Milky Chocolate – Milk Cream Filling

Probably one of the most iconic mascots in Japanese candy is Peko-chan of the Fujiya brand. Even if you weren’t sure of what her name was, or what she was supposed to be selling you, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen her if you’ve even walked by a specialty asian grocery store. They use her as the mascot for everything from hand candies, caramels, chocolates, to crackers and so on and so forth. In all the instances I’ve seen her, I’ve come to associate her with the Milky products that the company sells. It’s great marketing when you consider Milky is the perfect way to describe what your product is. There isn’t a whole lot of interpretation required to figure out what the products contain.

These chocolates are to supposed to be similar to the LOOK chocolates from the same brand. Instead of fruit filling, these are supposed to be filled with a milk cream filling. The LOOK chocolates were interesting, and had some hits and some misses. This one simply has the one flavour, so in that sense this one is all in.

I wouldn’t normally go out of my way to purchase this, but I figure it was on sale, so why not? By sale I mean I purchased enough in my order that they gave this to me for “free”. I’m embarrassed to admit how much I spend on importing snacks from Japan, so let’s move on.

The packaging is very similar to the LOOK chocolate; the box is very similar with the resealable tab, and the foil wrap around what I imagine is a cardboard tray to keep the pieces from flying about.

If you haven’t read any of my previous posts, you may not know about my horrid disdain of summer and hot temperatures. If you have, let me give you another reason – chocolate transport. It means that I am very restricted on what seasons I can import chocolate from other countries from, taking into account the heat in the country of origin, as well as the heat in my locale. Sometimes I try to make the cut off, but there are times when things heat up unexpectedly or a little too soon. I bring all this up because the next picture should explain all.

I’m really not sure what to say here, other than we are now pass the point of no return. A normal person may look at this monstrosity and think, “I should probably throw this out”. But not I! For science, I must press on and review this. That and I have a hard time throwing anything out unless it is explicitly gone rancid or is clearly inedible. Neither of those things appears to be the case. It just looks a little worse for the wear, but as I’ve been raised on the concept of “looks can be deceiving”, I will dig deep, down past the melty exterior and test the relatively intact interior.

As melted as the outside is, it looks like the outer layer of milk chocolate still has a good separation from the filling. This tells me that maybe the damage isn’t too extensive, and I can still get close to the original mouth feel and flavour of the chocolate.

Breaking off a giant chunk (or two), I can confidently say that it is essentially the same as what was originally intended, based on my experience with the LOOK chocolates. Much of the texture is preserved, though a little compressed at the top. The milk chocolate is very similar, and is nothing too special or worth writing home about. The milk filling is interesting. I’m not too sure how to describe it other than it tasting like milk. It’s not quite as sweet as the milk chocolate shell, and is more about the texture, which is slightly creamier than the outside. It doesn’t add much flavour to the overall experience, but the texture combined with the shell does remind me a little of a yogurt filling chocolate, similar to Ritter Sport if you’ve tried that. I would also liken it to the “Milk” flavour of Tirol Chocolates that is present in most of their staple assortments.

All in all, the melted-ness of the chocolate did not detract from my experience, other than making it much harder to portion control. In fact, it was actually kind of fun surprising people with my offer of chocolate, only to reveal this monstrosity to them. It tells a lot about a person and their willingness to look past the surface level of something. Very telling indeed.

I would be unlikely to recommend this product to anyone who isn’t a vehement supporter of Peko-chan and the Milky product lines, as it just doesn’t stand out enough to me. That being said, if you can find this cheap, and want a nice, somewhat mild chocolate experience, this is a great way to achieve that. Big emphasis on cheap though.