Green Tea Oreo Soft Cookies

Today is my birthday. That doesn't mean there's going to be a special post or anything, I'm just putting it out there.

Summer is a bad time for candy. I'm not saying it's a bad time to eat candy, it's just that when you walk out of the store, you'd better eat that candy bar soon, or else you've got liquified candy. I've had a protein bar liquified after I left it too long in my car. It's a particularly bad time for chocolate candy because chocolate loses its shape so easily. As opposed to let's say, a bag of Skittles, a Hershey's chocolate bar is going to start melting in the first minute in the heat. Well it's a good thing the item I'm going to write about isn't candy then.

Green tea and Oreo cookies? Why not. I've had crisp Japanese cookies that have had green tea filling before, and they've been good, so why not the king of creme filled cookies? Admittedly, I've never had an Oreo Soft Cookie before, or a Cakester, as they're called in American stores. I always believed that it's hard to improve upon the original Oreo design, but why not give this a try.

These are individually wrapped

It looks a lot less appetizing in real life, let me tell you that. I think the heat pulled the cookies apart

This was the stain that was left behind. Kind of concerning

The initial flavor of the cookie is very much like the cookie part of an Oreo in that it is not sweet, but slightly bitter. The texture is much softer than an Oreo cookie (hence the name Soft Cookie), and it felt kind of oily. The filling, to my surprise, lacked sweetness. This was new to me because the cream filling of an Oreo is generally recognized as the best part of the cookie. When the cream is not sweet, but only subtly sweet, I'm not sure if I like it or not. Well, I guess if I have to ask myself, "Was this good?" then I think I know the answer. The smell of green tea was there, but I was hoping for a sweeter cream. If you're a fan of green tea and don't like your sweets to be too sweet, then this would be for you. However, I would probably spring for a bag of good old Oreo cookies instead of this.

Green Tea Oreo Soft Cookies: 5/10

Apple Oreo Bar

You know what's not seen often? Apples and chocolate. When was the last time you got apple and chocolate ice cream? How about a chocolate chip apple cookie? Well, the common accompaniment to apple is caramel. There are candied apples, caramel apples, and other things that are some sort of sticky, sugary friend to apples, but that friend is never chocolate. Luckily, I found that, sometimes, apples can be friends with chocolate.

Here is, yet again, another Japanese Oreo bar. You never know what flavor you're going to get with these; I know I didn't know what flavor this was because all the text is in Japanese. However, the market where I got this from, was kind enough t label it as Oreo Apple.

The Apple Oreo Bar fortunately broke into perfect halves for me as I was driving home

Now I know why chocolate isn't apple's best friend. Chocolate likes to drape over things, but apple just wants a friend to hang on to him, not one that will smother him. When they hang out, there's a discord as to who should take the leading role. This wasn't a bad bar, but it wasn't particularly good. The oddest part of this bar was actually the Oreo bits. By the time the chocolate and apple flavored filling had melted, there were these Oreo pieces that were still lingering that left that familiar, slightly bitter Oreo cookie taste in my mouth. The other flavors of Oreo bars were much more pleasing because they used flavors that seemed to go well with each other. It was interesting, and it was worth trying, but I wouldn't want to see apple and chocolate again unless apple brought along his friend caramel.

Apple Oreo Bar: 6.5/10

Three on three with Phil and Karina

This is going to be another post featuring guest input from my friends. This time it is from my friends Karina and Phil, who were the ones who contributed to my Japanese Loot series of entries. The following products are Japanese, but we found them in a Korean supermarket. This supermarket had a large selection of candies, but the prices were a little bit more expensive than at a Japanese market. However, they did feature some things that I had not seen before, or things that have not returned to the shelves at Japanese markets. Anyway, the first item that we sampled was:

Blueberry Kit Kat. Meiji has a blueberry flavored chocolate bar, which is excellent as are there green tea and strawberry flavored bars. I figured that if Blueberry Kit Kat was anything similar to those, it would be worth the try.

A melted Blueberry Kit Kat. I'm going to assume that these were not the best stored candies because a majority, if not all the bars, were melted

We all agreed that this was a pretty mediocre candy. I expected a lot more, but there wasn't much flavor at all. The chocolate wasn't that good, there was a hint of blueberry, but overall it lacked flavor in general. I would recommend getting regular milk chocolate Kit Kat over this.

Blueberry Kit Kat: 6/10
Phil's input: 6 - 6.5/10
Karina's input: 6/10

The next item we tried was Mango Oreo bars. Mango and chocolate are not a combination I could have thought of. There are some fruits that pair well with chocolate, such as strawberries, but things like mangoes, oranges, or anything that you can't really imagine with chocolate never come to light, so I imagined this would be interesting

A Mango Oreo bar cut in half

The best way I can describe the way this tasted is that it's like a sub-par Chinese pineapple cake. Phil agreed with me on this and all three of us thought that this was a step down from the Blueberry Kit Kat. I expected more of a mango taste, but I suppose pineapple is the closest Oreo could get. It lacked even more flavor than the Blueberry Kit Kat and was extremely average

Mango Oreo Bar: 5/10
Phil's input: 5 - 5.5/10
Karina's input: 5/10

Lion Cola Candy was the last candy we tried and I figured that it was a safe bet. Cola candies are generally quite good when they have a fizz to them. The only time I could imagine a cola flavored candy being good without having some sort of fizz is with Haribo Cola Gummies

Lion Cola Candy from another angle

This was definitely the winner of the items we tried. It had lots of flavor, most importantly a lot of cola flavor, and it had a nice fizz to it. We've been screwed before with other hard cola candies that didn't have fizz and just weren't good at all, but this one was very good. The only thing that I could hold against it is that I think it wasn't stored properly either, so a lot of the pieces were sticky and stuck to each other, but that's more of a storage issue than a flavor issue. We're glad we tried this last, so that we could get the flavor of the previous two candies out of our mouths.

Lion Cola Candy: 8/10
Phil's input: 8 .5/10
Karina's input: 8/10

Oreo...strawberry bar

I think it's been established that in Japan they eat Oreos a different way than we do. Actually, I'm not sure if that's correct at all. Anyway, they have different flavored Oreo bars which I have not seen here. I've written about a few of them, so here's another one.

I'm going to assume that the packaging indicates that it's strawberry flavored. I could be very wrong about that, but that's going to be my assumption. I have no idea what the green and white text says at all

An unwrapped Oreo bar broken in half

All I can say is...eh. I wasn't too crazy about this. The texture was a bit rocky, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The strawberry flavor was there, but I didn't like it that much for some reason. If chocolate and strawberries is a good combination, then for some reason I'm not a fan of Oreo and strawberries. I would say the flavor is reminiscent of Strawberry Yan Yan, which is good, but I just wasn't feeling it with this bar.

Oreo Strawberry Bar: 6.5/10