F-odd: Cornolate

Yes, I've been slacking off. You would too if you had to deal with the millions of utterly thankless exhausting tasks I've had to do lately. Or maybe you wouldn't. You wouldn't whinge, whine, stamp your feet and take deep, deep breaths to calm yourself down when faced with someone in the service industry whom you've waited in a long queue to see, turn down your perfectly reasonable request. All I know is that I am no saint and I don't like being told no.

What I do like is chocolate. And corn.

But corn chocolate? That's a different story.

As opposed to how corn is seen in France, us Asian peeps love the stuff. From soft serve sweet corn ice cream served at 7-11 (ick and so, so wrong), to hot steaming cups of buttered nibblets to keep you company while waiting in line for the bus, to just the little corn on the corb skewers they serve at the local KFC. This is definitely a place that doesn't believe that corn is only fit for animal consumption.

But this particular treat, the corn chocolate, first appeared on my radar about 6 years ago, when a colleague brought back a package from her trip to Hokkaido. I was given a single piece out of her stash. Since then, I've seen it appear from time to time wrapped in a box ready to be gifted (another thing us Asians like to do). But now, you can often find them in the large Japanese supermarkets in a foil packet. Expensive enough to hesitate over but not as expensive as the high end boxed chocolates.

Seeing how these are wrapped and how crazy my colleagues went over them, I'll be the first to admit. They ain't all that. Seriously. It's CORN chocolate for one thing. Not a flavor I associate with chocolate. Oh, and it's white chocolate. Not something I like anyways.

But this one smells cloyingly sweet when unwrapped, very milky and pale yellow, with clear nuggets of corn (kind of like firmer rice crispies), when tasting it, its very crunchy, not as sweet as it smells and tastes wrong. Like it was a salty puffed rice treat that had been accidentally dipped in a sugar coating. It has a fragrant corn taste to it, which I'm guessing is the draw. All I can say is, you can keep it. Give me and my cheap ass a Tolberone any day.

You can find more on Corn Chocolate here.