Look Strawberry French Dessert Assortment

Though I've been late to the Look assorted chocolate collections, I've become a fan. They're firm chocolate shells encasing soft, varied flavorings. I get the feeling that the flavors are very carefully crafted to closely resemble the food they are emulating in a subtle way. I'm guessing that formulating these small bits of chocolate in such a fashion involves elves. Or, possibly fairies. I'm thinking chubby fairies with a refined palate and a sweet tooth who can't lift themselves with their delicate little wings so they are happy to spend their days laboring in Fujiya's chocolate formulation kitchen.

This crop of candies is currently available pretty much everywhere - hundred yen shops, supermarkets, convenience stores, snack shops. They cost me 100 yen ($1.21) for a 43 gram (1.5 oz.) box with 12 small pieces. Each piece is about 20 calories.

Each chocolate is based on strawberry, which is slightly disappointing as more variety, such as could be had in the Italian Dolce collection, would have been nicer, but it's not like the name of the candy wasn't a tip-off of what was to come. The basic construction for every variety is a chocolate shell and a soft center with a strawberry sauce on top of it.

Strawberry Mille-feuille:
There is a sharp, tart hit of strawberry and the tiniest bits of crunchy things in this to simulate the puff pastry aspect of mille-feuille. The chocolate is slightly bittersweet and makes for a very good contrast with the strawberry flavor, which resembles extremely intense jam.

Strawberry mousse:
The same strawberry flavored sauce is on top of the "mousse" interior of the chocolate. It's not quite as intense and there is definitely a bit of lightness to the filling and a dairy flavor which is reminiscent of mousse. Adding in this noticeable textural element that simulates the light sense of eating a mousse in such a tiny chocolate is pretty impressive.

Strawberry cheesecake:
Like the mousse, this has a light filling, but it's marginally denser. It also has the familiar tang of cream cheese. It is well-complimented by the small amount of strawberry sauce and larger looming chocolate flavor.

Strawberry champagne dessert:
I knew this was going to be my least liked variety and I was right. There's really nothing wrong with the chocolate itself. I'm simply  not a fan of boozey flavors in chocolates. The "champagne" part tastes to me like cheap white whine, though as these types of chocolate go, this wasn't bad at all. The strawberry flavor paired well with the wine flavor and the finish on the tongue was of chocolate.

This is another very nice international flavor collection of "Look". If you have a particular fondness for strawberry chocolates, don't hesitate to give this a try. It's good quality and the strawberry, while not real, is not overbearing or offensive. The chocolate remains the main star and it is fine quality consumer chocolate with a good flavor and texture that is accented by the strawberry and other flavors. I would definitely buy this again, and will be sampling future Look flavor collections based on my positive experiences so far.

Luna Banana Nata de Coco Yogurt

While the plain yogurt offerings continue to be decimated on store shelves due to supply chain problems and (likely) panic-buying, small cartons of flavored yogurt tend to be left behind, at least in small quantities. In my area, I've noticed that low or no calorie options are less popular than regular versions during the current atmosphere of crisis. I guess if you're going to hoard, it's important to make sure you have stuff that will fatten you up as much as possible.

I found this Luna yogurt at the local Lawson's 100 convenience store (100 yen/$1.21), but I've seen it pretty much everywhere. Since I've had very good experiences with the other offerings in this low-calorie line (a mere 65 calories) that Luna is creating, I thought I'd take the risk on banana yogurt. When I say "risk", I mean that I was risking the heartbreak of fake banana flavor, which is always a possibility.

After sampling this, the phrase, "it's better to quit while you're ahead" came to mind. Sigh. The banana flavor is too intense, and fake. The nata de coco pieces are firmer and tougher than some and the sweet and sour balance is not very pleasant. It's as if intense yogurt sourness is purposefully being off-set by equally intense artificial sweetness.

Though this is only 65 calories and makes for a light snack, I wouldn't buy it again because the flavors just don't work well and the textures are disappointing. I think if the nata de coco had been nicer, I'd be more forgiving even of the fake flavoring and unpleasant sweet and sour. Sorry, Luna, we have just had our first bad date, but I'll give you another chance in the future.

Fujiya Look Crispy Chocolate Snack Assort

When I was a child, I used to anthropomorphize everything. To those who didn't study General Psychology, or washed it all out of their brain with beer after taking the final exam, that means I used to assign human feelings and attributes to inanimate objects. To that end, I'd feel sad for things which were not popular or unwanted. I'd feel guilty when a toy didn't get played with, and this was before "Toy Story" put the notion into people's heads that toys lead animated and interesting lives when their owner isn't around.

