"Genius" Kyrorochan Choco Balls

The theme of candy targeted toward kids who are studying or taking exams continues in January with this latest member of the "choco ball" family. Choco balls are little pea-sized candies with different fillings and shiny chocolate exteriors. Their mascot changes in appearance to suit the flavor being offered. In this case, he has donned his mortarboard and graduation gown to hawk his candies. Presumably, consuming these will make you feel smarter, or help you pass your tests, or at least assist in the cultivation of a cavity.

Since I'm not taking any tests, I'm mainly interested in how they taste. I was drawn to these because the picture on the outside of the box is reminiscent of malted milk balls. Based on the Japanese description, I didn't expect malted milk taste, but I was mainly looking at the same sort of textural experience as malted milk balls.


The information on the outside of the box says that these are made with grape sugar. In fact, this appears to be a pretty important point as it is mentioned twice (and prominently) on the front. I'm not sure if grape sugar makes you smarter or is supposed to be healthier or what, but it's apparently a big deal. Note that these do not taste like grape in any way.

As promised, the center of these Choco Balls is super crispy. It tastes vaguely of corn flakes though I think it was made with potato as well as that is one of the ingredients. The chocolate is strong and nicely sweet. It's just intense enough to keep the chocolate flavor present even though it is greatly outweighed proportionally by the crispy interior. By the third one, the chocolate gets a bit stronger. Though the interior is a little airy, the center is denser than a malted milk ball. It's not hard to chew or bite into, but it is brittle.

I liked these, but they're a little expensive for a small portion at about 160 yen ($1.76 U.S.D.) per 35 gram/1.2 oz. box. They're also a bit hefty on calories (185 for the whole box) for what is mainly a texture-based pleasure. I think they'd make for nice movie-watching munching because there are a lot of them and the box design makes them easy to fish out while you're focusing on something else and you wouldn't have to really be think about how you should be paying attention to the deeper tastes or complex flavor. If I were in the mood for a super crunchy chocolate treat, I'd buy these again. However, I'm guessing they'll be gone after exams are over.

Incidentally, eating these didn't make me feel any smarter, but it did make my teeth hurt a little, so let's hear it for new cavities.

Choco Ball Peanut

Chocoballs have been around since 1967. The peanut variety is the original, but there are several other types around. All of them are sold in small boxes with variations on the theme shown on the box pictured above. The mascot, Kyorochan, is very well known and is meant to resemble a peanut.

Morinaga, which makes choco ball sweets, has stated that it is going to focus more on health food in the future because the market for products like this is eroding due to the birthrate in Japan becoming so low. I guess that elderly people aren't drawn to chocolates with cartoon mascots. Incidentally, Morinaga also produced Japan's first penicillin. With that sort of historical experience, maybe they can find some sort of medicinal treat to appeal to granny.


Fortunately, the market for the kid-focused candy hasn't disappeared enough to see the disappearance of choco balls. What appear to be mere chocolate covered peanuts are actually a pretty sophisticated treat with layers of care put into making them better than your average chocolate-coated legume. First of all, the peanuts are roasted so that they carry a deeper flavor. They are just short of having a "burnt" flavor so it's a pretty serious roast. Second, if you look very carefully at the broken ball above, you can see that there are actually three layers in each choco ball, not simply a chocolate coating and a peanut.


There is a wafer/cookie type coating around the small peanut in the center which adds to the crispiness. It may also stop the peanuts from absorbing moisture or color from the chocolate in a way only the tiny Morinaga angels who make these understand. Those little angels. They do good work.

The choco balls have a rich cocoa smell and an excellent texture. They are also multi-layered in taste in that you first get the roasted peanut flavor followed by a strong, rich chocolate flavor, though not a milky or dark one. Each box is 25 grams (.88 oz.) and contains about 20 or so little balls about the size of a peanut M & M. They're more uniform in shape though not exactly the same. One box has 145 calories and 9.5 grams fat.

These are very nice chocolates for something so low rent. One thing I've noticed is that there is some very high quality candy marketed at children in Japan. These would be a great thing to grab a bunch of and either send or take home as souvenirs, especially for kids or those who enjoy chocolate-covered nuts.

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.