Bourbon Petit Strawberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

There are some words in the English language (and I'm sure other languages as well, but this is the one I speak fluently and know the best) which carry a particular connotation. This is something which I find rather regrettable as I think words that are not meant to be derogatory should be able to retain their neutrality and be seen as purely descriptive.

I'm not talkinga bout words like "bonehead", which is clearly meant as an insult, or even things like "stupid". The type of word I'm talking about is something like "fat". This word actually is an adjective, but it's also used as an insult because being fat is seen as such a crime against humanity in our current age. Of course, it's only derogatory when we're talking about humans. If we're talking about cats, it can just be considered incredibly cute and cuddly. At least I love big fat kitties.

While "fat" is seen as having a derogatory connotation, "petit" is seen as having a fairly positive one. In fact, unless we're talking about men, I'm pretty sure petit is always seen as being a good thing. For women, shopping in the petit section is seen as an achievement. Petit animals - the sort that yap and crap everywhere - are somehow seen as adorable no matter how inbred and lacking in brain power they seem to be.

When it comes to snacks, I'm not sure of the connotation and it's interesting to note that there's a line of "petit" snacks in Japan and the French have their "petit fours", but America has "super sizing" and "Big Gulps". If anyone knows a line of "petit" snacks in the U.S., I'd like to hear about it. Mostly, I'm seeing "giant" this and that. Though, to be fair, there are "Giant Pocky" in Japan. At any rate, I'm not so sure that "petit" branding would sell in the U.S. as it does in Japan as we seem to like our women tiny, but not our food. That's a rather odd contradiction as big food makes it harder to have petit people.

As is always the case with the "petit" brand, these are tiny little cookies. Each is about the diameter of a 5-yen coin or a nickel. That's a little bigger than your thumbnail if you're me. The calorie count is 16 each. That sounds pretty demure until you consider that you could easily put away half of the package in one sitting if you weren't being careful.

Each cookie is cripsy and has a shortbread-like texture. You get hit by a burst of bittersweet chocolate chips coupled with a light strawberry flavor. The strawberry elements works far, far better than I would have imagined because it is not overly acidic nor floral. It sits in the background adding depth without clashing with the chocolate chip titans.

The texture of this is amazingly satisfying and this was a far better little cookie than I could have guessed. In fact, I loved it and no one is more surprised than I am that that was the case. I expected this to be very "meh", but this is a definite strong "happy". At $1 (about 100 yen) per package, I would definitely buy these again.

Mister Ito American Soft Uji Matcha Chocolate Chip Cookies (product information)

Image lifted from Candysan's web site. And, no, they did not bribe me to link to them. They just had the biggest picture that I could rip off. 

I couldn't figure out why a brand being named "Mr. Ito" struck me as funny. After all, we have "Mrs. Fields" in the United States, and her cookies were pretty popular until she sold out and they started to be sucky mall fare. Also, just as "Mrs. Fields" and "Mr. Ito" are both real people using their real names, unlike, say "Mrs. Butterworth". So, what's the weirdness? Well, it's the combination of Asian and occidental (Note: I am prohibited from using "oriental" as a pairing with "occidental" because I'm home now and must be politically correct at all times, even if the Japanese use the word "oriental" themselves.) It's not "Ito-san", it's Mr. Ito.

The folks at Mr. Ito are nothing if not international, and that's what compelled me to highlight these cookies as a product. They were released in February 2012, so they're actually a bit long in the tooth. They caught my eye because of the strange irony of a cookie called "American Soft" being sold in a green tea flavor. Further research reveals that the target market for these is 20-50-year-old Japanese ladies. There's very little "American" about them, beyond the half-Westernized name of the company's founder and the chocolate chips.

Pasco Stick Melon Choco

I read the results of a study recently which said that putting calorie information on menus didn't have any impact on purchasing decisions. I think that's a big, fat lie. Personally, seeing calorie information actually encourages me to buy certain things. I've taken to inspecting the calorie counts on interesting looking breakfast foods, and anything which is a reasonable portion size and under 100 calories is likely to go into my basket.

