I can't believe I haven't blogged about Pocky yet. If you don't know what Pocky is, you've been missing out because it's one of the most well-known, fun and tasty Japanese snacks around. They're pretty much chocolate covered biscuit sticks, but Glico, the company behind Pocky, create different flavoured chocolate coatings for the snack.
Last week, while at my local Asian grocery store, I found a special Kumamon box of Pocky. They didn't say what the flavour was, but there was a picture of a cow and a cup of steaming brown drink, which I took to be hot cocoa (I did some research later on and online sellers of the snack have said that it's hot cocoa flavoured). The packaging was cute (and I have a soft spot for Kumamon), so I bought it. The cool thing about the box was that you could pop out the ears and arms....Along with the Kumamon face, you could turn the box into a square Kumamon!
...So after opening the box, that's exactly what I did. It was adorable. I really liked the internal plastic packaging for the biscuits too. They had lots of little Kumamon pictures printed on it. Kumamon has such cute little arm movements!
How were the biscuits though? They were very chocolate-flavoured. As soon as I took them out of the plastic I could see chocolate flavoured biscuits sticks, dipped in 'hot-cocoa-flavoured' chocolate with cocoa crumbs. The biscuits and the chocolate flavoured dipping were a good match. While the biscuits weren't that sweet, the cocoa chocolate added that flavour to the biscuits. The chocolate was quite milky in flavour. It reminded me of some instant Hokkaido milk tea drinks that I'd tried.
The coca crumbs were also nice. It made it a bit crunchier in texture and differentiated the flavour from other chocolate flavoured versions of Pocky. It wasn't my most favourite flavour as I'm not always the biggest fan of chocolate-flavoured snacks despite my love for real chocolate, but it was pleasant for a sweet treat. More milky and cocoa-flavoured than heavily chocolate.
In any case, I definately liked it and would buy them again if I was craving Pocky, provided that there were no new flavours I wanted to try.
Overall, Kumamon Hot Cocoa Pocky is pleasantly milky and reminds you of solidified hot chocolate in biscuit form. Kumamon Hot Cocoa Pocky scores a 7/10.
