Summer is here and the shelves are stocked with a new season of baffling and intriguing candy flavors. This week I picked up a couple different Kokage no Chocolat flavors, including Iced Lemon Tea. Not only are these filled with lemon-tea-flavored chocolate, they're also studded with bits of ceylon tea leaves. It's double the tea and double the weird!

When I bit into my first piece, I thought, "Tree. I'm eating a tree." The lemony center mixed with the herbalness of the ceylon gave the overwhelming impression of a mouthful of leaves. Eucalyptus, perhaps. My next thought was of Lemon Pledge and other fake-lemon scents, and I set the box aside for awhile. But when I came back to it, the sharpness of the flavors were gone and I enjoyed the herb-and-chocolate combination. I definitely couldn't down a whole box in one sitting, but I've been eating these periodically for the past couple days and will undoubtedly finish them off. Which is more than I can say for most of the candy I buy.

See the little penguin on the front of the package? He's saying this candy tastes good chilled. He's right, but it tastes better at summer room temperature, I think, because the milk chocolate on the outside gets a little bit soft and everything is all creamy and good.

Kokage no chocolat means "arbor chocolate." If you're like me, you'll look that up in your Japanese dictionary and still not be entirely sure what "arbor" means, so you'll look that up in your English dictionary and see it is "a shady garden alcove with sides and a roof formed by trees or climbing plants trained over a wooden framework." And that will make sense. This is the kind of candy you should eat on a blanket in the shade on a warm summer afternoon.