snack cakes, or something

I realized earlier tonight that I had a craving for something sweet. But it was already eleven pm, and it was cold and raining outside, and there was no way I was going to go anywhere. I couldn't justify going out late at night for chocolate alone. And there was nothing like a cookie, or hot cocoa, or a piece of a gingerbread house in my apartment. Because, believe me, I looked.

So I tried to forget about it, and started clearing all the junk off of my table. Which, by the way, is not a fair trade for chocolate. But there was three weeks of whatever-I-could-get-by-without-dealing-with-it collected into a heap on top of the table in my kitchen. (And as messes go, I have to say it was super contained, where I had given into slovenliness, yes, but for some reason only within the controlled confines of that one table). So, I got to work.

And there was a payoff. As I got to the bottom, I noticed some of these little Japanese snack cakes that my sister-in-law had given me as part of my Christmas present. I forgot I had taken them out of the box. There were two of them. They had come in a beautiful jewelry box that she had filled with all sorts of fun and exotic little soaps and things. I remembered that she told me that these two were cakes, and those two were soaps, and that one was an eraser, etc.

They were strange little cakes wrapped in cellophane with something brief and to the point written on them in italicized Japanese that, whatever it said, ended in an exclamation point. So they had to be good. And my sister-in-law had mentioned that they were good. So I was really thrilled.

I like Japanese food, but these were snack cakes I had never had before. Not knowing what to expect, I took one of them out of its packaging to study it. And, upon further inspection, it struck me as the kind of item that, if I added water to it, would grow to 500% its original size. And it really looked like this round eraser that I like to use. And a little bit like soap. And it smelled like both cookies and flowers.

Then I remembered something, went into my bedroom, and grabbed the jewelry box. In it I found four other items that looked exactly like these snack cakes. They too were white and round and were all packaged in a similar same way. But they were bigger than the ones I had just examined. So I was confused. I really needed to determine which of these things was a snack cake.

So, I took all of them out of their wrappers and lined them up on my kitchen counter to look at them under the light. All six were spongy. All six looked sort of like erasers. And all six erased #2 pencil quite cleanly. I spent an inordinate amount of time doing this. Finally I ate one of them. Then, all of them. And, although I have no idea what I've eaten, whatever they were, they were good. Really good.