All Cranberry VE Plus Cookies

My husband operates from a mindset that would seem to be pretty logical, but doesn't actually work, when it comes to food and how bad it is for you. His notion is that if the food isn't that tasty, and especially if it isn't that sweet, it can't be all that bad for you.

When we first came to Japan, he used to buy Tohato's All Raisin cookies in accord with that type of thinking. They had raisins, which are a sort of dried up fruit and fruit is good for you, and they weren't very sweet. They had no creamy filling, icing, or sugary topping. It turned out though that All Raisin cookies weren't exactly the epitome of healthy eating despite their lack of food fun quotient, and he stopped eating them.


Fast forward to the present and I run across a small bag of All Cranberry cookies made in the same fashion as the All Raisin ones which I haven't sampled for well over 15 years. I love cranberries so I decided to revisit Tohato's healthy-sounding cookie now that it was in a flavor I liked far more than raisin. This packet of ten 3-cm (1.1 in.) square cookies was 98 yen ($1.03) at a local drug store. The VE Plus, incidentally, is for a whole slew of added vitamins including A, D, E, and 4 different B-vitamins and Calcium.

The cookies smell like cranberries, unsurprisingly. The texture of the cookie is rather crispy with some chewiness from the cranberries. The cookie itself doesn't have much of a flavor. It's more of a generalized biscuit flavor than anything else so you're getting the strongest flavor from the cranberries. Besides the vitamins, there are a lot of healthier grains in these including rye and spelt flour and oats. Sucralose is also used as a sweetener to cut back on the sugar added. Each tiny cookie has 16 calories (the entire bag is 155 or so).

I really liked these and would have given them an even higher rating except I though I detected a slight "plastic" aftertaste. I wonder if storing these cookies for 3 weeks in the summer (before opening them) on top of my refrigerator caused some of the plastic bag's chemicals to leech into them. If so, that's an unappetizing thought. It might also simply be some preservative or processing aftertaste from the cranberries that I was detecting. Since I don't like too sweet foods and I liked the texture of these a lot, I would recommend them to anyone who wants something a bit healthier to nosh on.

Note that Tohato has expanded their line of "All" cookies a lot since I last checked into them. In addition to raisin and cranberry, they also carry peach, apple, adzuki, coconut, mango and pineapple. The mango and pineapple are "dessert" versions so they're probably not as "healthy" as the raisin and cranberry versions. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any of these exotic flavors in my usual haunts, but I'll be certain to sample them if I run across them.

Carameliser Macademia Chocolates

People who go to Hawaii for vacation often bring boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts to their offices as a souvenir treat. Back in the early days of my stay in Japan, this used to be quite novel as it was expensive and relatively uncommon for one to find anything with macadamia nuts in Japan. These days, people still bring the same souvenirs from sojourns to paradise, but more often than not the exact same boxes of sweets can be bought at various shops around Tokyo.

So, the creamy, tasty macadamia nut has gone from exotic siren of the souvenir world to the plain girl down the street who you'd only take out on a date if you were invited to a wedding and couldn't sucker anyone else into accompanying you. There's no clearer indication of this than the fact that you can pick up a plethora of varieties of macadamia-based sweets at 99 yen shops. That's where I ran across these small gold foil packets.


I'm not sure what the deal is supposed to be with the caramel on these since there is no visible indication of anything other than a nut and chocolate. They smell like chocolate. They taste like super sweet, rich chocolate with a good, fresh, crispy macadamia nut. There are no detectable caramel notes, but I'm guessing that the nuts are probably cooked or rolled in caramel syrup such that there is a paper thin layer on them. What little caramel there is mainly makes them sweeter than usual and richer.

I love almost any sort of chocolate covered nut, and my affection for these was greater than usual. The only "problem" is that there are only 8 candies in a 43 gram (1.5 oz.) bag and 254 calories or 32 calories per chocolate-covered morsel and it's incredibly easy to just eat all of them in one sitting. I would definitely buy these again, but only if I think I can exercise some judicious control or decide to throw caution to the wind.

Tokachi Kinako Caramels

One of my students recently visited Hokkaido. She brought back a plethora of pictures of flowers, green fields, and nature. She also brought me back a souvenir, as is commonly done in Japan. Though the item was supposed to only be available in Hokkaido, it was a very familiar item to me. Yes, it was the wonderful Ezo Brown Bear caramels that I had reviewed previously.

There seems to be a never-ending supply of Hokkaido-only caramels that are sold all over Tokyo as that is what the kinako caramels that I'm reviewing today are supposed to be. I found these at the local discount snack shop for 100 yen (about a dollar). Dounan, which makes both these and the Ezo Brown Bear caramels, seems to get around.


