These came about from one drive home from work when I was thinking about innovative or new dessert ideas. One that came to mind was the idea of lollipops, thanks to a song of the same name by Koda Kumi. A lollipop-up dessert concept, where I would serve different flavored treats on sticks. Back when I was in college, I used to make fully edible cake-pops, using pretzel sticks as the stick. However, I am not in college, and I can step it up and do something better than that. So I opted to create my own edible cookie sticks, inspired by pocky.

The idea to use nama chocolate came from the fact that I used to make it all the time. I love nama chocolate. It is soft, tender, and velvety, so offsetting that with a crunchy, buttery biscuit-type of pastry and a crunchy chocolate coating, it made sense. It would be a simple baseline concept, since I could then take this recipe and really flavor it however I would want down the line.

There are three components to a nama-choco pop. They are the nama chocolate disks, the chocolate-biscuit sticks that go into the disks, and the dark chocolate coating that covers a good 60% of the entire thing; you’d leave 40% of the stick uncovered, just so that eating it would not be a complete mess. It basically is what would happen if nama chocolate, a lollipop, and pocky had a baby. They’re not terribly hard to make, and they’re super addictive!

For the pastry:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup granulated sugar
a pinch of salt
1 egg

Whip together ingredients and transfer to a piping bag. Pipe out sticks that are about 2 1/2 inches long, 1/2 inch wide onto a nonstick baking surface. Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes. Cool completely.

For the nama chocolate:
1 cup dark chocolate chips
a pinch of salt
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt together ingredients. Transfer to a piping bag. Either pipe into 1 1/2 inch in diameter circles, or pipe into ring molds, making sure that the circles are at least 1/4 inch thick (yes, there’s a lot of geometry in this recipe), and then freeze them for 1 hour.

For the coating:
1 cup dark chocolate chips

Temper the chocolate. Keep lukewarm for assembly.

Assembly:
Stab the sticks into the disks, and re-freeze for another hour. Dip into the chocolate and let them sit on a nonstick surface overnight in the freezer to set. Serve right away when you remove them from the freezer.