Mos Burger Choux Pot Shakes

Image from Mos Burger.

The "Choux Pot Shake" sounds like it would be a great name for a dance. Perhaps some wordplay could even be used such that one stuck a foot in a flower pot and attempted to shake it off a la "shoe pot shake". Okay, maybe not so much, but it'd be very entertaining for bystanders to watch a bunch of people on the disco floor pantomime trying to dislodge a stuck pot from their foot.

This type of choux is the French kind rather than the type that you shod your feet with and such desserts have been popular in Japan for a very long time. You can buy simple ones with either whipped cream, custard or a mixture of both in most convenience stores and markets. For something with such an upscale feel, it is decidedly common and available as a mass market item. I used to buy a tray with 9-12 tiny little one-bite ones at Lawson 100 (for 100 yen/$1.03, of course) on occasion so I could nosh on one without having to cram one of the giant ones into my cakehole.

Since they are so common, it's no surprise that a fast food place like Mos Burger would get in on the gig. For 380 yen ($3.90), you get a mug lined with choux pastry with custard and either a vanilla, coffee or strawberry shake.  It's on the expensive side, but you do get to keep the coffee cup (and don't we all need more coffee cups) as well as have the sense that you're a cut above the ignorant rabble with their plain old shakes in paper cups, sucking at their dessert through a straw like a plebeian.

If you'd like to set your computer up like a plebeian, Mos Burger has wallpapers for you here.

Meiji Lucky Stick Cappucino

I've read that the name "Pocky" came as a result of the sound that is made with the stick is snapped. I'm guessing that Meiji named this "Lucky" because it was close in sound to "Pocky" (sharing the basic "vowel+cky" sound), but wasn't going to get them sued by Glico. In Japan, I don't recall seeing "Lucky" sticks, though this is clearly identified as being a Meiji product and therefore released by a Japanese company. The box says these are made in Indonesia for Meiji Japan and are to be marketed to Canada and Singapore. I'm not sure how they end up in America, but I found them at Daiso Japan for $1.50 (147 yen). They are incredibly international for such a simple thing as is evidenced by their multi-country origins and the presence of 3 languages (French, Japanese, and English) on the box.

I don't recall seeing a product by Meiji called "Lucky Stick" in Japan. Their Pocky rip-off over there (as far as I personally noticed) is "Fran". Fran tends to have more sophisticated offerings than this simple cappucino "cream" on a stick version. The types available at present include macadamia cheese and macadamia chocolate. The cheese one would scare me and I'd never buy it, and the chocolate one would be too boring to sample. Also, I was never intrigued by a product that seemed to be named for a particularly bossy aunt. No, I didn't have an Aunt Fran, but it just sounds like the type of aunt who'd leave a big lipstick smudge on your cheek when she kissed you hello, talked too loud, and probably drank bad coffee and smoked cigarettes.

Getting to the matter at hand, which are the "lucky" sticks and not Aunt Fran's cancer sticks... If you take a moment to smell these, they smell like instant latte powder. I know this because I was given a free box of Nescafe latte instant coffee at Safeway and it was 140 calories of disappointment. These sticks are very reminiscent of that very coffee, though they do have some advantages. They are sweet, but not overly so (unlike that instant latte powder) and they have an excellent crunch factor. The coffee part of this is extremely subdued and comes across more as an aftertaste of coffee than true coffee bitterness. The milkier elements, which taste like fairly decent non-dairy creamer come through more strongly, so these might be a nice alternative if you are a coffee wuss. The biscuit stick itself is very bland, but if you eat the small part which is not coated, it has a floury taste which reminds you of very bland, dry cookies. I actually rather like that flavor, but it comes across poorly to most people.

These are not bad at all, but I can't personally get past the fact that it is so reminiscent of non-dairy creamer and instant coffee. I ate the whole box over time (probably a few sticks here and there over 5 days), which means that I spread the 220 calories over about 5 days. It also means that I wasn't so drawn to these that I scarfed them down or had to stop myself from eating them. While I'm not the world's biggest fan of these coated stick snacks to begin with, this definitely rates lower than even standard Pocky and absolutely pales in comparison to things like "Winter Pocky". I wouldn't buy them again, and, unless you're a fan of powdered coffee-like beverages, I wouldn't recommend them.

Glico Shall We Biscuits, now with tea included

All images from Glico Japan.