Walking around the closest convenience store and its quake-induced-panic-buying decimated shelves, I looked at the sad sacks of unpurchased snacks and felt a little of that old sense of anthropomorphism. I felt bad for the Hello Kitty chocolate-covered puffs that resembled Styrofoam in the cutaway image, and for these bags of Look chocolates. What did they do to be left out of the disaster-induced-hoarding love? Meiji chocolate bars are definitely the teacher's pet of earthquake shoppers. Perhaps Fujiya doesn't inspire notions of soundness and shelf stability. I blame the Fujiya Girl with her lolling tongue and somewhat goggly eyes. Nobody wants to see that in a crisis.

Honestly, I don't know why these were left behind as I'd actually bought a package of the chocolate wafers that make up half of the bag before and liked them. For 100 yen ($1.24), this was a nice portion (18 pieces about the size of an American dime or one-yen coin) of candy for the price and, hey, chocolate! Each is individually wrapped and about a bite unless you're me and then it's two bites because you need a picture of the inside of the candy for your blog.

The main selling point for these is that they've got crispy innards under their layers of milk chocolate, and they do live up to that. The flavor of Fujiya chocolates is rather unique compared to other Japanese chocolates and one that I've come to recognize after sampling other offerings. It's hard to explain what that flavor is, but it's just a hint of a floral chemical taste. It's not offensive, but it is distinctive.

Yes, I had to bite them in half for a cutaway. The chocolate is too thick to cut through them with a knife. It makes for bad pictures, but tasty chocolates!

The candies themselves are pretty run of the mill decent quality consumer level chocolate covered wafer offerings in two varieties: "crepe" (22 calories) and "wafer" (24 calories). In terms of taste, the wafers, which have a tiny sugar wafer inside, have a little more sweetness because of the cream filling. The wafers themselves have a somewhat wheaty and earthy flavor which adds some distinction between the two candies. The "crepe" version has a mild waffle cone flavor going on. Both are mainly about the milk chocolate though.

I am not doing handsprings over these, but I liked them because I adore chocolate-covered crispy things and wafers in particular. I also love milk chocolate. This is not a unique offering or something for connoisseurs who want something that challenges or enlivens the palate. They are a decent pedestrian candy though, and I'd buy them again even if the shelves weren't picked over by quake panic shoppers.

Random Picture 56

I'm doing two pictures of beverages in a row as random pictures but this one rather stands apart from last week's picture. This curious display of shapely water bottles was on offer at a shop for people that aims mostly for consumers that are young enough to be my offspring called Village Vanguard. Each is 367 yen ($4.50) for what looks to be less than 500 ml. I'm wondering if even these, with their hyper-inflated prices, sold out during the great radiative water fear of the past week.

Personally, I like how the price tag seems to be censoring the front of Superman's tights. ;-)

Befco Camembert Cheese Kakimochi

Camembert cheese is one of the  most popular and common types of non-processed cheese in Japan. You can often buy it in little boxes for between 350-500 yen ($4.33-$6.17). In the most common offering, there's a little circular plastic tray protecting a small (100 gram/3.5 oz.) round of softish Camembert. You can buy these pretty much everywhere, including convenience stores. For foreign folks who find processed cheese to be the spawn of the devil, it's often the only option.

It's my best guess that Camembert is a popular "real" cheese because it's mild and fatty, two food attributes that are popular in Japan. I've read that pizza was originally unpopular in Japan because the cheese was too stringy, stinky and pungent. The fact that mature cheddar is much harder to find and more expensive would seem to support the notion that strong cheeses, though much more common than before, are still less favored than mild ones.

This sembei seeks to transfer a flavor which is incredibly mild to begin with to the exterior of a 24-calorie salted snack. The crackers are nicely crispy and the way they are scored gives them some convenient breaking points and provides a nice visual sense. The powder on the outside isn't voluminous, but it's still enough to have you rubbing your fingers to get it off. They smell slightly of pungent cheese, but the first bite is really more buttery than cheesy. Only toward the end of one cracker do you start to detect a cheesier flavor. It obviously needs to build up on the tongue and get some momentum before it takes on enough critical flavor mass to matter. The saltiness level also seems to take a few crackers to kick in. If you're a fan of pigging out, you're probably going to find these a lot more appealing than me, but I generally stop at two.

These were fine, and I'd even buy them again if they were a mere 69 yen (85 cents) for 12 decently sized crackers. I got these for that paltry sum at a discount snack shop along with the previously reviewed soy sauce flavor of the same type of cracker. However, the decision to buy them in that case would be based merely on the fact that these are serviceable salty snacks and not because the flavor really blew me away.