Kameda Seika Happy Turn Maple Sembei

My husband and I brought back select souvenirs from Japan and had to be extra cautious about large items. One of the big things we brought back was a Happy Turn tin. He won it in a crane game (aka UFO Catcher) and I had a good association both with how it was acquired and with the product inside - the "Happy Turn" (sometimes called "Happy Tan" sembei. We keep the tin in the kitchen and I store my snacks in it. It's a nice way of keeping the multiple open bags and food waiting to be reviewed in an appropriate place.

"Happy Turn" is a very popular brand in Japan and most people know it and enjoy it. If you want to understand just how popular, you need only consider that there is a stamp made with its mascot's image. A real postage stamp. Yes. I haven't seen a Dorito's stamp in the U.S. - but then I haven't been looking either.

The brand's signature is a unique combination of sweet and salty with a heavy emphasis on vinegar. When I saw this maple variety at Marukai market for about $2.60 (around 270 yen), I jumped at the chance to sample it. I only had a few second thoughts when it came time to open the bag. Since vinegar is a large part of the Happy Turn experience, I suddenly realized that maple may not be the best choice. After all, few are the times when I've mixed vinegar with maple syrup and poured it on my pancakes or chugged it down as an elixir.

There aren't many flavor variations on Happy Turn, oddly. Besides the regular variety, there is cheese, this maple flavor, and, very strangely, a chocolate-covered version that is being sold as part of a variety pack. I would pick up said pack if I saw it, but mainly because I'd get to try the cheese version. The chocolate sounds pretty out there, but you just never know. Vinegar is nearly a cure-all and can mix with some pretty interesting flavors... but I'll hold off on the Hershey's syrup and rice vinegar, too.

With some apprehension, I gave it a taste, and it did taste weird at first. There is a definite maple flavor followed by vinegary sharpness. After I had it, I thought that was strange, but then I wanted another, and another, and another. It's strange how it was so enticing even when it seemed like such an odd flavor pairing. Somehow, it worked for me with the sweet, salt, and sour flavors mixing in. Of course, the light crispy cracker was adding something very "more-ish" to the textural delights.

I can't say that this is for everyone, but I liked it. It wouldn't be my first choice of Happy Turn, but it very much won't be hard to finish the bag. I can't say I'd kill to get more, but, if it was on sale, I'd certainly pick up some more for future consumption. At only 20 calories per cracker, it's also not the most calorically dense treat and the flavor is strong enough to satisfy after about 5 or so of them. My only issue with them is that, while they are all individually wrapped, they're done with a twist wrapper. Chances are they'll go stale fast if the bag isn't kept tightly closed or they aren't eaten pretty fast. That's a small complaint, and I can say that Happy Turn deserves the "happy" rating.

The "Happy Turn" download page currently features some adorable illustrations of the king and his castle. You can get it here for the time being.

Glico Baton D'or

"Baton d'or" means "golden stick" in French. Naming any product in French instantly improves its cache. Instead of being a repackaged Pocky stick, with it's snappy name and Japanese pop cultural tones, it's a sophisticated pastry. The package designs make me think about diet foods with their attempts to emulate a slender, curvy feminine figure, but that is not what is on the minds of the folks at Glico. The thing that makes this stick "golden" is butter, lots and lots of butter. With that fact, it seems unlikely that this will do much to trim the waistline.

This brand has actually been around since around the middle of last year, but is being beefed up with new flavors and stripped of its chocolate coating. The pedestrian flavors (milk, white, strawberry, green tea, coffee) above are being supplanted at a grand release at Hankyu department store with butter sugar, cinnamon sugar, maple sugar, strawberry sugar, and green tea sugar. Though it may seem that sugar is the big deal with these high class pretzel sticks, the real selling point is that they are dipped in clarified butter after they're baked (and then dipped in sugar). If I were still in Japan, I would totally want to buy one of these, especially the cinnamon one since cinnamon snacks are relatively rare there, but Hankyu department store is in Osaka and that's a long way to go for a designer pretzel. It would take a magic stick made of real gold to get me to fork over the price of a Shinkansen ticket (over $100).

