Psyduck’s donut debut sort of breaks your brain to look at, but how does it taste?

“Thank God it’s Wednesday!” isn’t a phrase you hear very often, but it’s definitely how we felt this week. Every fall, Japanese donut chain Mister Donut teams up with the Pokémon franchise for a line of Poké-donuts. We’ve had this year’s batch on our to-eat list ever sine they were announced way back in August, and the wait is finally over, as the three new sweets all went on sale November 8.

Pikachu Donuts are always part of the lineup, but last year’s Jigglypuff donut has been replaced by another Pokémon species, as Psyduck makes its donut debut, and rounding out this year’s trio is a Poké Ball donut.

With the Pikachu and Psyduck donuts priced at 302 yen (US$2) and the Poké Ball at just 237, they’re affordable enough that we didn’t even consider not grabbing all three, and they came packaged in a special box decorated with Pokémon artwork that ties in with the “zone out and take a little break” theme of this year’s Pokémon/Mister Donut collaboration.

We started our taste test with the face of the franchise. The Pikachu Donut looks the same as it does every year, but Mister Donut periodically tinkers with the ingredient list. This year’s version has a chocolate cream filling and caramel custard-flavored chocolate coating.

Now, when consuming adorable-looking character sweets, there are two ways to deal with the “But it’s too cute to eat!” dilemma. You can either daintily nibble on it, bit by bit, so that it retains its shape for as long as possible, or you can do what we did for this taste test…

…and just break it in half so you can start moving past the guilt ASAP. It’s hard to feel bad, anyway, when the Pikachu Donut tastes so good. It’s sweet, but not overpoweringly so, which tends to be the target Mister Donut usually shoots for with its sweets. The caramel notes of the coating blend nicely with the chocolatey cream, we felt, and the chocolate eyes were especially tasty.

▼ Yeah, it sounds heartless to say “We could have happily eaten a few more Pikachu eyes,” but that’s the knowledge we now possess.

Next up, the Poké Ball donut.

Officially, it’s called the Poké Ball Ring, which sounds a little contradictory geometry-wise. There’s a similar duality to the flavor, with half of the donut coated in white chocolate and the other in strawberry chocolate, with strawberry sugar that’s both sweet and tart sprinkled atop the crimson half. With a hole in the middle, this Poké Ball isn’t going to be able to trap any Pocket Monsters, but it was very satisfying to eat.

And last, it was time for the Psyduck Donut!

OK, this one might not look like Psuduck at first, or even a donut, if your definition of the sweet is that it has to be ring-shaped or round. Rest assured, though, that this is Psyduck, just shown in side-profile, not a straight-on perspective like the Pikachu Donut.

We can kind of see why Mister Donut went with this design. With its duck-like bill, Psyduck’s face is much more contoured than Pikachu’s. Rendering Psyduck’s beak in dough that protrudes out/up from the donut would have been hard to bake and hard to eat, but trying to represent it in a straight-on angle with something like a flat slab of chocolate probably would have failed to show how prominent the bill is supposed to be.

After a few moments, we were able to start seeing the edge of the donut as Psyduck’s bill seen from the side, just like Mister Donut intends . We could understand, though, if trying to wrap their head around the perspective were to give someone a Psyduck-sized headache.

However, once we bit into Psyduck, the mental gymnastics quickly came to a close as our brain simply said “Yep, this tastes really good!” Like with the Pikachu Donut, there’s a custard chocolate coating, but the cream filling is vanilla instead of chocolate.

For all the visual weirdness, it’s a pretty sophisticated sweetness, just the sort of thing to pair with a cup of coffee as you set a good example for Psyduck by taking some time to kick back and destress.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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