Lightly haunted

Everyone has their own coping skills for dealing with the maelstrom of conflict and uncertainty the U.S. election is about to unleash, but here’s mine: Let’s review more cute little desserts! I’m still abroad (wild! what a life!) and have collected many treats for review along the way. Also lush and mysterious places, unexpected animals, pearls of travel wisdom, et cetera, much of which I’ll be sifting through and savoring very soon. For today, we’ve got a fresh quartet of Halloween-themed treats as a bite-sized distraction from the impending possible implosion of the American democratic experiment — how lovely and demure.

It’s very strange but also very serene to be abroad right now rather than head down in a newsroom election vortex losing my mind. Before I left for Japan, I was still obsessively consuming political news, even though it literally was not my job any more. Traveling for six weeks served as my delayed reward for taking a break from the weird and stressful cycles of journalism, and being away I’ve been so busy bopping around having experiences that I truly have not had time to fixate on the various threadbare American systems that usually haunt me day to day. I feel very lucky to have this experience, and in the words of the sturdy hobbit-heighted woman who shuffles peacefully down our street in Portland every evening, I am indeed having a blessed day. (The earnest blessings she doles out are extremely sought after in my household and Evie, Dog and I regularly vie for them.)

My exposure to the News Cycle and Trump in particular became totally maxed out over the course of the last eight years. As a journalist, I started covering Trump and the emerging misinformation beat right away after the 2016 election and pretty much stayed on it through earlier this year, whether as an editor or a reporter. It made me increasingly tired and frustrated, a fact compounded by a sinister loser billionaire’s decision to wade into the whole thing and amplify the worst impulses of the worst people who learned the worst lessons from the first Trump era. Exhausting! And absolutely fuck all of that. Part of me wants to return to this work because it’s important and interesting, but I’m not sure if it’ll be as a journalist or as a researcher or in policy or some kind of other capacity. (What will people pay me to do with this dark expertise? Will anyone ever pay me again? Questions abound.)

There was a brief moment for those of us who track online extremism and misinformation where it seemed like tech companies might not repeat some of the costly mistakes from 2016-2020, but with the pandemic and the rise of AI and Twitter’s disintegration, everything just sort of fell apart again and the Silicon Valley sociopaths realized they could just keep getting away with their bullshit and that everyone was pretty tired of even worrying about it. It’s all pretty disheartening and to my peers in journalism who did not have to step back and take a break from it, I hope you go to therapy regularly and treat yourself to nice baths and offline hobbies. I could write many words about all of this and probably will some day but hopefully not today because I’ve got to go get some bubble tea and see some goddamned Chinese antiquities.

On to the treats! Like I said, these are Halloween treats and yes, Halloween has passed. But many of us surely feel haunted today and our souls may verily seep right out and wisp up through the ceiling like so many ghosts depending on what goes down in the next 72 hours. On a practical level, many 7-Elevens did not carry all of these Halloween-themed special treats and I had to track them down across town(s) while traveling which took a minute. But it was worth it.

First up we’ve got “cocoa tiramisu” which was described as having “cream and mousse” and I’ll say this did deliver on all of those fronts. This treat only suffers from its own lack of imagination. It’s very good actually and tastes like any other 7-Eleven tiramisu, which is to say that it’s delicious. Not as intense as a fine tiramisu out in the big world, but very good and I love tiramisu personally and have met few I don’t like. This treat is Halloween-themed by being a) black and b) having this cute little cat on it but otherwise isn’t very special. Yummy but only lightly themed 8/10

This one I think was described as “cake with cheese and cream” and in Japan you never quite know what something with that description is going to be like. As it turns out, like the cocoa tiramisu this one was just plain ol’ cocoa cheesecake. Not much of a visual impact here, spookiness-wise. Flavor was on par with their normal chocolate cheesecake, a yummy cake like situation lacking the tanginess of a great cheesecake — and don’t get me wrong if you got this in an American gas station you’d die from shock at how good it was — but in the context of Japan’s exacting konbini standards, this was nothing special. Still good, she just isn’t that fun 6/10

This was one I spotted and then couldn’t find again and had to hunt down. Look at him, our perfect little skelly cake and his sweet little grin askew… this one is fun, we love to see it! Based on the description (again, these are often weird or misleading whether in english or Japanese) I did not expect to want to eat this. I thought it was going to be a jelly-like texture with maybe more black jellies inside and while I am an adventurous eater I am just not a jelly gal (obviously my sole toxic trait).

When I bit into this sweet skelly boy I was treated to such a surprise. He was a cake after all and not jelly-like in the least, rather various layers of mousse and milky cream, with a lot of delicious intense coffee flavor at his cute little molten core. Against all odds our little skull and bones rocketed up the charts to the all-time instant classics, which I’ll list in 10 years when I get through my other treat reviews. 11/10 skeleton husband

Another mysterious challenger approaches, this time one inscrutable to the Western mind, or to me at least. I didn’t know what this design meant before translating the text on the wrapper and apparently it’s a mummy! I have yet to make sense of this on a cultural level (please write in if you can) but it was still fun and different and the perfect little portion. This one is clearly a black cake, no mysteries there, but it truly added up to more than the sum of its parts. Delicious, chocolate mousse-y, perfectly sized with a nice thick, super sweet icing and yellow cake layers inside. Would enjoy this at a restaurant. Excellent and apparently a mummy 10/10

Tragically there were a few Halloween 7-Eleven special treats I saw once and wasn’t able to track down again, which adds another level of haunting. Shoutout to the “chocolate danish,” a pretzel-shaped bready thing, and the “chocolate omelet with whipped cream,” a kind of waffle taco that I regret not eating (though I’ve had the normal version and it’s a fave).

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hold onto those souls, everybody.