04.11.04
Tsuinkuru
Or better known as Easter Candy; sub category – chocolate eggs. These really amuse me on several levels. First being that Easter, as I understand it, is a Christian holiday what with the Christ and the dieing and the resurrection and whatnot but it also seems to have Pagan ties as well. The whole rebirth and the renewing and the spring thing going on. Oh, and the dying too, you know, as long as we are talking eggs here. I’m not exactly familiar with Japanese religion but I didn’t really expect such a western idea such as a chocolate Easter egg candy to pop up. And yet, here it is.
So these eggs are your standard hollow Easter chocolate egg, which means that the chocolate is neither fantastic nor incredibly nasty. It is chocolate, so I can’t condemn them solely on that account because…well…chocolate! You have to go pretty far down on the chocolate scale to get a bad rating for being chocolate. But, then again, it isn’t the best chocolate ever tasted since the evolution of man so I can’t really give it a rousing endorsement complete with angelic chorus either. I can say, with confidence, that it meets but does not exceed all the chocolate standards.
What does make these eggs fun is the stuff inside. Each egg has a good handful, if your hands happen to be about thimble sized, of these round candy doodads and a couple bigger shaped candy things. The round candy balls are pretty much polished sugar balls about 2-3 mm in diameter. They taste sort of like little itty bitty jaw breakers, provided your jaw breakers aren’t flavored anything but sugary. Not much going on for them there, but they do crunch and they do rattle inside the egg. Thus, they get a full point for fun. Shaky shaky shaky. Y’all KNOW that the rattle is a shiny and shiny gets amusement points from me. Besides, I wasn’t the only one; TheMan’s boss remarked that the rattle was pretty cool.
The shaped things, I believe, come in a variety of compositions. The first egg had a couple vaguely yellow muffin looking things in it but I did not separate out the candies from the egg. That egg I was tasting for the full effect of the chocolate and the crunchies, which turned out to be very pleasing BTW. I approve of the crunchy and the chocolate. The second egg had four pink heart things (no yellow moons or green clovers however) which I extracted and tasted by their lonesome. Eh. They were reminiscent of Sweet tarts or Smarties (but no gloss coating) but they also had a chemical cherry flavor. I’ll admit that I am not cherry flavor’s number one fan so to the rest of the world, cherry might just be OK. I didn’t mind them, however, when I ate the rest of the egg and the leftover heart critters as one unit. The chocolate completely overwhelms any flavor of the ball doodads and the shaped things so all they are really adding is crunch. And rattle.
Lastly, at the back of the package was this:
What’s with the Japanese and foreign language weirdness? First the raspberry pocky with the French writing, now Greek Twinkle. Those crazy Japanese. So, I’m going to give Tsuinkuru an average rating with a half point boost for the amusement factor and go with a total
Rating of 3.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