These will be available from June 12, 2013. I'm guessing that distribution will expand beyond Osaka eventually, but that information isn't clearly provided at this time.

Random Picture 57

My husband and I were taking a walk around Ogikubo and happened across what seems to be the viral spread of Don Quixote shops. We walked around the mob forming around a huge box of cheap Chinese flashlights and past the 18-roll toilet paper (post-quake behavior) that people were eying nervously and headed back to the snacks area. It was there that I eyeballed this specimen, but didn't have the ovaries (that's what we say when one is female and lacks cajones, right?) to buy and sample. This is a bag of a salted snack treat called "ika meets maple". Ika is squid. Yes, there is many a day when I think that I'd like to buy a serving of squid and pour maple syrup on it. Even for the Japanese, this is pretty "out there" on the flavor front.

Tirol Hot Cake Butter & Maple Premium

For those who aren't familiar with Tirol (or haven't been paying attention to my prattle about them), there are two types of them on offer in Japan. One is a small version sold in variety packs with 9 candies usually in 3 or 4 flavors for around 100 yen ($1.20) per bag. The other is a slightly larger version (about 1" square) sold as a "premium" version for 20 yen (24 cents). The small type is about 2/3 the size of premium version.

The reason this distinction is of value is that the smaller ones are made with less sophistication and care than the larger ones, and this "hot cake" version was first released some time ago as part of variety pack. I didn't review the non-premium version because I refused to buy 6 candies I didn't want to sample 3 that I did want. However, Ebidebby at Snack Love reviewed it. The basic structure is the same, but the premium one has more sauce and the sauce is separated from the crispy biscuit. It is protected from getting soft from contact with the sauce by a layer of white chocolate. It's these little touches and a marginally larger size only that separate "premium" from regular.

I found this at at NewDays convenience store for the aforementioned price of 20 yen, but they are available at most convenience stores. This little morsel is only 51 calories, which will give you about 2 bites. Once you open the wrapper, you smell sweet, sweet maple syrup. The white chocolate outer portion is super soft and it nearly melts on your fingers at room temperature. The interior is a nice crispy cookie. It tastes like super sweet white chocolate with only the barest hint of maple. Mainly, it is dominated by a powdered sugar flavor. I didn't detect any "hot cake" or pancake flavor at all. I think the bland little biscuit in the center is supposed to be a surrogate for the hot cake, but it's not a very capable replacement.

This was rather a great disappointment because it's just pretty much a throat-burning sugar bomb with very little flavor. If it hadn't been so small, I probably wouldn't have finished it. To be fair, I'm not a great fan of white chocolate, so I reacted more unfavorably to this than others might. If you can find it cheap and adore white chocolate, it still may be worth a try, but if you have to acquire it expensively via an importer or hate super sweet candy, give it a miss.

Otsuka Calorie Mate Maple

Click on this picture to see a bigger one that will allow you to read all of the ingredients clearly.

Calorie Mate is one of those things which nearly everyone who has been in Japan is aware of, and thanks to a video game appearance even those who are not in Japan may have heard of it. I'm not so sure that everyone who has seen it has tried it. I know that I had no inclination to sample it until I started this blog.

I've never been 100% sure of what the point of Calorie Mate is supposed to be, but I've always guessed that it is meant to balance people's bad eating habits by offering them a couple little fortified blocks. One of the reasons I never saw the appeal was that they aren't low calorie as a snack at 100 calories per cookie, and I eat fairly decently anyway and don't feel the need to eat this type of thing to balance my life nutritionally.

The Calorie Mate web site emphasizes nutritional balance and even provides a chart of the number of calories, amount of protein, fat, vitamins, etc. that an adult needs to maintain weight and health. For the record, the calorie count that Japanese men require according to the site is 2,650 and women need 2,050. I believe that the bars are supposed to be considered possible meal replacements if you are trying to cut calories in addition to being used as supplements if you feel you need more nutrients.

Calorie Mate is often sold in convenience stores and drug stores in Japan for around 150 yen ($1.67). I got mine from a huge display of health food cookies and bars at Tomod's drug store. Most of the other items were variations on granola bars and whole grain cookies.