These "stick melon choco" (chocolate chip "melon" bread) are 99 calories each, and the perfect size to have two for breakfast or one at tea time. There are 5 in the bag and it only cost 99 yen ($1.22) at Seiyu supermarket. I like melon pan when it's good, because the contrast between the crispy cookie exterior shell and soft, fluffy white-bread-like exterior can be sublime. The main problem is that store-bought melon pan usually is soft, but I was lured into buying this because there was something on the front that said I could make them crispy again by putting them in the toaster oven. I'm dumb like that.

It squishes easily when you cut it.

The flavor is heavily influenced by margarine and white flour. Despite the fact that there are a few chocolate chips and what looks like layers of chocolate, that component is very subdued. The sweetness is also on the light side except when you catch some of the granulated sugar sprinkled on the top on your tongue.

Even wrapped in foil for toaster oven heating, the bottom burned slightly around the edges. Without foil, it turned to a black crispy horror. The packaging should have warned me that I shouldn't put it directly in the oven, but instead just said, "use the toaster oven and it'll be crispy"! Thanks for nothing, Pasco! I charbroiled one in the oven to learn this lesson.

The texture varies widely depending on how it is prepared. Straight out of the bag, it's slightly doughy and a lot like standard white bread. Heated in the toaster oven in foil, the bottom gets a little crispy. Warmed in the microwave, it becomes doughier and quite soft. The flavor of the chocolate came out the best when heated in the microwave, but the texture was best when done in foil in the toaster oven.

There were fine, but I was disappointed that the chocolate aspect wasn't stronger. I liked them well enough, but perhaps not enough to have them again. Chances are that I will opt to sample something else rather than re-visit these. It's not that they're bad in any way, but rather that they're not special enough to become anything resembling a "favorite".

Country Ma'am Crispy Cookies

Country Ma'am brand cookies have been marketed for their crispy exterior and soft chewy interior since the brand's inception. This makes the appearance of these "crispy" variety rather curious. I guess that the company has run out of bizarre flavor ideas and decided that overcooking their basic chocolate chip cookie until it is super crispy was the new way to go.



My husband picked these cookies out at Seiyu supermarket for 178 yen ($1.95) . The portion of cookie is quite small. Each is about 4 cm (1.6 in.) in diameter and there are only 12 of them in the bag. Each cookie is 48 calories. For a plain chocolate chip cookie, as opposed to a chocolate chocolate chip version which was also available, these are very dark. That's the reason that I believe this is their same basic cookie just baked longer.

The cookies smell of coconut and mild cocoa. The flavor is also very strongly coconut-based and has a pretty good chocolate chip flavor on the first bite, but it seems to fade by the second or third bite. They're also on the sweeter side. The texture is, as expected, very crispy. This has none of the nice, soft chewy aspects of the mainstream Country Ma'am cookies. That isn't a bad thing though. They're quite tasty and satisfying.

I'm not a serious fan of cookies in general, but I found these quite likable. I think they'd make a nice tea time snack if you can limit yourself to a few tiny cookies. They also probably would do well dunked in milk or coffee. They are pretty crumbly, but most people can probably dunk and put a whole one in their mouths. If you find yourself craving a Chips Ahoy, these would make a nice higher quality substitute.

Country Ma'am Black Sugar Cookies

You never see molasses for sale in Japan. In fact, it's actually rather difficult to explain the concept of molasses to students. Gingerbread doesn't exist in Japanese culture (as far as I've seen). Commonly available Japanese brown sugar is also really light in color and weak in flavor, so you get the feeling the native's don't have a taste for strong molasses flavor.


These cookies are called "black sugar" cookies, but what they actually are are molasses chocolate chip cookies. The goop pictured on the front of the bag even looks like molasses, though the web site calls it something like "black sugar nectar". So, maybe Fujiya is trying to cultivate a taste for molasses, or just coming up with yet another flavor of Country Ma'am cookies.


There are five tiny cookies in the pack and it costs about 150 yen ($1.60). Each cookie is 3.5 cm (1.4 in.) in diameter (10.5 g./.34 oz.) and they're 48 calories per cookie.


Unsurprisingly, the cookies smell like dark brown sugar or weak molasses. The texture is perfect. They're crispy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. There are generous amounts of chocolate chips in them, so you can taste the chocolate very well and the sweetness level is about right. The flavor, however, is a matter of taste. My husband liked these, but I couldn't get on board with the combination of chocolate and molasses. To me, it was just not a good mix.

