the fact that McDonald's is now featuring a caramel macchiato flavor McFlurry (and possibly to the fact that there is also a Kit-Kat flavored one). There may have been some sort of cross-advertising agreement between Nestlé and McDonald's or Nestlé is getting some sort of cash infusion from the golden arches, but the ways of business are a mystery to this simple food blogger. On the back of the box, there is a barcode which can be read by cell phones that can be read in and will allow you to get a coupon for a free McFlurry.

If you look at the upper left corner of the box, you'll see that the calorie count per serving is offered. This is a new trend among Japanese snack products. They put the calorie information both on the front and back so that consumers can consider whether the purchase is going to be worth the added calories. Note, however, that the 115 calories is for "1 package", not the entire box. Kit-kats in Japan are boxed with two packages of two fingers, not one bar of 4 fingers. The entire Kit-Kat is therefore 230 calories. You can also see that it says this caramel macchiato flavor is 1.0% coffee. I'm sure that'll make a huge difference in the flavor.


The bars are white chocolate with tan marbling. When you open the package, you are hit very clearly by an artificial burnt caramel scent. The information on the back says that the coating is caramel chocolate and the coffee component is in the cream between the wafer layers. This means the bar is sure to have a much heavier caramel flavor since the amount of coating greatly outweights the "cream" between the wafers. Also, even the scant cream is billed as having both caramel and espresso. My first bite confirmed this. I tasted the caramel on the super sweet coating and detected no coffee flavor at all. There was just the barest hint of a coffee-type bitter aftertaste on the tongue after the first bite, but it was very faint. The caramel taste is okay, but pretty obviously fake. Mainly, I get the sweetness.

The second bite revealed more coffee taste to me. My husband sampled it as well and he felt it carried a much stronger hit of coffee than I did right off the bat. In fact, his first response was that it had a strong coffee flavor. This could be related to the fact that he took bigger bites than I or that he feels less overwhelmed by caramel flavors. It could also be related to the fact that I sniffed the bar a few times first and smelling something often enhances taste.

I'm inclined to go with my husband's opinion on this more than mine as I am not a huge fan of caramel. He said that it carries more of a burnt caramel note rather than a buttery, pleasantly well-rounded caramel flavor and that he detects bitterness in it. The bar has a heavy artificial flavor and I asked if he'd buy this again and he said he would not. When queried about whether he'd even finish the other 2 fingers in the second package (we each had one finger from the first package to sample it), he said he'd only do so if he was seriously in the mood for something sweet and nothing else was around. Since he's a caramel fan, this isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of this bar.

This is also reviewed at Snack Love.

Mamador Bean Cakes

Two gifts from two different students in one day. A box of Mamador bean cakes from Takashimaya in Shinjuku and some macademia nuts from Saipan.

Sometimes I wonder how long I'd have to live in Japan to sample every white bean cake on the market. No matter how many we try, more keep popping up. And, we've tried a lot. My husband was given a new variety today as a gift from a student for no particular reason. Japanese people are like that.


When I say "new", I mean "new to us" only. Apparently the company that makes these has been in business since 1946. It's easy to miss any particular Japanese sweet when you're shopping. Department stores have miles and miles of them available and it'd be impossible to buy or try them all. That means that some real gems can slip under your radar and these cakes are pretty, shiny diamonds amongst white bean cakes. In fact, they're my husband's new favorite among the types you can pick up pre-boxed (and locally).


The picture of the inside of these cakes makes them look like like they're full of some sort of yellow or fruit jelly, but they are full of super moist white beans surrounded by a moist cake-like shell. Most bean cakes are relatively dry and their fillings can be downright powdery at times. These are full of butter and milk and the flavor is reminiscent of vanilla cake.

It strikes me that these would make an excellent souvenir to take back home as it's a Japanese sweet which I'm sure even squeamish eaters would enjoy. They're just a little hard to find though unless you happen to live in the right location.