YBC Picola Strawberry Cream Filled Wafer Rolls 10 Sticks

A biscuit stick baked thin and rolled into a hollow tube, with strawberry cream painted around the inside. The strawberry is tart rather than sugary: there is a real sourness running through the cream, and the biscuit around it is toasty. Buy it if you have found strawberry sweets sickly; if you want the sweet pink-lolly kind, this is the wrong biscuit.

On the pack: ピコラ いちご (pi-ko-ra ichigo).

What you're getting

• Tart, not sugary. A clear sourness runs through the strawberry cream.
• Thin and crisp: the wall shatters rather than snaps.
• The cream sits on the inside of the tube, not around the outside. That is the opposite way round from Pocky.
• Ten sticks, five to a sealed bag. In 2021 it was twelve, six to a bag; the maker has since cut each bag to five. When it resized Picola and other biscuits in 2023, it put the change down to rising ingredient, oil and freight costs.
• It sheds crumbs as you eat it. It is a hollow tube, and it breaks apart easily.
• Allergens: contains wheat, egg, milk and soy. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

You will see this shape sold as wafer rolls, cookie sticks, crepe cookies, biscuit sticks, or even "egg rolls": all the same thing, and the last one is a translation quirk rather than anything savoury. The review quotes below say "choco" or "chocolate" for the strawberry cream: Japanese shoppers use that word for any set cream filling. There is no cocoa in the product.