When my dad visits my house, he always enjoys a shopping spree at the local Asian grocery store. I never know what he’s going to come home with, and this time he brought back a cup of Meiji Yan Yan Double Cream.

For seventy-nine cents, we got a 1.55oz cup that had ten tubular crackers and two triangular wells of chocolate cream and strawberry cream. The packaging is cool—it’s set up like a lop-sided peace sign to keep all the ingredients separate. I was little disappointed with the amount of cream in the cup. The wells were shallow, and there was visibly more space allotted for the chocolate than the strawberry.

The crackers were sufficiently cookie-like to work well with the cream, but both the chocolate and strawberry tasted like weakly flavored cake frosting. I could have done better with twice as much cream, but I’m biased toward sweets, and I ate the Yan Yan for the chocolate and strawberry, not for the crackers.

The chocolate/strawberry combo isn’t the only type of Yan Yan. Singularly packaged chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry are also available. I wasn’t much interested in finishing more than two crackers, but the Yan Yan was fun to share (as long as people don’t double dip), and I’ve found that my family and friends always enjoy trying foreign candy. A sampling of Asian candy, if nothing else, provides a nice change from the usual chocolate, although I can’t say I’m sick of “the usual.”

• Yan Yan at Asian Food Grocer
• Yan Yan at Amazon.com

candy, sweets, crackers, cookies, chocolate, strawberry, cream, frosting, yan yan, yanyan, Meiji, Japanese, Asian, Japan