Woodsman's Stumps (Coconut Milk) Chocolate Snack

These stumps are another in Bourbon's line of nature-emulating sweets. A lot of Japanese snack reviewers love their line of cookies with chocolate, but I've never been particularly drawn to them. I think this is because they are the kind of treat which seems not to be able to make up its mind. Is it candy? Is it a cookie? Well, it's 50% each, so it doesn't pander to my cravings, which tend to be annoyingly specific.

In Japanese, these are called kikori no kirikabu which means "woodsman's stumps". On the package, you can see the woodsmen and his tasty-looking stumps. A pink bunny seems shocked by the turn of events in the wake of the woodmen's tree-icide. Won't somebody please think of the bunnies!


There are 11 little stumps in the 33 gram (about 1 oz.) package. Each cookie/candy thingy is about 2 cm. in diameter (.8 in.) and is half whole grain cookie and half coconut infused white chocolate. These smell better than most white chocolate because there's a hint of the scent of real coconut. There's a distinct lack of the overly sweet smell you usually experience with white chocolate.

I kept these in the refrigerator because it's been hot enough to melt chocolate into a pile of goo these days, so my sense of the texture is going to be different than that at room temperature. The chocolate was good and firm and the cookie a bit hard, but it wasn't hard to bite into. The cookie doesn't have much flavor at all, but that works pretty well with the coconut base which is relatively sweet. The coconut flavor is subtle but present. It's a very good balance. I think it's not overly strong because it's made with real coconut milk and coconut milk powder.

I loved these and would definitely get them again except for the fact that there is 185 calories in a relatively small portion. As it is, I'm eating 3 or 4 stumps at a time (at 16 calories a stump) to break it up into 3 servings. If you like coconut, these are really delicious and I highly recommend them. They're not easy to find though. I have only seen them at one shop, AM/PM convenience store. Still, they're worth tracking down.