Meiji Meiji Takenoko no Sato Chocolate

I'll be real, I mainly got these on a trip to my local Japanese market because they were on sale. I'm an economical wolf. And I had to look up what these were at first to make sure they weren't some weird flavor! But nope, just biscuit and chocolate here. There was also a variant that looked like mushrooms, but who really sees mushrooms out in the forest and thinks that they want chocolate on them? So I went with these horn-tip-whatever things dipped in chocolate. The name though, actually has something to do with bamboo shoots, which we definitely don't have here in the California wilderness.

I want to mention first how cute all this packaging is! On top there's the monkey showing what the biscuit cross-section looks like, saving me the trouble of biting it halfway to find out myself (because really, who wants to do that?). And on the bottom, there's this lovely design on the inner bag with trees, mountains, houses. Maybe I should decorate my den this way? I certainly love the use of this color palette here. All the green tricked me at first making me think these might be green tea flavored but nope! Still some of the best art I've seen on a package.

Onto the actual biscuit, because the smell is sending my tail into overdrive like a windshield wiper on high. The chocolate smell from these is absolutely intoxicating! It smells like melted semisweet chocolate when you're getting ready to dip it in stuff, mmm. If that's what this is, I'll be set. The biscuit also looks nice and crispy, and has a perfectly flat bottom so you can stand it up. There are also flakes on the chocolate layer - likely these are biscuit crumbs but if it's salt this is going to be a killer treat.

And killer treat it is! It's way softer than meets the eye after you get through the initial crispy layer. The chocolate in particular just dissolves in my mouth, and it does taste semisweet as I predicted which I love - I feel like if you mask the chocolate with too much sweetness it begins to lose the pure essence of the chocolate flavor but you get plenty of it here.

I'm also really impressed how well the two components blend together, I've made shortbread with chocolate before and it's a similar taste to that. The flaky buttery biscuit combines with the soft rich chocolate giving truly a treat that hits all the marks. I like in particular how there's a section at the top that's just chocolate and you can bite that off first, it feels satisfying to me. No idea what it is. If any complaints I'd say that it feels dry after a while, but that's nothing that some milk or water or tea alongside won't fix. Great work Meiji, I'm really impressed! Maybe impressed enough to try those mushroom things now.

Rating: 9 - Arooooo!