I think someone who likes chocolate chips in their gingerbread would love these and though I certainly wouldn't buy them again, I can't fault anything about the cookie. It's just a matter of my tastes.

Country Ma'am 5 Flavor Cookie Assortment

Back when I first moved to Japan, there was a "Fujiya" cake shop close to the train station nearest my apartment. The shop sold elaborate freshly made cakes for a pretty hefty price as well as packaged sweets. The shop featured a "life size" (about the size of a 6 year-old child) statue of the company's lip-licking mascot, Peko-chan. Fans of Peko-chan can join a fan club on Fujiya's web site and get their hands on a variety of junk bearing her likeness.

The Fujiya cake shop closed up some time ago, but I still run across their mass-produced sweets on occasion. They make a ubiquitous milk fondant filled chocolate with Peko-chan on the cover and Country Ma'am cookies. As I mentioned in a previous review, Country Ma'am are a soft, chewy cookie with a crispy exterior which are even better when microwaved.


This box of assorted cookies includes the usual cocoa chocolate chip and vanilla as well as three new flavors: cream cheese, strawberry, and "delicious chocolate". There are two of each kind of cookie in the box, but I'm only going to review the three new flavors since I already reviewed the vanilla and cocoa in the aforementioned review. Ten small cookies are sold for about 200 yen ($2.18). Since the big bag of cocoa and vanilla cookies alone is about 400 yen ($4.36) and contains 24 cookies, you're paying a slight premium for the new flavors.

From left: strawberry, cream cheese, delicious chocolate
(Click this image for a more detailed, larger one.)

All of the cookies have the same basic texture. The outside is crispy and the inside is moist and chewy. The strawberry one seems a little strange though since it seems like pinkish dough was applied to the outside of a vanilla cookie. The interior is not pink.

• strawberry: This smells pleasantly of real strawberries. The taste is slightly tart, with a nice real strawberry flavor and it is mildly sweet. There was exactly one white chocolate chip on the edge of this.
• cream cheese: This one smelled very faintly of cream cheese and had a nice tangy cream cheese flavor. Like the strawberry, there was exactly one white chocolate chip stuck in the top.
• delicious chocolate: They smelled nicely chocolatey and the taste as compared to the regular "cocoa" flavor was of deeper chocolate. I'd say it was marginally better than the cocoa version. There also appeared to be a few tiny fragments of nuts in this, but you can't taste them because they're too small. The ingredients list for this cookie mentioned almond paste, but I couldn't detect any of it in the taste.

The packaging is rather misleading and I think that it has been digitally constructed to make you think that all of the cookies are full of chocolate chips. The cream cheese and strawberry seem like they were made by having a machine drop just one chip on the corner as that was all that was in each of them. I get the feeling that that chip is simply there to add the slightest bit of credibility to the "choco chip" claim written on the packages. That being said, I don't think the cookies suffer at all for their lack of chips. They probably would be too sweet with more of them.

These were all nice cookies with good flavor and excellent texture, but they carry the tiniest hint of an artificial flavor which I connect with the preservatives or the packaging. The texture is unique among the various cookies you can buy in Japan and is about as close to homemade that you can get from packaged cookies. That is not to say they are anywhere near as good as a home-baked chewy cookie, but they're nice in a pinch.

Black Thunder Cocoa Cookie Crunch

"Black Thunder" sounds like the name of a hyper-caffeinated beverage, or possibly an adult film star of African descent with a premature ejaculation issue. It doesn't sound like the name of a relatively unassuming but tasty little candy bar which can be had for a bargain price of 27 yen (25 cents).


This bar, which is similar in shape, size and appearance to the Yuraku Almond Caramel Latte bar and made by the same company has such a dumb name that I have skipped buying one for quite some time. I was worried that there was going to be some jolting, harsh flavor included to represent the "pow" of the "thunder". Now that I've sampled it, I know why it's called "Black Thunder", though it certainly isn't a name we'd choose in English. The "black" part comes from dark bits of bittersweet chocolate cookie. The "thunder" part comes from the crunchiness of the bar which you can "hear" in your ears as you chew.


