4 double kitkats in a jar.  Sold from a vending machine.  Sandwiched between cold drinks on one side and hot coffee on the other.  How does it survive?  The technology is amazing. What is the best thing that you have ever bought from a vending machine?  

Picture 3 Australians crowded around a table.  One is studying Kanji, another is studying Japanese grammar and the third is studying the Japanese Lonely Planet.  Out comes a packet of this chocolate with macha and you can probably guess what happened.
Our analysis was short and sweet.  One said “great”, one said 8 out of 10, and the other just kept eating away.  The overall opinion was very good.  For a weird concept like a sandwich of chocolate containing a layer of macha (green tea) flavoured chocolate, I was nicely surprised. 
Of course most of the flavour was actually ordinary chocolate but …read more

This is the third type of choco pan that I had in mind when I wrote about the three types back here.  This one has to be the lowest level of choco pan.  Simply a long life type bread stick.  Dry and tasteless.  Dipped in chocolate.  These guys exist on the shelf next to cookies and sembe for who knows how long.  How does bread stay edible for that long?  I guess the real question is “Is the bread ever edible?” 
If it didn’t say choco pan on the packet I wouldn’t have dared to mix it in with the other …read more

Lisa from Lunchbucketbento was on the same wavelength as me when she picked this one other type of choco pan.  Have a look at her description in the comments to this post.  You can understand what she is talking about if you look at where I took a bite in the photo.  It has a swirled pattern of chocolate throughout the bread.  Even though this is just a cheap and nasty supermarket version, it still tastes alright.  Nothing like good bakery style choco pan.  They are in a league of their own.

Pino are a classic Japanese ice cream.  Typically vanilla ice cream shaped like a tiny fez covered in chocolate.  This week I discovered dark chocolate Pino and was very happy.  There is nothing particularly unusual about the ice cream or the chocolate but they make studying Japanese Kanji (as you can see behind the box in the photo) so much more relaxing.  A box of six Pino like this costs about 100 Yen and will get me through about half an hour of Kanji before I have to go searching for more snacks.  I think that snacks and study go …read more

Saturday was cold, in fact bitterly cold.  I had been training on my bike up and down Mt Tsukuba until I was almost dead with cold and exhaustion.  I had just an easy flat ride to get me back to a shop and about 20 minutes to devise the perfect snack to keep me alive.  This is what I came up with:
1) A can hot red bean soup
2) A cheap and nasty bluberry bread bun
3) A block of creamy chocolate
4) A glass of sake
That was the best that I could imagine (and also have a reasonable expectation of finding at …read more

The last post was about choco pan.  Now this is not to be confused with the totally different species known as choco pie.  Normally choco pie is a sort of biscuit/cake that lives in with the sweets and cookies in a supermarket.  They consist of a sandwich of sweet soft biscuits, some cream and heaps of chocolate.  They are neither classy or refined but they are delicious and remind me of “Wagon wheels” if that means anything to you.
This photo is actually of choco pie ice creams which I had not seen before.  They stuffed them full of ice cream …read more

Choco pan is Japanese for Chocolate bread.  It is found all over Japan but takes three main forms.  The first is pictured here and is probably the sweetest and stickiest.  It is basically a low grade sweet bread roll that is filled with chocolate cream (sort of like a bitter chocolate mouse).  In this case, it was a cheap convenience store snack, so the quality was quite poor, but the chocolate to bread ratio was exceptional.  About 3 to 1.
If you can guess and describe the other two styles of choco pan I’d love to hear from you.  And this …read more

I scored a bag of these wasabi flavoured chips from the 98 yen aisle of my local supermarket this week.  Needless to say they didn’t last very long.  Not only did they have a beautiful wasabi flavour (with the heat that really gets up your nose), but they also look quite like wasabi roots themselves. 
Of course they are just artificial foam sort of stuff like twisties with a coating of wasabi flavour but their green colouring and unmistakable aroma made it seem instantly legitimate.  Not that I would ever consider chomping down wasabi roots without serious medical support.  But they gave …read more

I was wondering why I never saw beetroot here in Japan.  Then the other day I tried Japanese beetroot chips and I understood.  Not only are they the best that I have ever tried, but they even beat wasabi potato crisps.  I have a theory that all of the healthy fresh beetroot is being diverted to the chip kitchen and being dried, cooked and sugared.  I can’t back this up with evidence but I’d love to see someone prove me wrong.