Chocoroom DIY

Chocoroom DIY

(Japan Crate: August 2015)

[Japan crate description: A popular snack turned DIY kit.]

Melissa Says:

Tastes like chocolate! Surprise, surprise. The fun part is making the chocolates. After warming the chocolate in hot water, you can squeeze them into the little supplied mold. There are little round candies to put in them, too. We just liberally sprinkled candies into the chocolates. Tasted like the pink color was strawberry. The little round things were sugar candies. They tasted really good because of how hard we worked on those buggers. I'd definitely make these again! It was a ton of fun.

Kimberly Says:

Okay, this was fun to make. You ended up with fairly bland chocolate, but the process of doing it was fun. xD

The candy bits are yummy, but they make the rest of it look weird, as you can see in the last picture in the bottom left.

But tasty. xD

Pulling everything out.

Getting it all ready to go!

In progress shot.

Getting ready to put in the freezer.

Mmm, all done! Some worked better than others. xD

Adzuki Mizu Yokan

Adzuki Mizu Yokan

(Japan Crate: July 2015)

[Japan crate description: A more traditional Japanese dessert, this red bean snack is sweet with a gel-like texture.]

Kimberly Says:

All right, I'd been putting this off for a while. I had doubts and concerns.

When we finally got around to trying it, though, it was...not terrible. 
We started out just eating it plain by the spoonful. If it had been more...well, every time I hit a big chunk of bean it put me off. It if had been more like jelly than jam, more of a puree, without chunks of bean, I think I would have loved it.

Or if we had had something other than italian herb ritz crackers, because the next thing we tried was spreading it on crackers. Plain Ritz, or maybe a sweet rather than savory cracker, would have been delicious.

Blurry, but tasty. x3

Melissa Says:

It looks like the cranberry stuff served at Thanksgiving, but tastes like beans. It's a tad odd. It's incredibly sweet-tasting, with the texture of pureed beans. That is, until you hit a whole bean. Then it's more unique. It's pretty good spread on a cracker. I probably wouldn't eat it again, but it wasn't bad once.

Crayon Shin-Chan Candy

Crayon Shin-Chan Candy

(Japan Crate: August 2015)

[Japan crate description: Crayon colored, ramune flavored hard candies. Shin-Chan has his own anime & manga!]

Kimberly Says:

All right, the box is adorable, I loved it, and I played with it for far too long.

Unfortunately, the candy itself was a mixture of gross and utterly underwhelming.

When I first started sucking on it I taste...not much of anything. It had no flavor. As I continued, it still didn't really have flavor, but it somehow started tasting...gross. The texture was odd, and I did NOT want to continue...but I am stubborn, so I did.

Fortunately it didn't get worse. It got...neutral. Once you get past the coating, you basically just have a round Smartie - kind of powdery and sour.

Not going to be finishing this one, for sure.

Melissa Says:

The outer coating either has no taste or a nasty taste, and I can't decide which it is. When you reach the center, the flavor comes out (in my case, orange), and starts to become powder. It was the weirdest sensation. 

I probably wouldn't choose to eat this again, mainly due to the coating, but also the powdery end.

Soda Mixing Jelly Beans

Soda Mixing Jelly Beans

(Japan Crate: August 2015)

[Japan crate description: 5 flavors of soda in tasty jelly bean form. Mix & match flavors to create your own flavor!]

Melissa Says:

Exactly as the name says. Much like the hard candy, gum, and various other food items with this style, there are a variety of flavors you can mix. Grape, white grape, cola, lemon, and soda flavoring, which you can mix and match however you want. 

They have reasonably good flavor and taste pretty good. They have the consistency of gum, which slowly disappears as you chew. Though the soda one didn't do a whole lot that I could tell, the lemon one tasted lemony. Probably will eat more later.

Kimberly Says:

Looking at these, I was reminded of the Kirby gum from a couple of boxes ago.

When I opened the package, there was a fairly intense scent coming from them, but other than 'sweet', I couldn't really tell what it was.