There are quite a few flavors of Calorie Mate available including fruit, cheese, chocolate, and this maple version. I chose maple because I wanted to buy a variety that my husband would be willing to try. Each cookie is 7 cm x 4.25 cm x 2 cm (2.8 in. x 1.7 in. x .8 in.) and there are 4 of them in the box. They smell strongly of maple and, well, general cookie smell. The cookies are very dry and crumbly and have a decent, though rather artificial, maple flavor. They're like a poor quality shortbread cookie. Occasionally, there are fragments of what appear to be nuts in the cookie which isn't surprising since almonds are one of the ingredients.

For what they are, these are pretty good. I wouldn't be doing cartwheels over them or selecting to have one rather than a real cookie or an authentic treat. That being said, if you want to have something cookie-like which is healthier or at least less unhealthy, these are enjoyable both in texture and in taste.

Note that there are a lot of Calorie Mate commercials on YouTube featuring Kiefer Sutherland. Since "24" is so popular in Japan, they love to show him in his headset being frantic about something or other and then having some Calorie Mate product. Here's one commercial:

Maple KitKat Mini

Back when I was working at a Japanese office, one of my coworkers was an amiable, but rather goofy, American fellow named Scott. Scott used to make up weird hobbies and interests when students asked him questions because he got bored giving the same answers. Among the things he said was that he was interested in dancing (and he'd vary the type of dance, but it was ballet for awhile), ska music, and Harvey Keitel. Of course, anyone who knows who Harvey Keitel is knows that no one could possibly be interested in Harvey Keitel, but cultural differences allowed Scott to pull off this type of transparent lying.


I'm not a fan of lying to people for the sake of amusing myself. In fact, I'm not a fan of lying in general. Scott and I did have two things in common though. Both of us are writers and enjoy writing for its own sake, though Scott was a fiction writer and I'm strictly non-fiction. He wrote a short story called "The Man With the Golden Penis" (I kid you not), and I write about things like why Japanese service is polite and professional, but sometimes robotic in nature.

The other thing that Scott and I had/have in common is that neither of us likes pure maple syrup. In one of those discussions that can only occur when you're sitting at work bored but trapped at your desk, we talked about how we both preferred pancake syrup to 100% maple syrup because we didn't care for the strength of the hard stuff. Of course, this makes us heretics. It also reflects the fact that I don't like really strong maple flavor in candies, cakes, etc. I'm not sure if it's very flattering to share this taste sensitivity with a man who writes stories about men with golden ding-dongs, but it is a fact nonetheless.


My husband and I came across these maple mini KitKats at Okashi no Machioka discount candy shop. He snapped them up immediately for 280 yen ($3.10) as he is an enormous fan of maple. There is an unlucky number of little bars in the bag, thirteen. Each small pair of fingers is 69 calories and would probably make about 1.25 regular fingers if laid end-to-end. The bag mentions that the maple sugar used in these is derived from syrup from Quebec, Canada. Of course, it fails to mention what percentage of the bars is composed of this fine quality product.

I had very low expectations of these because of my aversion to maple syrup, but ended up surprised. These smell lightly and pleasantly of maple. The taste is super sweet white chocolate with very weak maple notes that tend to be revealed more with subsequent bites. My husband found these wanting on the maple taste front, but I found them just right for me. I'm not sure why the super sweet white chocolate base didn't hit me as overwhelming this time as it so often does, but I liked them enough to have a second mini the next day.

I can recommend this provisionally. I think serious maple syrup fans are going to be disappointed, as my husband was, and those who really dislike very sweet white chocolate will want to give them a pass. Those who, like me, find a little maple flavor appealing may find them much more enjoyable. That being said, I had my mini bar with a cup of tea the first time and a cup of coffee the second time so I'd also recommend a good palate cleanser between bites.

Lotte Maple Custard Cake

Based on the choices I make for review, one might assume that Japan has little or no equivalent to Hostess cakes or Little Debbie. While it is certainly the case that there aren't nearly as many preserved cake options in Japan as there are in the U.S., there are often boxes of individually wrapped cakes with cream centers and various styles of icing on offer.

