03.04.06
Coffee Marshmallow
Remember the super cool package from Japan that contained all sorts of tasty (and in some cases unreadable by me) treats? Here’s the first of the lot to be reviewed. My Guinea Pigs this time were the folks at TheMan’s office and they had pleasant to good things to say about them. All except one fella who was not going to be putting any Japanese weirdness in his mouth even if you paid him. I do believe he’s been perusing the JSFR archives and has been marred by the likes of Puchi Pasuteru and Jelly Cake. I think the new motto for the JSFR should be, “The Tasting crap so you don’t have to!”
Although, the marshmallows were really quite good. Sometimes you take one for the team, other times you get rewarded with something nicely tasty. Someday, I’m going to see what the average pea pointage is over the entire JSF database, just to see if we are above average or below average across the board, but not today. I’m lazy and here to talk about Coffee Marshmallow. Coffee Marshmallow tastes like coffee flavored marshmallows, which is sort of the duh news because that’s what they are called. On the other hand, we often burst into spontaneous cheering over here at the JSFR when something tastes like what we think it’s going to taste like and it is palatable to boot.
It’s a nice mellow coffee flavor too, not so “in your face” and also nicely subtle about it. One Pig remarked that they wouldn’t have pegged the flavor as coffee at all if they hadn’t been let on from the get go that there was coffee involved. You might call the flavor “coffee nostalgia”, which is a much stronger flavor than say “hinting of coffee” but not up to the likes of COFFEE! and beyond. It’s a perfect flavor for a marshmallow because let’s face it; marshmallow isn’t one of the hard hitting flavors of this world. The creamy marshmallow and the lovely laid back coffee flavor just walk hand in hand around your mouth, stopping every so often to admire a tooth or maybe taking a break to watch the tongue do its tongue thing. No worries, it’s all good.
The interesting thing about these coffee marshmallows is that they are a little bit tougher than their American counterparts. They seem to have a slightly thicker outer shell; not so much that you’d notice it and say, “My, but this marshmallow is tough!” but more a slight resistance before you get to the tender marshmallowy middle. Is this because they came all the way from Japan or is this the nature of the beast? I’m not sure, but it did beg to be tested in a different medium than just straight mouth popping.
Enter the cocoa. But of course! The true test of a marshmallow is to float it in hot cocoa and see what it does. My hope was to get a mocha flavor out of my hot cocoa without adding any coffee and…well…sorta. In the same way these marshmallows are nostalgically coffee flavored, so to was my cocoa. But! The impressive thing about these mallows was their staying power. I had one cup of fresh off the stove boiling cocoa and all marshmallows outlasted the cocoa, which included a pretty hefty cool down period. I tried another couple in a go cup at work and after an hour there was still a sizable lump of mallow. I was impressed.
I even went the extra mile and tried making s’mores out of these fellas. The marshmallows do that melty thing (and also that flaming hat thing that occasionally happens when you get the marshmallow too close to the fire) as well as their American counterparts and s’more up nicely in theory; however it was 20 degrees out when I was ‘sperimenting and below freezing is just not the weather to be making s’mores in. I think they would do just fine in normal s’more conditions so plus pea points there. All in all, I’d call these an eatable treat, more so if you are going to pop them in cocoa or coffee (yum) and give them a
Rating
of 4 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
