Larvae Chocolates are a big hit

Date: 2008 April 14 17:07

Posted by Joe

With Easter long gone, we still can't stop thinking of chocolate. So we'd like to point out a story about chocolate in Japan a reader sent us (who has strange tastes including custard pizza, but that's another story in itself). The Japan Times On-line have a story about chocolate bugs, sold by an Akita based confectioner. Komatsuya Honten specialises in making chocolate treats that look like beetle larvae and caterpillars. Yum!

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The treats look realistic, but don't sound that bad, as they're made of dark chocolate, with a white chocolate outer shell, and orange peel yummy, however looking at the site, it also uses dried saki squid for the feet, erm, hmm, not quite so yum. They make 500 to 1,000 a day, but can't make enough to meet demand, and as a result there's a 3 month wait to meet orders! Apparently they're popular around valentine's day, when ladies rush out to buy their men chocolate treats.

The article states "Komatsu made his first chocolate larvae in 2005, when he was asked to prepare sweets for a local festival where children were being given live beetles, which are popular and expensive pets for boys in Japan."