The bar smells very weakly of cocoa. The chocolate is soft and a little waxy, but not unpleasant. The cookie bits inside are crunchy and the chocolate chips so lacking in distinct taste that they can't really be separated from the coating. Despite the fact that this doesn't sound great from what I've written, this is an enjoyable bar. In fact, the first bite immediately reminded me of chocolate-covered Oreo cookies from back home. This is perhaps just a little less sweet, but it's definitely a close approximation.

Once again, Yuraku has surprised me. This is another smallish (about 3 inches long by 1.5 inches wide) bar from that company which provides satisfaction in a compact package for around 100 calories and a very small price. If you miss chocolate covered Oreos from back home, or just like crispy chocolate-covered cookies, you'll want to sample this.

Country Ma'am Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Translations are a tricky thing. Take the word "kaboucha", for instance. In Japanese, it means pumpkin. In English, the concept of a pumpkin is usually that of a big, round orange thing which you scoop the guts out of and carve weird faces in or make a pie from. In Japan, it's a small green thing that tastes like squash and you use it in stews or eat it as a vegetable side dish. It doesn't taste the same as an American pumpkin, yet it is nearly as versatile. Mainly, it just has a more potent hit of squash taste which tends to shine through more strongly when you use it in things like cookies and cakes.


If you buy any sweets with pumpkin included, you have to learn to expect that squash flavor. You also have to forget about any notion of spices being added to cut through the vegetable nature. There will be no cinnamon, nutmeg or ginger included.

There 16 individually wrapped cookies in the bag. Each cookie is 50 calories and quite small at 4 cm in diameter (1.6 in.). They are made with "pumpkin paste" and pumpkin-flavored chocolate chips. All of the chips are yellow to reflect this fact.


Country Ma'am cookies have a signature texture combination which you will find in every single cookie produced under that brand name. They are crunchy on the outside and moist and tender on the inside. It's a very gratifying cookie on that front and lends itself to being heated in the microwave. There are instructions on the side of the bag advising you how long to heat them in the microwave or toaster oven.

These smell very faintly of squash and mostly just smell like a basic cookie. They are quite sweet, but not over the top. The balance of sugar with the vegetable taste of the pumpkin is well-matched. The chips are much sweeter than the cookie itself.

These are enjoyable, but a bit of an acquired taste. I think they slightly challenge the palate and that they won't be as tasty to people who have no experience with similar foods. Surprisingly, my husband liked these even though he doesn't like kaboucha (Japanese pumpkin). I wouldn't buy these again, but we'll finish the bag and I certainly don't regret having had a chance to sample them.

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.

Yuraku Caramel Almond Latte Chocolate Bar

When I saw this bar, I thought that someone was trying way too hard to throw the candy equivalent of the kitchen sink into one itty bitty bar. There are so many parts to the name of the bar that they can't simply write it across the package. They have to stack "caramel" on top of "amond" which is on top of "choco bar" and "latte". There's even more that doesn't fit into the name. There are also wheat puffs in it.


This is another of the candy options available in some stores for only 27 yen (25 cents) that you can pick up with kid's snacks. It's a little less than half the size of most bars and is made by a company named Yuraku (ユラク). It makes a variety of sweets including cookies, candy bars, chocolates and souvenir sweets. Most of its products are pretty low rent and either blandly or badly packaged. The company's "principle" is "contributing to society through making candy." That's some lofty goal. I wonder if one tiny little bar is going to live up to that.


The bar's smell is so mixed that it's hard to pin it down. The scent is like an elixir of malt, cereal, coffee, and chocolate. The "cereal" smell comes from the wheat puffs which are present in abundance. The large white bits in the detailed picture above are these puffs and the first bite of the bar strongly reveals the cereal flavor. In fact, the puffs portion tastes exactly like the Popeye wheat puff cereal my parents used to buy for me when I was a kid. Subsequent bites bring about a stronger sense of all of the flavors. All of them, the caramel, coffee, chocolate, almonds and wheat puffs are present in an extremely tasty mishmash of flavors. The bar is crunchy, but easy to bite into and chew.

