Country Ma'am Sweet Potato Chocolate Chip Mini Cookies

Sometimes it amazes me how the weight of the packaging can weigh as much as the actual product contained within it. These Country Ma'am cookies are a good example of that sort of thing happening. There are five tiny individually wrapped cookies inside of an over-sized plastic package. The cookies are a little less than 4 cm (about 1.5 inches) in diameter. If I could compare the volume of plastic to the volume of cookie, I'm guessing the plastic would win by a nose.


These cookies are a limited edition and classified as a "premium" variety. They cost 158 yen ($1.71) which is very pricey for so few cookies. My guess is that they will vanish by the end of spring as sweet potato treats are largely confined to winter consumption. However, Fujiya doesn't mention when they will be withdrawn on their web site. The packaging, which is not represented very well in my photos, is purple and resembles the flesh of a sweet potato.


Each cookie has the trademark textural elements of the Country Ma'am brand. They have a crispy external shell and a moist, chewy interior. The cookies are so tiny though that you don't get much of a sense of their chewiness. They smell like a regular chocolate chip cookie with only the faintest hint of sweet potato.


The taste hits you in two waves. First, you get a general chocolate chip cookie flavor, but a wave of super strong sweet potato flavor washes over you after it. I love sweet potato, but this was way too much even for me. It's insanely concentrated and overbearing. It's as if you're eating powdered sweet potato in the cookie. The ingredients do include "sweet potato paste", so there may indeed be some sort of heavily processed and concentrated sweet potato. The chocolate chip flavor is bold and bordering on bittersweet. It does nothing to enhance the taste and is a poor match of flavors. White chocolate chips would have been better.

I'm surprised at how unlikeable this cookie is. I expected to enjoy it and ended up finding it unpleasant due to the strength of the sweet potato. It borders on tasting like what a near rotting sweet potato might taste, and I certainly wouldn't buy these again.