Recently, they mailed me a bunch of Japanese candies, including this pack of Lime Shikwasa Hi-Chew. I originally thought these were lime, but Debby and Nana cleared that up in the comments. A Shikwasa is a tart Japanese citrus fruit with a green rind and golden flesh.

Also, there’s all kinds of fun stuff going on on that wrapper in addition to the Shikwasas. Nana has a great explanation in the comments.

I’ve reviewed a bunch of Hi-Chew in the past. Like all Hi-Chew, it comes in a pack of individually wrapped rectangles. The chew started off sproingy and then softened and became stickier.

These were a pale pistachio green with a white center. The flavor was amazingly juicy and spot on.

It was incredibly sweetly limey and zesty with the perfect edge of pithy bitterness. As the chew went on, the zestiness intensified and took on just a hint of herbal grassiness.

There was no sourness to it, and the sweetness level was perfect – tasty without being cloying – with just the right tidbit of bitterness to set it off.

I couldn’t stop popping these and would change nothing about them. Well, I would change one thing: bring them to the U.S. please! A ZOMG!

They were basically regular milk chocolate Pocky – thin biscuit sticks dipped in chocolate – with an added sprinkle of salt. The salt crystals were small but visible, though not quite as sparkly as they appear on the packaging.

The biscuit sticks were crisp and crunchy. They tasted mostly neutral with just a bit of butteriness. Their purpose was mostly to serve as a neutral flavored but texturally interesting foil for the chocolate.

The chocolate coating was thin but creamy. It had a nice duskiness, and the salt crystals added a flash of flavor that really set the chocolate off.

These were a really simple yet wonderful treat. It’s amazing how the simple addition of a few grains of salt added so much more complexity to it. An OMG.

Cheesecake Pejoy is made by Glico. They have a decent U.S. presence (they make Pocky), and various flavors of Pejoy are available in U.S. Asian grocery stores. I’d never seen the cheesecake version in America before, so when I came across them in China, I just had to pick up a box.

China is modernizing at a rapid clip, so I may be a bit behind the times, but I don’t think cheesecake is all that well known in China. There, even just cheese is a fairly new import, so I was surprised to see cheesecake as a flavor. But I’m not complaining – I love cheesecake. Probably too much!

Pejoy are basically an inside-out version of their more famous Pocky counterpart. Pocky are biscuit sticks coated in a thin layer of some sort of flavored frosting-like coating, such as chocolate or pumpkin. Pejoy are hollow tubes made of biscuit and filled with flavored frosting-like substance.

My Pejoys’ color varied from a pale yellow on the underbelly to a lovely golden brown toastiness on its top. Most of mine had little darker hatch marks – almost like grill marks – along the edges.

The cookie shell of the Pejoy tasted rather bland. I think it may have contained vanilla and butter, but the flavor was so neutral that it teetered on the edge of being savory in comparison to the sweeter filling.

The off-white, grainy-looking filling was creamy on the tongue, but it lacked flow. The texture was fine, but the rippling ribbons of cheesecake filling depicted on the box made me expect something a bit more luxurious. I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed.

Similarly, the tangy cream cheese scent of the sticks made me expect a similarly sweet and tangy flavor. Alas, the filling turned out to taste sweet with a dairy-ness to it, but it wholly lacked in tanginess.

For me, tangy creaminess is the best part of cheesecake. These Pejoy captured the essence of cheesecake in scent but not taste. While they were a nice snack, they weren’t a cheesecake snack, so they get an O.

The Hi-Chews had an orange-yellow center surrounded by an off-white shell that didn’t photograph well. Just imagine this, but slightly more orangey. The flavor, however, was flawless!

It tasted just like a fresh, juicy, perfectly ripe mango. I have no words to describe it other than as a perfect distillation of real mango into a candy chew.

As the sticky chewiness developed, the unique mango seediness became stronger and lingered a bit in the finish. I found it intoxicatingly delightful and almost better than the real thing. An OMG.

Instead, they turned out to be little caramels with a blueberry flavored center. It looks like I wound up with the blueberry version of Neil’s Cadbury hazelnut treat.

The caramels were soft and chewy, with a texture similar to that of Starbursts, only grainier and not quite as sticky. The caramel flavor was rather boring, just generically sweet with a one-dimensional caramel flavor.