The ingredients list for this bar is huge, but the whole bar contains a good balance of sweetness and complex flavors. It's no premium bar by any stretch of the imagination, but it's very good, particularly for 90 calories and for such a low price. It's definitely something I'd have again. The lesson learned from this experience is not to conclude that something is going to be bad because it's cheap and from a company which isn't very well known. This is a tasty little bar.

Chocochip Cookies — Country Ma'am vs TopValu

There's an intriguing web site called "Second Rate Snacks" which places big brand name snacks head-to-head with knock-offs. This is a concept which is especially useful in America where knock-offs are plentiful. In Japan, there aren't quite so many of these though there are a few, particularly of things like Pocky and Pretz.

While it may seem like I'm ripping off someone's cool concept, the incentive for this post actually came from my husband who saw both of these bags of similar cookies and thought it would be interesting to see if there was a qualitative difference. I can guarantee that this sort of comparison won't be happening very often. It's too much work and more junk food than I want to have around. My hat goes off to the folks at Second Rate Snacks who manage to do this regularly (and do it so well).

The way in which both of these packages are designed clearly shows that TopValu, maker of cut-rate food and goods all over Japan and Asia, was attempting to copy Country Ma'am. Country Ma'am, which is a brand offered by mega confectioner Fujiya, has been around for quite awhile and sells a variety of versions of it's semi-soft cookies. They're supposed to be especially good if you pop them in the microwave to make them softer.



The TopValu brand is about 150 yen ($1.50 USD) cheaper than Country Ma'am and contains 2 more cookies in the bag. All of the cookies come in individually wrapped packets. This is the sort of excessive packaging that Japan excels at and is often criticized for, though it does make it easy to keep the cookies around for a long time once the main package has been opened.

Country Ma'am on top, TopValu on the bottom

The cookies in both brands are the same weight, 10.5 grams (.37 oz.), but the TopValu cookies are smaller. It's difficult to tell from the picture, but they are also duller, paler and drier looking. They all carry essentially the same calorie counts at 50 calories per tiny cookie.

Country Ma'am chocolate, TopValu chocolate, Country Ma'am vanilla, TopValu vanilla (click to see a much bigger version)

If you look at the cookies when they are cut open, you can see that there is more moisture in the center of the Country Ma'am cookies. Both bags have the same claims on the front of their packages. They say their cookies are crispy on the outside and moist inside, but Country Ma'am clearly lives up to this claim much better than TopValu.

The proof is in the taste and texture, however, so here is what I thought:

• Chocolate TopValu: Crumbly outside and slightly chewy inside with a nice chocolate flavor
• Chocolate Country Ma'am: Crunchy outside, softer interior with a nice texture, good chocolate flavor which is richer and deeper than the TopValu chocolate cookie
• Vanilla TopValu: Crumbly outside, slightly chewy interior, bittersweet chips with a much heavier note of bitter than usual for this kind of cookie
• Vanilla Country Ma'am: Crunchy outside, soft interior, a bit of a pleasant cookie dough flavor inside, nice milk chocolate chips
  

Country Ma'am is, unsurprisingly, a better cookie. In particular, the vanilla cookies are far better than the TopValu vanilla ones which border on unpleasant with the heavy bitter aftertaste of the chips in their cookies. The main difference between the chocolate ones is in texture. TopValu's cookies are so dry on the outside that they nearly crumble into a powder in your mouth. Country Ma'am's crispy exterior is more like a crispy shell which cleaves cleanly. The TopValu cookies fail rather badly if you plan to microwave them a bit to warm them up. At that point, the dryness of the cookies becomes a serious liability whereas Country Ma'am holds up well.

A look at the ingredients list reveals that both cookies use similar components, but sugar is higher on the list on the Country Ma'am cookies. Since sugar adds moisture, crispness and softness to baked goods, this suits the differences between the texture of the Country Ma'am cookies and TopValu.

I consume Country Ma'am cookies very infrequently because I'm much more inclined to bake my own if I'm in a cookie mood. However, if I were inclined to pick up some chocolate chip cookies or have a bag to share with others, I'd pay the extra money, take a few fewer cookies, and go for the Country Ma'am cookies over the TopValu ones.