Careme Delicia Strawberry Fromage Chocolate/Cookie

Stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld once did a bit about how cars were named to bring to mind certain words, but to not actually use them. One of his examples as "The Integra", which was meant to evoke thoughts of "integrity". This candy/cookie combination obviously took a page from the book being referenced by such car makers. It's not "delicious", it's "Delicia".

This is another in a line of sweets designed to bring to mind a much more complex confection. I love these in theory. In practice, I'm often disappointed. I never expect them to actually taste like a real strawberry cheesecake. My only hope is that they have complexity sufficient to distinguish them from something like a plain white chocolate bar flavored with strawberry. If you're going to make such a fussy treat, then at least make sure the consumer's experience is nearly as good as the candy looks.

The candy smells delicately of strawberry. Biting into it yields a textural wonderland with the crispy little cookie providing crunch and contrast to the somewhat soft strawberry white chocolate and the even softer white "cheese" filling. The textural complexity is accompanied by flavor depth including some sense of creamy whipped cream, ever so slightly floral strawberry, and a hint of earthy grain from the cookie. I'm not going to say everyone will pick up on all three of these elements individually, but they are there if you take the time to notice during the tiny sweets brief experience in your mouth to heed its attributes.

This is a pretty impressive little treat that offers layers of complex flavoring and texture though what I can only assume is the work of tiny little fairy folk. Each is about the diameter of a nickel/five-yen coin/your big ass thumbnail but is a cookie platform with freeze-dried strawberry encasing "cheese cream" which in turn has a tiny dollop of stawberry sauce and is topped with a disc of strawberry-flavored white chocolate. It sounds like it'd send you into sugar shock, but the sweetness level is very balanced with the blandness of the cookie and the tartness of the strawberry.

All of this weighs in at only 31 calories per bite. Yes, it's a small portion, but if you compare it to a square of Milka chocolate (22 calories) or a Hershey's Kiss (25 calories), it's got a lot of bang for the calorie cost. In terms of the monetary cost, I paid a little over $2 for this at Marukai market. For 8 pieces, that is somewhat expensive, but my husband and I look at junk food as much as the experience cost as the cash. If you can eat one of these and be happy with it, then it is well worth the higher price. I can say that I'm intrigued to try more of the Delicia sweets after this and would definitely buy this one again.

Careme Quattro Fragrant White Cookies

I recently watched a lecture by a priest on addiction. You might ask yourself, "why is a priest talking about addiction?" You might also say, "this is a Japanese junk food blog, why on earth are you talking about priests giving lectures on serious topics?" This are all good questions and I have a good answer. He was talking about how there are certain things that we are born enjoying and, as children, we like things that are sweet because our genetic heritage has inclined us to do so.

When it comes to things like coffee and booze, we have to actually learn to like them. Part of how we do that is to adulterate them with more pleasant-tasting things like sugar, milk, or juice. We add something we naturally enjoy to something we find less pleasant in order to acclimate ourselves to bitter or harsh flavors. Once you get addicted to caffeine or alcohol, you can let go of those things which make them palatable and focus on what you need to get you high.

As this priest talked about how kids like one thing and adults like another, I thought about adult tastes and how we tend to separate them from those that children enjoy. Alcohol, by virtue of the illegality of consuming it at younger ages, at least outside of ritualistic practices, is something that we associate with adult tastes. However, sometimes, even adults don't enjoy the taste of alcohol. We have to learn to like it.

This cookie is part of an adult tastes line-up of the Quattro cookie line. I'm sure that this is an idea that they ripped off from Nestle Japan with their popular "adult sweetness" line of KitKats. What does "adult" taste like? It appears that it tastes like rum raisin as that is what the goo inside of these little biscuits is highly reminiscent of. One must ask why they didn't simply name them "rum raisin". It could be that I'm wrong about the flavoring or it could be that "mystery meat" sounds more provocative than "meatloaf".

I picked up this box of 6 cookies for $2.29 at one of the many Japanese markets in my general area. This is my second review of one of the Quattro line of cookies. The first one was an orange chocolate one that I loved so much that I sent a box to my sister. I won't be sending a box of these to my sister.

There is really nothing "wrong" with these cookies, but there are several things that they didn't exactly get "right". One was that the chocolate cookie portion is so flavorless as to practically be a plain cookie. I think more chocolate bitterness would have balanced out the almost cloying sweetness of the white chocolate. Sandwiched between the white chocolate and the bland cookie is another layer of slightly off-white chocolate that is supposed to be cheese flavored, but not much of that comes through. The dominant flavor is what I perceive to be the sweet white chocolate and the rum raisin sauce.

I like the textural mix of the crispy cookie, soft-ish chocolate and the jelly-like filling, but that's really not enough to overcome the fact that rum raising is one of those "adult" flavors that I never developed a strong affinity for. I'll finish the box, particularly since, at 43 calories per cookie, these aren't the most calorific sweets in the world, but I wouldn't buy them again.

Careme Cacao Time Quattro Orange

When I was a kid, we only received three television channel's signals - ABC, CBS, and NBC. We were located in the boonies and our old wire antenna was too far away from the Pittsburgh transmitting station to get the PBS channel or the really cool channel that showed re-runs of Star Trek (TOS) and the best repeats of old shows. Occasionally, we'd get a grainy PBS show, but that was usually just Mr. Rogers. Due to my television deprivation, I didn't grow up with Sesame Street. Being deprived of that seminal show means that I wasn't exposed to the Cookie Monster.


While I haven't done a psychological study on the emotional impact of being deprived of the Cookie Monster during ones formative years, I speculate that my general lack of enthusiasm for cookies relative to other types of sweets is a result of not being able to get PBS on the tube when I was growing up. My husband certainly is a lot crazier for cookies than me, and he grew up in Silicon Valley with all sorts of television viewing options.

Despite this lack of indoctrination into the way of the cookie, I was intrigued when I saw this box of orange chocolate cookies at the local 99 yen shop. The main thing that dissuaded me upon first viewing is that each cookie is 57 calories and they're quite small at 5 cm (2 in.) x 3 cm (1.2 in.). This makes them more candy than cookie. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, of course.


Thee are three layers to the cookie - a bland, crunchy little butter-cookie type biscuit, orange-flavored chocolate, and bittersweet chocolate. There's also an orange "sauce" in the middle of the chocolate layer. You can smell both the orange and chocolate when you give it a sniff. The bittersweet chocolate and orange flavors are intense and blend very well together. The cookie portion is mainly there for texture and is a fairly hard. One of the big points about these cookies is that they are made with Valencia oranges, and the flavor does taste real.

I really liked this and would definitely go for them again. That being said, the strong flavors might be off-putting to some, especially if you favor milk chocolate. I love strong flavors when they are in good quality ingredients, and both the chocolate and orange appear to be so.

Kabaya, which makes the Careme brand, offers these in other flavors and shapes as well. The other two types listed on the web site are caramel and chocolate and bitter chocolate and white chocolate. Oddly, the orange chocolate version is not listed on their web site. If you'd like to download a wallpaper of their mascot, you can find a few choices here.