07.21.07
I Songi
In honor of Alessar’s 40th birthday, I decided to do a special (but late) JSFR just for him. Besides, these reminded me quite a lot of the quadrogenerian.
These little chocolate dollop critters may call themselves i Songi but we’ve totally nicknamed them Emoticon Candy. Hee! Plus amusement pea points for that whole concept because while the Japanese take (by the way, I Songi are Korean) gave us cute mushroom chocolates, the Koreans have gone one squee point further and made Emoticon mushrooms. Err…OK, they aren’t really so much mushrooms but they are working on the same principal as the Kinoko No Yama; mainly a dollop of chocolate with a stubby little stick poked into it.
Don’t get me wrong, mushrooms are awfully cute but it’s sort of a one squee pony. The first one is too adorable and then you pick up the second one and…it’s kinda exactly like the first one. The Emoticon candies, on the other hand have the same tiny squeeness about them plus every chocolate head has a different little anime smilie looking up at you. So while the little shape squee is wearing off after the second or third candy, the stamped smilies continue to rack up the amusement points.
I was also amused by the carefree nature of the stick sticking. I sort of wondered about that because, in theory, the chocolate would be liquidy when you would have to plop the stick in so what keeps it vertical? The Japanese manufactured mushroom fellas were all pretty much on the straight and narrow as far as stick position but the Korean Emoticons? They had, shall we say, maybe a more lax stick quality control guide. There were Emoticon sticks lying every which way. If you had a hankering to anthropomorphize them (and why not?) quite a lot of them were exhibiting the Faceplant Emoticon characteristic but that didn’t stop Orion World. Oh no. Sticks in? Good! Box ’em up and ship ’em out!
My Guinea Pigs seemed to really like these though. I found that the chocolate wasn’t as tasty as the mushroom candies, tending more toward a middle of the road milk chocolate rather than the rich darker chocolate I usually find in the Japanese snacks. However, the Pigs all agreed that the chocolate, while not stellar, did the job with enough chocolaty oomph to please them all.
The sticks were what stood out on this snack food. The mushroom candies had your basic Pocky stick, which is good but nothing to write home about. Think of them as milder tasting plain graham cracker with a crunchier almost Ritz like construction. The Emoticon candy stick, on the other hand, had some character. It crunched a crunchity crunch but also carried a little bit of flavor to the Emoticon candy table. Something like a lighter tasting blond sandwich cookie, or very much like the cookie part of a Vienna Finger. I rather liked the more flavorful stick.
I’d say that the base I Songi can easily claim a 3.5 pea rating on taste alone but I’m going to add an extra half pea for amusement and go with a full
4 wasabi pea rating of out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.
Zinju said,
February 8, 2009 at 9:08 pm
i have actually been looking for these for a while since someone let me try some a few months ago, so i was very pleased to find this review ^_^ if i may ask, do you have an idea of where i could purchase these?
Boo said,
February 8, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Hi Zinju. I think you had several comments because you are a first time poster (or at least the review is seeing you as such) so I had to OK the post. Which I hadn’t gotten to until now. So there you are! I deleted the other posts since they were dups.
I can’t remember exactly where I got the I Songi but I’d bet dollars to donuts that they came from Manna so if you live in or around Ann Arbor, Michigan then that’s where I found them in ’07. Otherwise, J-List might carry them at some point in time or you might find them online at Wizzywig (both linked in the side panel if you are on the main JSFR page).
I’d also check around your home town if you are not local and see if there is an Asian food haunt that is more Korean in nature. They might have I Songi.