The center filling was where it went all wrong for me. It tasted weirdly artificial with dark plummy undertones that really didn’t mesh with the caramel at all.

In fact, the combination was downright off-putting. A –.

Artificial banana is not my thing. Banana Runts? Run away!

Fortunately, the Hi-Chew banana didn’t taste artificial at all! Instead, its banana flavor was surprisingly genuine, like the actual fruit instead of some chemical approximation.

The chew started off with a mild sweetness and just a hint of banana scent. As I chomped away, the overtones of real banana flavors became stronger before ceding ground back to a pleasantly fruity sweetness not unlike the base flavor of the Peach.

This isn’t my favorite Hi-Chew flavor, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. Kudos to Hi-Chew for making banana not just palatable but even enjoyable. An O.

The company that makes Hi-Chew, Morinaga, has a U.S. subsidiary that sells Hi-Chew in strawberry, green apple, mango, melon, banana, and grape flavors. And as of last month’s Sweets and Snacks Expo, a peach Hi-Chew flavor is now available in the U.S. I got a free sample pack to review from Morinaga.

The Peach Hi-Chew had a light pink center and a lightly floral scent. It started off with a very mild, not very sweet flavor. As its bouncy chew developed, however, the sweetness grew.

Honestly, it didn’t taste much like peach to me. It just tasted mild and floral and sweet, maybe more like a muted strawberry. I was surprised, as Hi-Chew is usually really spot-on with their fruit flavors.

Though it wasn’t as peachy as I would have liked, it was still quite enjoyable with its pleasantly light flavor. An OM.

Like the Baskin Robbins Collaboration, the Parfait a la Mode was 12 little filled rectangles of chocolate. This time, the four flavors were Blueberry, Pudding, Strawberry, and Chocolate.

The structure of the fillings was different than that of the Baskin Robbins version. These were half-filled with a white cream, then topped with a contrasting flavor goo, except for the Chocolate parfait, where the topping was more solid.

Blueberry was white with purple goo. It tasted darkly sweet at first before the bright fruitiness of jam came through.

Based on the picture on the box, I think Pudding was supposed to be flan flavored. It was white with a gold goo.

Pudding turned out to be my favorite of the bunch. At first, it tasted of just chocolate. Then the flavor of charred, just-shy-of-burnt caramel came through and lingered in the finish.

Strawberry had just a faint fruitiness and a mild, jammy finish. It was similar to the blueberry but more mellow and less flavorful.

Finally, Chocolate was the worst of the bunch. It was poor quality chocolate inside more poor quality chocolate, and the finish was weirdly fruity, but not in a pleasant way.

Another O for the set. As a concept, Look has great potential for fun and versatility, but they really need to use better ingredients to win on the execution.

The Look chocolates came as 12 little filled rectangles, three each of four flavors. In the Baskin Robbins Collaboration, the flavors were Strawberry Cheesecake, Jamoca (sic) Coffee, Orange Sherbet, and Vanilla.

Strawberry Cheesecake had a grainy thin chocolate shell with a pink filling. It tasted sweet and brightly, artificially fruity, with a slightly seedy bite.

Jamoca Coffee had a grainy lighter brown inside. It had barely any coffee flavor, just a light, chocolate sweetness.

Orange Sherbet’s filling was grainy and the color of a creamsicle. It had a bright, artificial citrus fruitiness that didn’t blend with the chocolate in a harmonious way.

For some reason, Vanilla’s center was solid (the others had a grainy paste). It smelled weirdly of fake coffee and didn’t have any flavor of its own that I could discern – this one just tasted of the chocolate outside.

While the idea of the Look chocolates was interesting, the execution was underwhelming with meh chocolates and fillings. An O.

The Kit Kat fingers were pea green colored. Even though I’ve reviewed quite a few matcha chocolates on this blog, I still find their coloring to be shocking.

They tasted creamy with a light herbal undertone and had an almost bitter lingering finish. They had no chocolate flavor – it was all tea and dairy.

I liked the crisp crunch of the cookies, but I’m not a big fan of tea in general, and matcha-flavored chocolates just really ain’t my thing. An O.