In case you don't remember or are a new reader, kinako is toasted soy flour. It has a nutty flavor which can be similar to peanut butter, but it doesn't always carry much of a peanut flavor. It's just the toasting process. These caramels carry the scent and flavor of kinako and are nicely sweet. The kinako is neither too strong nor too weak. It's really very nicely balanced. The caramels themselves are easy to bite into and stick to your teeth a bit. Because of their size, they vanish all too soon. If you want to savor them, sucking on them might be a better bet.

It took me a long time to consume the 18 caramels in the box and by the end they had picked up some moisture and gotten a bit soft and sticky. They still tasted great, but the texture lost some of its luster. Each caramel is 17 calories and quite small. They make for a nice little sweet, but I think most people wouldn't be satisfied with just one.

If you like kinako, it's nearly a lock that you'll enjoy these. I really liked them and would definitely buy them again if I wanted some caramels. However, I would either keep them in the refrigerator or only buy them if I could share them, eat them faster, or if it wasn't summer in Tokyo when it's hot and humid.

Super Sweet Corn Baked Snack

I'm not sure if the name of this snack, which is literally "super sweet corn" in katakana (スーパースイートコーン)" and not a Japanese translation of the English words, is meant to imply that the corn is super sweet tasting or if the corn is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I'm guessing it's because the corn they use is the lollipop of the corn world.

At any rate, I can't resist something which is actually corn-flavored, as opposed to corn-based. Corn flavored snacks in Japan tend to be buttery, nicely salty, and feature the best flavor that corn as a food has to offer.

These corn snacks have the added bonus of being baked. If you're health conscious in Japan and looking for snacks, you can seek the characters for "non fry" (ノンフライ) written on the package. Of course, if you are really health conscious, you won't be buying this sort of stuff anyway. It's not that this is all that bad really. This bag has 50 grams (1.7 oz.) of corn goodness and only 230 calories. It's also got bits or real corn flattened out and pressed into the chips, so you may actually get some sort of infinitessimal benefit from the embedded corn. It's just that snacking and health rarely go hand in hand.



Because these chips are baked, they are lighter than your average chip. They are crispy, but have a softer snap than a deep-fried chip. Even though they look a bit puffy in spots, they're relatively thin. The spots with actual corn in them are a bit tough and chewy, but it in no way undermines the overall texture and eating experience.

These smell like fresh corn on the cob. They taste like corn cream soup with a bit of added chicken extract for added savoriness. You can really detect that they are made from fairly sweet corn. The salt on them is just right, though rather inconsistent at times.

If you enjoy corn potage soup in Japan, you will almost certain like these as much as I did, which is to say quite a lot. They're seasonal though, so you'd better grab some while you can. I know I wouldn't hesitate to have them again.

Akagi Mikan Ice Pops

When I was a kid, my mother used to buy enormous boxes of Popsicles with a variety of flavors in them. I recall there being at least 4, possibly 5 flavors - grape, orange, cherry, and lemon or lime. The only thing I know for sure is that the kid-preferred first choice was grape. Once grape was gone, orange was second. Grudgingly, cherry came third and whatever that last flavor was was only consumed in absolute Popsicle desperation.

As an adult, I favor orange over grape, though I hadn't had anything resembling a Popsicle for decades before buying this box of Japanese tangerine (mikan) ice pops. I was drawn to them both because the box was entirely made up of orange flavor and each pop only has 48 calories for a 63 ml. (2.1 oz.) bar.

These bars are made by Akagi, a company which I was unfamiliar with until I did a little research on the web about them. Their web site has an extremely annoying flash-based interface which my Mac was a bit flaky with, but I tunneled through it nonetheless. They also have an extremely obnoxious-looking mascot named "Gari" that dances all over their web interface with his huge maw gaping at you like some deranged pervert. Anyway, Akagi makes a wide variety of frozen confections similar to these mikan pops. The best known is likely their pop version of the chocolate milk beverage, Milo.


There are five ice pops in the box and each is a good size for a frozen treat. They're neither too small nor too big. Really can't smell much from them if you give them a sniff, but you can see pulpy bits of tangerine embedded in the bar as darker orange spots. The fruit flavor is quite subtle and realistic. The first ingredient is tangerine juice and the second is "fruit". This is followed by grape sugar (which is essentially fructose) and sugar. The fact that juice and fruit are listed as greater components than any of the sugars is probably why these aren't sickly sweet and have such a refreshing real fruit flavor.

I really liked these and will definitely buy them again. They are a very adult version of a Popsicle and relatively healthy for a frozen confection. The only reservation I have about them is that the pulpy parts can be a bit distracting if you like to suck on the bars instead of bite into them. Once you run across the fruit pieces, you really have to bite into the bar and that shortens the pleasurable experience. If you like mikan, I wholeheartedly recommend giving these a try.