The reason I rarely review them (with a few exceptions including the Morinaga Kyorochan milk cake and Borden condensed milk cakes) is that I don't want to buy a box of six of them and find out I don't like them. Most of them cost around 270 yen ($2.97) and the cakes are small and fatty. Since I review so much junk, I decided awhile ago not to buy any of those big boxes of cakes and that I'd only review them if I could get them as individual portions. Enter this orphaned Lotte Maple Custard cake which I found at AM/PM for 60 yen (66 cents).


The cake smells like maple and has a distinctive cake smell which you encounter with all Japanese cakes of this type. The cake itself tastes like margarine and has a slightly oily texture and leaves a film on your fingers. I'll note that any type of cake like this which is not covered with icing or coating is like this in Japan. It's oddly dry and oily at the same time.

The filling is nicely sweet and has both a maple and caramel flavor. There isn't much of the custard filling and it can't really be tasted as much more than a sweet fatty feeling on the tongue. The maple notes are much more powerful than any custard notes.

This is not a bad cake really. I split it with my husband so that I wouldn't be eating all 116 calories by myself. Both of us thought it was pretty good, but also that we wouldn't buy it again because the cake itself just wasn't doing much for us. Note that this cake is a limited edition for winter. If you're interested in it despite my less than glowing endorsement, you'll have to get it before the cherry blossoms start blooming.

Hungry's Maple Caramel Chewing Candy

Sometimes I run across something which makes me very curious about exactly what it is. This item appealed to me on two fronts. First of all, what the heck is "chewing candy"? Second, it has a weird name. Why would anyone name this "Hungry's"? One of these questions could be answered by making the purchase and sampling the product. The other will remain a relative mystery.

This is made by mega-food maker Meiji, but it appears to be a separate division which handles gum, hard candies, caramels, and small children's toys that are sold in the candy section of Japanese markets (among other things). The fact that Meiji is so huge that they separate out their candy and gum section from the chocolates and other products is a good indication of how huge they are.


I found this candy at a discount snack shop. This was the first time I had ever encountered it. It's smallish, about 10 cm long (about 4 in.) and 2 cm wide (.8 in.) and only cost 28 yen (about a quarter). I noticed that the package doesn't really give you a good idea of what the candy is going to look like. You can see an illustration of a portion of it hidden behind the logo on the right. When you see the candy, you can see why they are trying to draw more attention to the maple syrup aspect on the left. It's not a pretty sight.

I didn't take a picture of a cross section of this because it looks the same inside as the end you can see in the picture above. You can see that little bits of something are studded in the "log" of stuff this is made of. The ingredients include almonds, hazelnuts, pineapple, and mango. I'm guessing that these little specs are a mixture of those things.

This smells vaguely sweet with a whisper of maple. It's quite tacky to the touch so it's best to eat it from the wrapper. When I took my picture, I put it on a tissue and it stuck to it (but I was able to pry it off). The texture, smell and general sense of this is like a softer Bit-O-Honey bar. If you've never had that, the texture of this is like a nougat crossed with taffy. It's easy to bite into and chew. It neither goes down like a caramel because it doesn't tend to have that slick, melting away feel nor like a Hi-Chew because it lacks that latex-like chewing gum feel. The flavor doesn't really carry much of the fruit bits or nuts. It has a nice maple flavor. It's sweet, but not throat burning or overbearing. Since maple sugar is the first ingredient, this is not surprising.

As for the name, I believe it is supposed to imply that you can eat this when you're hungry. The fruit and nuts bits are supposed to make this a more fortifying experience. I don't know if that is actually true, I only know that I liked it and would definitely buy it again. For 28 yen, it's a steal.

Maple Monimo Chocolate Wafer

I love small portions for sweets, and I definitely live in the right country for buying things in small quantities. One of the reasons I review so much Tirol chocolate is that it is sold in roughly one inch (30 mm) square blocks that are individually wrapped and sold for a small price. This means two bites, a few calories, and no temptation to overindulge. By and large though, Tirol has been the only manufacturer to regularly offer such small morsels for individual sale.

