05.08.04
Cool World (ice pops)
This particular style of Cool World (icy pops?) came in pink, green and white. I bought them on Dirge’s recommendation and if he hadn’t told me that they were freezy pops I might not have figured out what to do with them. As it is, there is a diagram on the back that says to put three of them in the fridge and the other five in the freezer, or maybe three in freezer and magically they will become five at which point you put them in the oven or perhaps three go in the top drawer of my dresser while the rest go in the tool box. You can see where being Japanese illiterate can be a problem. Take a look and decide for yourself what the pictograms say to you.
I opted for all in the freezer (and occasionally shooting out of the freezer, onto my toe and under the table as they didn’t seem to want to stay put). After they did their freezing thing we took them out for a taste run. Incase you wondered, the thin spot in the middle is where they will break when you grasp both ends and snap them. I’m not sure that’s the way it is supposed to work but that’s the way it worked for us. The plastic coating is much tougher than the American freezy pop so I would recommend leaving them out a bit to melt up and then eat them. Otherwise you get to gnawing on the plastic coating to get the pop out. Mmmm, plastic coating.
I was going to split this up by general texture of a Cool World freezy pop and then go and describe the different flavors but I found out that each flavor had a slightly different texture. That’s odd. So here it goes.
Pink: Is strawberry. It has a nice solid strawberry taste that isn’t overpowering in its strawberryness. It’s surprisingly not as sweet as someone might expect a pop to be if said pop had Fructose, Glucose, Liquid Sugar, and Sugar as its first four ingredients. Really. I expected a syrupy sweet nastiness and although they are sweet, I don’t think they are any worse than your standard American freezy pop. What was surprising was the texture. The pink had a much smaller crystalline freezy pop structure than its American counterpart, which meant that you could bite down on it and not have it shatter into ice shards. It was also hard to suck the flavor out of the pop and leave a nubbly frozen water mess behind. This pop was having none of that.
Green: Is grape. Or apple? Maybe melon? Hard to say. I might lean towards grape, yet my first instinct was melon. I’m terrible at the “play that fruit flavor” game but with green, so was everyone else who tasted it. Let’s just say it’s fruity after a nature and leave it at that. Green was much more like the American freezy pop in texture. I bit into it and had some good solid ice shards to chew on. I tried the suck the flavor maneuver but still, these pops were not about that nonsense.
White: Is definitely vanilla with a hint of something that could possibly be pineapple or maybe a sweet grapefruit and a bit of a chalky aftertaste. Frozen solid (and I do mean solid, these were the densest of the three pops…like chewing on an ice cube) the vanilla taste comes to the forefront so at first I thought they might be milk flavor (hey, one of the ingredients is “Powdered Condensed Milk Acidulant” which has the word MILK in it. You know, white, blahblah MILK blah, you can’t go wrong!) but when I came back after letting the pop sit I could taste the pineapple/grapefruit. Also, the texture changed slightly into something a little more like the strawberry pops. Not as smooth but close.
They are fun, they are frozen, they don’t take to no “suck the flavor” nonsense from anybody, Cool World gets a
Rating of 3.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