Recently, I was contacted by a woman at the BBC and answered some of her questions about Japanese food/snacks. One of the things I said to her when she asked about odd flavors of ice cream (think "chicken", not "sweet potato") was that things are not nearly as weird as people think. Just like all countries, there are regions in which oddities exist, but they are highly localized disturbances in the food continuum. I'm sure some place in Japan sells especially bizarre ice cream flavors, just as Gilroy in California has garlic ice cream on offer because they are the garlic capital of the state (country?), but it's not a mass market thing.

butter cookies

People who write about food in foreign countries tend not to concern themselves with the mass market stuff so much because it's actually pretty mundane. If 999 people are eating chocolate cookies, a journalist or blogger will choose to focus on the 1 who is eating the cookie with shrimp testicles in it (note: I do not know if shrimp have testicles, but if they do, I'm sure someone eats them as a delicacy). Well, 998 people would be eating "Shall We" biscuits by Glico and the 999th would be me generally not eating them.

chocolate chip macademia

I think I may have bought one box of these once while I was living in Tokyo. It's not that there is anything wrong with them particularly. They are actually pretty tasty consumer-grade shortbread cookies. It's more the case that they are a bit like a package of "Chips Ahoy". They'll get you there, but not necessarily in high style. I consider such cookies perfectly fine, but nothing to get excited about.

green tea (matcha) cookies

For me, part of the problem with these little blocks of cookie was that they always reminded me of the types of cookies that you bought in a roll and sliced off bits and baked to make them. The fact that they clearly were cut from enormous slabs of dough and mass produced without even trying to fool me into thinking grandma lovingly hand crafted them in her kitchen wasn't helping matters. They actually resemble micro versions of Calorie Mate.

That being said, there was something inviting about the name of the product. "Shall we?" is a question you ask as you sit down for tea with friends and prepare to gossip about people you supposedly like. It's the civilized start to verbally savaging your enemies and figuring out how to destroy their lives in the most passive aggressive manner possible. In furtherance of this illusion, Glico has teamed up with tea maker Karel Capek and is now including one bag of their custom tea blend in each box of cookies. Each tea is carefully selected to match the flavor of the cookie type it is included with. Butter cookies come with milk caramel tea. Something called "everyday tea" (which is mixture of teas from the Ceylon and Dimbula regions) comes with the green tea cookies and, strawberry (called "Girl's Tea") accompany the chocolate chip macadamia.

Karel Capek is a boutique brand and this is an interesting joint campaign which is meant to elevate the "Shall We" brand and raise recognition of a smaller tea maker. The target consumer is women aged 30-50 and the release corresponds with Mother's Day. I guess women in said age group presumably have nothing better to do with their afternoons that sit around and eat boxes of cookies and share a single tea bag with their friends. Actually, the cunning nature of including just one bag is that anyone who wants to share their 11 cookies (or a mere 9 if you choose chocolate macadamia) with others will need to go buy more tea if they want to have them with the special tea included in the package. This was released on April 23 and will be available as long as the limited supplies last (which Glico believes will be until mid-May). Each retails for 294 yen ($2.96).

Coca-Cola Swarovski Crystal Bag

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Japanese people were flocking to designer bags like a goose to a fat juicy moth. There was a time when people had money to splash about for Louis Vuitton bags or purchasing a trivial bit of real estate like Rockefeller Center. It seems that someone at Coca-cola Japan would like us to forget about the 20+ year economic decline and promote like it's 1989. 

The bag pictured above is the same size and shape as a can of Coke and opens with a clasp that works like a pop-top. It's covered in swanky Swarovski crystals. There's a limit to a mere 2,500 of them worldwide, but you can have one for 289,800 yen ($2,957.90) because who doesn't think it's worth nearly three grand to carry around a supremely tacky coke can bag? 

On the more practical side, it has a serial number so you are actually looking at something that could be considered a collectible with potential future value. That being said, if the initial price is so insanely high, there's a low chance that the value will increase much over time. 

As an aside, I ran across a couple of Swarovski shops in Tokyo. They were both pretty tacky looking from the outside with a bunch of what looked like mirrored stalactites hanging from the front of the shop. It was as if the designers were caught in a time warp that froze them in the 80's style. 

Random Picture #159

Most, if not all, of the mochi I had in Japan was made domestically. The Japanese are pretty fussy about their rice and don't trust foreign-grown rice and mochi doesn't tend to age well. Most of what I saw in terms of mochi was white unless it was mixed with some other food like pumpkin or sweet potato. Occasionally, there would be pink ones that were colored with beet juice in order to make them match some seasonal or holiday colors (white and pink or red are festive colors in Japan).

One thing I don't recollect ever seeing were mochi as vividly colored as the ones pictured above. Most of the tones I saw were closer to pastels and these are more akin to jewel tones. Though these have Japanese writing on them, they were made in another Asian country (likely China or Taiwan, but I don't remember). My guess is that this sort of color can only come with the use of artificial coloring and that is frowned upon in Japan.

Though these are actually very pretty and reasonably priced, one of the lasting impacts of life in Japan for me has been a suspicion of anything which clearly shows unnatural coloring. I'd rather buy a muddy-looking or grey blob of mochi that looked real than something lovely such as these.