Pucca Chocolate Biscuits

The is a plethora of tiny cookies with thin shells and a cream filling on sale at supermarket checkouts in Japan. The only one I'd sampled before was Koala's March vanilla, and I was not a fan of it. Since most of these cookies are designed for kids and are quite cheap, I hadn't really felt compelled to sample another until I read ebidebby's review of Pucca creamy caramel. The fact that the Pucca cookies are covered in pretzel rather than a thin cookie shell piqued my interest. Pucca seem to be a sweet version of Combos pretzel snacks, albeit ones with a thinner pretzel portion.


A 58 gram (2 oz.) box of these cookies costs about a dollar (98 yen). There are 272 calories in the whole box and the ingredients include cocoa masses, cocoa butter, rye flour, butter oil, and cheese powder. Fortunately, the cheese powder didn't lend any bizarre flavors to the cookies as was the case with my previous experience with chocolates that had cheese powder. The rye flour, no doubt, makes the brown pretzel shell.

The shell is bland and unsalted, but carries a distinctive taste and smell. Before biting into one of these, they smell just like your average pretzel. Despite how thin the shell is, it lends a good flavor to the mix. This is unlike the white cookie shells on similar cookies which don't seem to do much other than hold the cream filling. The chocolate center is soft, but not liquid. It's a bit like a firmer, less sweet, and milk chocolate version of an Oreo cookie center. The sweetness level is perfect and eating a lot at once does not take you up to a cloying level of cumulative sweetness.

I really enjoyed these, much to my surprise. I'd very much recommend sampling them and would buy them again if I was in the mood. I could see having a craving for Nutella fulfilled by these in a pinch. The filling doesn't have hazelnut flavoring, but it does have the same satisfying sense of chocolatey richness as Nutella.

If you like the little characters in the Pucca commercial, you can download some desktop pictures featuring them here.

Onagaya Taiyaki

Taiyaki is a traditional Japanese sweet made with what looks like and is similar to pancake or waffle batter. It has a filling which is often made of beans or custard in my experience, but can be any from a wide variety of fillings including savory ones.



There's a taiyaki place not too far from my home which I have walked past many times, so I've seen the process hundreds of times. There are two fish-shaped mold pans (like a large muffin tin with fish-shaped holes) which batter is poured into and a dollops of filling are placed in the center of one side. The two sides are then joined together and the batter is completely cooked and the filling warmed up or melted.

Recently, we got a flyer for a taiyaki place, Onagaya, opening up in our neighborhood. This one produces taiyaki which is a little different than usual because it is white and made with tapioca flour-based batter instead of pancake-style batter. They sell a great many varieties including black and red bean, grean tea, blueberry cheese, strawberry cheese, and mango cheese. We decided to sample their unique taiyaki and chose white bean, custard, and chocolate.

The texture of these is rather rubbery and the outside feels tacky, but is not actually sticky. The inside is good quality, sticky and hard to chew and like mochi. You have to be very careful to chew it well to prevent choking. The chewy shell was a little on the thick side in these sweets. I had to make an effort to take small bites and these were tough to bite off and cut in half with a knife. If you have a chance to sample these, don't underestimate the danger of eating them too fast or the difficulty of chewing them.

from left: chocolate, custard, white bean

custard: The vanilla pudding in this is rich and smooth. It has a nice vanilla flavor and is at the right sweetness level. The mochi mainly adds its texture so it was a pretty nice combination.

white bean: This was somewhat of a disappointment. It was good, no doubt, but the beans didn't have a strong flavor aside from sweetness. Both the mochi and the beans are mainly lending textural elements so you're getting two interesting textures, but a very bland flavor profile.

chocolate: Like the custard, this had a good pudding center which was creamy, smooth and rich with a bittersweet bite.

All of these were good, high quality and well made. The main issue was with the combination of tough, chewy mochi-like outer shell with those fillings. If the shell had been much thinner, I think this would be a definite repeater, but chewy, tough wrapper with a squishy filling isn't really a match made in heaven. One of these days, I hope to do a review of the more traditional taiyaki from our local shop to contrast the experience I had with these ones.

"Bamboo" Cookie Crunch Bar

Meiji has a well-known line of cookies that resemble trees and mushrooms. There are variations on them, but the basics are a cookie covered with a bit of chocolate. There are many people who are great fans of these, though I haven't really gotten around to sampling them. Ebidebby at Snack Love has reviewed several varieties so you can use the links in the first sentence to read a bit more about them on her blog and see her pictures.

This candy bar attempts to keep the theme of sweets that resemble things found in nature by being molded in the shape of bamboo. I haven't seen any candy bars in this line before, and this was a New Days convenience store specialty item that you supposedly cannot buy at any other shop.


