Toppo – Vanilla Milkshake

When you think vanilla milkshake? What comes to mind? For me it’s 60s or 70s style diners and malted milkshakes. I’m sure it was a magical time, you know, apart from all the racism, impending nuclear doom and uncomfortable fashion. Those cars though…love how stylistic those things were. I would have loved to own one of those vintage red or baby blue refrigerators too. Those things like pretty neat. Just don’t stand too close to them for prolonged periods of time.

This flavour is another collaboration with Calbee. How vanilla milkshake relates to Calbee, one of the biggest makers of potato based snacks, I clearly can’t tell. I’m guessing it’s a cultural or regional thing specific to Japan that I am unaware of. It still seems kind of strange to me. Hard to pass up on a vanilla milkshake flavoured chocolate though.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m more in favour of the the thicker girthier sticks for most flavours, and this is no exception. While the thin sticks are good as well, I feel like these thicker ones are what help to set them apart from Pocky, while the thin ones are just kind of the reverse. My opinion tends to waver depending on the flavour itself, but I feel like the thicker ones eek out marginally better in my opinion.

These smell like vanilla ice cream. More specifically, vanilla ice cream that I would intentionally leave out to let it melt into a more liquid form, and try to drink it only to realize there’s a reason people eat it cold and no drink it. I mean, have you ever tried drinking defrosted ice cream? That stuff is usually sickeningly sweet. It’s probably to account for the fact that everything has a more subdued taste when it’s super cold and frozen. Though I guess that’s what milkshake is, so this is already halfway there with the smell.

The flavour is pretty accurate to what I’d expect from the smell. It has a very sweet vanilla flavour to it. The vanilla flavour has a creamy quality to it, so it reminds me of an actual vanilla ice cream. Or vanilla cream frosting. It’s vanilla and dairy adjacent. The pretzel is mostly neutral in flavour, so it serves to cut some of the sweetness. Actually, the flavours come together to remind me of a birthday cake, or more specifically a vanilla frosted cupcake.

Texture is basically a chocolate filled pretzel straw. I say pretzel and not biscuit because the outer shell of these sticks has a very pretzel like hard texture to it, much like how soft pretzels are boiled for a bit and have that unique texture on the outside. I don’t know why but these feel so much more substantial than the thin sticks, even though they aren’t that much thicker.

I like these, but I’m not crazy about them. If you like vanilla, you would probably enjoy this. If you enjoy anything vaguely resembling vanilla ice cream, in whatever form it takes, well you might go crazy for these. Like flies to honey, these are a vanilla lovers wet dream. I don’t know if they intend on bringing this back for seasons to come, but I can see this being popular enough for them to bring it back each year. And that would be pretty great. Now that I think about it, I wonder how these would taste with an actual vanilla ice cream…