These adorable little panda chocolate biscuits are made by Kabaya and are called Sakusaku Panda Cookies or Sakupan. The pandas come with a wide variety of facial expressions and the cookies, or rather the chocolate, in several flavours. Sakupan used to have a different panda drawing on its packaging and was available in a more traditional white panda with black markings, but at the moment only a double chocolate and strawberry version seem to exist in stores.
Kabaya – Sakusaku Panda: Strawberry
Price: ±€2
The strawberry Sakupan smelled like artificial strawberry and pretty sweet. I’ve noticed before that a lot of Japanese candies and chocolates have a much stronger smell than flavour, but this was not the case with the Sakupan. Unfortunately, the chocolate itself tasted very strongly of artificial berry flavour and very sweet. I couldn’t specifically detect any strawberry flavour and was a bit taken aback by the overall sweetness of the treat. It also has a bit of a sour flavour to it, which I think is supposed to make it taste more like strawberry. As a whole, I didn’t completely dislike it, but I wasn’t a big fan of this one either. I thought the flavours were a little too strong.
Kabaya – Sakusaku Panda: Double Chocolate
Price: ±€2
The double chocolate Sakupan were strong in flavour as well, but not as sweet as the strawberry ones. They had a bit of a bitter flavour to them, which I didn’t dislike. The milk chocolate was less bitter than the dark chocolate, which is logical, but did still have some bitter taste to it.
Both the strawberry and double chocolate Sakupan had a creamy chocolate layer and the same biscuit underneath. The biscuit didn’t have a lot of sweetness to it, was crunchy and was a nice neutral base for the chocolate, but did add to the flavour and texture.