I stored my bar on top of the refrigerator on a day when room temperature was about 72 degrees F. (22 degrees C.). It wasn't an especially hot day, but the bar was quite soft when I tried it. It easily started to melt on my fingers when I sampled it so I put the remainder in the refrigerator. It seems that a lot of Japanese chocolate softens up even in modest weather. This is rather unfortunate since the flavor of chocolate is diminished if it's too cold.


The package front points out that there are crushed cookies and macadamia nuts in the bar. Among the ingredients listed on the package are almond paste, macadamia nuts, margarine, cocoa powder, and cocoa butter. The entire bar is 189 calories for a 32 gram (1.1 oz.) bar which is about 13 cm (5.1 inc.) long x 3 cm (1.2 in.) wide.

The outside is a chocolate shell around a softer filling which is filled with very finely crushed nuts and cookie bits. The pieces are so small that the crunch is rather subdued. I think it would have been more satisfying from the texture viewpoint if the cookie pieces had been bigger. As it was, you get a rather grainy finish because there are so many little bits in there. It's a bit like it's dissolving into tiny little pellets of sand.

The bar smells like sweet milky chocolate and that's what it tastes like with a touch of malt. It's somewhat atypical for Japanese chocolate in that it doesn't have the characteristic bitter aftertaste of most Japanese candy bars.

This is a pretty nice tasting candy bar with mildly flawed texture. I wish that the filling were smoother. I get the feeling that the graininess in it is the result of nuts that were ground too small or a lack of something which binds all of the elements in the center together into a smoother whole. I'd certainly consider buying this again for the taste alone, but I wish the texture was just a bit finer.

Calpis Soda Grape Zero

Let's get the big laugh out of the way first. When you say "Calpis", it sounds like "cow piss". The makers of Calpis either didn't know or didn't care about that when they made the name. The "cal" is for Calcium and the (rather unfortunate) "pis" is from Sanskrit and supposedly means "supreme taste" and is used because it is part of Buddist culture (and Japanese culture has elements of Buddism). Note that in English-speaking countries, this is called "Calpico".


Despite having been here for 20 years, I've never been tempted to buy Calpis. I chuckled about it a few times when I first got here, and promptly lost interest. The drink is supposed to be yogurt-like and feature milky flavors. It's called a "lactic acid" beverage. The color of this beverage certainly would bear that out as it is very cloudy and appears to be mixed with something milky.

This attracted me to it because it is zero calorie, though the first ingredient is, oddly "grape sugar". I'm guessing that it is not absolutely zero, but one of those deals where it is essentially zero per 100 ml. The other ingredients include the usual cocktail of artificial sweeteners.

This smells like grape soda, and on first sip, tastes like it. It has two strange aftertastes. The first is likely the lactic acid/milk element and the second is the artificial sweetener. I don't know what it is about Japanese low calorie sodas, but with the exception of Diet Coke, they all seem to have a heavy chemical flavor. This one is better than some on that front, but the weird bitterness and somewhat metallic taste that chases every sip spoils what might have been a promising beverage. So, while I drank the rest of the bottle, I wouldn't buy it again.

Bakauke Five Cheese Sembei

The Bakauke brand seems to be exploding. I hadn't seen it in most markets when I started this blog, and now I'm seeing varieties of its banana-shaped rice crackers everywhere. This cheese flavor was at Seiyu supermarket and cost about $1.45 (about 140 yen), and it caught my eye amongst the see of fish and seaweed types.


Bakauke sembei has very good brand imagery and I think that's why it's catching on fast. Besides having a distinctive cracker shape, it also has a couple of distinctive mascots (as mentioned in my review of their wasabi sembei). Like many mascots for food products in Japan, they're rather crudely drawn and not really very attractive, but seem to help make the product more noticeable. For this particular bag of sembei, one of the little blurbs on the back mentions that every cracker packet inside has a mascot in a different get-up.


When I opened up the package, even before I breached one of the individual packets, I could smell the cheese powder used in these. The first whiff is highly reminiscent of Cheetos cheese puffs seasoning. The flavor is also rather similar, but these have more depth and variety to them. I'm guessing that's because of the five flavors of cheese that have been included - Edam, Swiss, cheddar, Camembert, and Gouda. You can detect the Swiss notes distinct from the cheddar in particular.

These are nicely cheesy, but not extreme. They have a bit of the typical rice cracker flavor, but not the heavily cooked flavor with soy that you sometimes get. The crackers are crisp and fresh and only about 45 calories per packet of two. If you're not a big fan of sembei, these may be a good stepping stone for you to transition from the "light" stuff to the heavy stuff. They're not quite as accessible as the garlic butter sembei (which I would call the non-sembei-tasting rice cracker), but they're a good second.