The flavor is pretty strong, but the unusual thing about these is the texture. At first bite it feels more like a gumball, and it has a sort of grainy texture after you chew on it for a while.

It's not bad, but it's somehow different from any jelly bean I've had before.

I would say it's decent. Not great, but not terrible.

Pokemon Puzzle Gum

Pokemon Puzzle Gum

(Japan Crate: August 2015)

[Japan crate description: Enjoy some gum while you piece together your Pokemon sticker puzzle.]

Kimberly Says:

This was...underwhelming. Big giant package for two sheets of stickers - one a large single one, the other one the 'puzzle', and a square piece of gum maybe an inch by inch in size.

The stickers are unique, I don't know what I'll do with them. I'll hold onto them, I suppose. (These ones had Yvetal and Xerneas on them)

The gum was...soooooo sweet. It was like I had dumped a spoonful of sugar into my mouth and started chewing. After the sourness of the cotton candy we'd just had, it was almost painfully sweet. There was no other real flavor, though. Just bland and sugar.

Melissa Says:

It's mainly just sugar-flavored gum, with a Pokemon card puzzle with it. The gum was pretty bland, almost as if you ate straight sugar out of the package. The card has Yveltal and Xerneas on it. 

Probably would not choose to eat again.

Crackling Cotton

Crackling Cotton

(Japan Crate: August 2015)

[Japan crate description: Fluffy grape cotton candy with an explosive pop rocks kick. A truly unique candy.]

Melissa Says:

Feels like cotton candy. Looks like cotton candy. Tastes like cotton candy on steroids. It smells like grape, and it tastes intensely like grape. You put this on your tongue, and it immediately starts crackling and tastes like concentrated grape flavoring. Not just that, but this is sour grape flavoring. It's grape death. 

This is no ordinary cotton candy. It was very intense, very flavorful. Would probably eat more if it were not grape flavored…or sour. Or both, preferably. It was quite an experience! Not bad, though, all considered.

Kimberly Says:

Grape. Why did it have to be grape? EVERYTHING is grape lately - it's proving to be the only downside to getting these boxes, the tendency of so many things to be flavored GRAPE.

I'm not fond of grape flavoring, if you didn't notice. xD

All right.

So opening this package you are greeted with an intense grape scent and...a...block of cotton candy. A brick. I've never seen such solid cotton candy before.

I broke off a piece and put it in my mouth...and instantly was suffering from the MOST INTENSE SOUR GRAPE TASTE EVER. I didn't even notice the Pop Rocks style candy inside it because I was chewing it and trying to get that OUT of my mouth as fast as possible.

However, I wouldn't say that it's bad. If it wasn't sour grape, or was any flavor but grape and sour, then I think I could almost like it. The intense sour and even more intense grape flavor, though, was too much for me.

Shuwa Shuwa Soda Candy

Shuwa Shuwa Soda Candy

(Japan Crate: August 2015)

[Japan crate description: Shuwa Shuwa is the sound of fizz in a soda. Wait for the center to find out how this candy got its name.]

Kimberly Says:

I was pleasantly surprised to find the candies individually wrapped - that'll make it easy to share with people at work. xD

Looks like there's three flavor, grape strawberry and orange. I had the orange, which is very intensely orange flavored.

My sister kept talking about the fizz she kept tasting, but I never really tasted it.

It was very tasty, though, and I will be eating more of them. Most likely the orange ones, because orange is my favorite. x3

Melissa Says:

These came in nice, separately packaged packets, which clearly named the flavors. They look a bit like stickless Dum-Dum suckers. And for a little bit, they taste like Dum-Dums. 

Then you get down far enough to realize why it's soda candy, and not just strawberry candy. The crackling starts out small, but by the end your mouth is itching, your cheeks are itching, your eyes are burning a little bit…but it tastes exactly like soda. You usually don't have to hold it in your mouth that long, though. 

It's pretty flavorful, if a bit overpoweringly…bubbly. I'll probably have another later on.