Caplico

Name: Caplico

Origin: Japan

Found at: H-Mart, Irvine

Cost: $6.49

Ingredients:

Sugar, Whole Milk Powder, Lactose, Corn,(Wheat Flour, Starch, Sugar, Shortening (Hydrogenated Fish Oil), Salt), Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Rapeseed Oil, Palm Oil, Sunflower Oil, Cocoa Butter, Cacao Mass, Skim Milk Powder, Yogurt Power, Glycerin Esters of Fatty Acids, Sucrose Esters of Fattty Acids, Sorbitan Monostearate, Propelene Glycol, Esters of Fatty Acids, Soy Lecithin, Beet Red, Caramel (Coloring), Carotene, Artificial Flavor, Sodium Carbonate, Citric Acid.

Why I Bought It:
The prospect of ice cream? At room temperature? I was sold. I secretly hoped that this would be an approximation of those freeze dried packets of astronaut ice cream you see at the Fry's checkout line. But I was willing to settle for a marshmallow candy that looked like an ice cream cone.

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Also, notice the name. Flip the “P” and the “L” and you have a Will Shortz Sunday Puzzle hint. “Take the name of one Japanese snack brand name, flip two of the letters and you get the name of another Japanese brand name for a yogurty drink.”

When the register rang up the price, however, I got a bit of sticker shock. At $6.49 for a package of 5 cones, this quickly became one of the most expensive snacks I've bought for this feature. Now it had better taste like ice cream. Or else I just got duped on paying a lot for just marshmallows.

Tasting Notes:
Amazingly, it was the former. It does taste like ice cream. The texture is like freeze dried ice cream foam — porous and melts as soon as it hits your tongue. The flavor approximates that freezer burned stuff that sticks on the side of the ice cream carton. Yeah, it's like that, but better. What really sells it is that the cone is a real cake cone. Unfortunately, I don't see this ever going up on the space shuttle. Everything is a bit too crumbly for the weightless environment of space. Plus with the budget cutbacks at NASA, astronauts would have to fight over who gets the last one.