Kabaya Puchi Pastel – カバヤ プチパステル （カラフルチョコスナック）

I’ve been wanting to try these since the first time I spotted them in the supermarket, not long after I moved to Hakodate, but for some reason it’s taken me over a year to make the purchase. I’d say it’s because they’re for children but in a country where every second thing has Hello Kitty on it, there’s no shame in buying cutesy candy, especially as someone who still looks like a high school student.

Puchi Pastel consists of two small packets of pastel-coloured biscuit balls partially embedded in cute chocolate shapes.

The cheerful colours and variety of designs was enough to appeal to me, so I was surprised upon opening the box to find an extra level of entertainment, in the form of a fortune wheel displaying a prediction for each of the chocolate forms.

Here are the items that were in my selection, and the corresponding readings:

Ice cream – You might stumble and fall 😦

Fluted cup – You could get a present

(back) Rocket – You may have a good dream   Heart – You may be able to talk to the person you like

(front) Blob monster – You might meet a monster   Pumpkin – Someone may get angry at you   Whale – A dog may bark at you

Others: Candy – Your wish may come true   Shuttle bus(?) – You may find the thing you’re looking for   Train(?) – You may be able to make up with someone you fell out with (sorry, these were very difficult to photograph…)

The fortune-telling element is a novel idea, I can see that this would be a lot of fun to share with friends, blindly picking candies one by one and finding out each other’s fates. Even without this added entertainment, not knowing what assortment of the fifteen shapes you’ll get keeps things fresh. With fifteen designs and five different colours of biscuit center the total number of possible combinations is pretty big.

But cute gimmicks aside, what about the actual product? Well…the chocolate is not good. The ingredients include a shining agent to bring lustre to the surface, but due to the simple packaging the pieces rub together, leaving them tarnished and dull. They have a pleasant hot chocolate aroma but fail to deliver on taste – the chocolate is oily and, despite an initial cocoa tang, overly sweet, to the extent that even just sucking one tiny piece was enough to induce a slight burn in the back of my throat, the way very sugary, low-grade chocolate is apt to do.

The little biscuit ball is slightly better. Its outer surface, probably also made using the shining addiditive, has no flavour, so it’s best to bite into the cookie as sucking it means working through the waxy layer before you can taste chocolate. The colourful chocolate is blandly sweet and milky, while the crunchy center has notes of vanilla and malted milk, which is quite nice overall. Fortunately there is not too much air in the biscuit, which creates a good crisp bite.

I had fun with Puchi Pastel, it’s cute, colourful and original. However, a large part of the appeal for me lay in the fortune-telling element, which wouldn’t be so fresh and entertaining if I were to buy this product a second time. Add to this the disappointing appearance of the candy itself and the sub-par quality of the chocolate and you’re left with something that’s average at best. Puchi Pastel could be fun to share and would make a nice gift for friends abroad who are into typical Japanese novelty confections, but as a whole package it didn’t impress me.

5/10

Kabaya Puchi Pastel  2 packs (22.5g x 2)  121kcal/pack