Because I like a company that offers its products in a fashion which saves me from myself, I was happy to come across Monimo brand squares which appear to be a knock-off of Tirol types of candies. They are the exact same size as Tirol Premium chocolates and about the same price. The company that makes these is Nikkoh Co., Ltd. which is located in Gifu, Japan and was established in 1954. In addition to a small line of chocolates, they make jellies (what we call gelatin) and bottle beverages like ramune (a kind of Japanese soda) and cream soda.


These chocolates come wrapped in the exact same fashion as Tirol candies. That is, they are wrapped in foil-lined paper and then in a thin layer of plastic with nutritional information large folded under the candy. This particular chocolate was 59 calories. Unlike Tirol, it's not stamped with a design but rather with a message to "Relax!" I have no idea why it says "Modena" on it, but it is interesting to note that it is the name of a breed of "fancy pigeon". Let's hope that has nothing to do with the candy's ingredients.


Since spring is here and it's warm and humid all the time, my candy melted just a little en route to my apartment. I put it in the refrigerator immediately, but the chocolate is on the soft side even when kept quite cold. The candy smells like regular chocolate. There isn't a hint of maple in the scent at all. The chocolate itself tastes somehow cheap. Even though it is made with cocoa butter, that ingredient comes pretty far down the line.

The chocolate has that familiar bittersweet chocolate aftertaste that one often finds in Japanese chocolate, but it's a bit stranger than usual. I think that slightly funky aftertaste comes from the maple flavor in between the wafers. The problem is that there is so little wafer and so little maple flavor, that you can't tell exactly what it is. The wafer is crispy and nice, particularly as a pairing with the soft chocolate coating, but ultimately it's just not that impressive.

This wasn't bad by a long shot, but I definitely wouldn't choose to revisit it. If I had known what it was like before purchasing it, I probably wouldn't have bothered. It's not the least bit offensive or anything. It's just not all that exciting or delicious. On the bright side, it didn't appear to taste anything like a fancy pigeon.

Maple & Vanilla Caffe Latte

When I was working full-time in a Japanese office, I used to indulge myself once or twice a week with the purchase of a Caffé Latte milk and coffee beverage. At that time, there was no Starbucks down the street and my choices for coffee were making my own when I was zonked out and dazed in the morning or picking up a plastic cup of cold Caffé Latte. I opted for the cold coffee, though I wasn't necessarily happy with all of the sugar that was in it. When sugarless versions were later released, I was pretty happy with that, though I had to add my own sweetener.

After a few years, I gave up on this indulgence because of the waste of the plastic packaging and the relatively high cost. At a convenience store, these usually cost 150 yen (about $1.50) for 240 ml (8 oz.), though the one I'm reviewing today was at a 99 yen shop (about $1). This is one of the few brands of the many, many coffees that you can buy in cans, cartons, or plastic cups in Japan that I actually like because there's so much milk in it that it's not bitter or overly acidic. It also carries with it the image of being a relatively high profile beverage since commercials featuring Jodie Foster and Winona Ryder have advertised it.






Since the mixture of maple and vanilla sounded interesting, and I hadn't had one of these for years, I thought I'd give this a try. Flavored coffees are always a big gamble though because they usually seem to be infused with a lot of artificial flavors or the added flavors are too strong. A sniff of this revealed just the smallest hint of vanilla and no maple scent at all. Mainly, it just smelled like coffee. The first sip though was overwhelmingly chemical tasting. The vanilla hit super hard and the maple rather less so. Subsequent sips revealed more of the maple and the strongly artificial vanilla taste relented a bit, but to the last drop, the flavor didn't taste like anything that may occur in nature.

There is real maple syrup in this, but there is no listing of vanilla among the ingredients. I'm guessing that much of the artificial taste is in some sort of cheap vanilla substitute, but I could be wrong. Perhaps someone just overdid it a bit. The entire cup is 145 calories. This means that you'd be better off drinking a can of Coca-Cola if you're trying to avoid sugar and fat as it'd be lower calorie and probably deliver enough caffeine.

This was okay. I didn't have any trouble drinking the rest of it, but mainly that's because it was pleasantly sweet and still coffee despite the flavorings. I'd certainly never buy it again, but more importantly, had I known what it would have tasted like before buying it, I'd have given it a miss.

Maple Fried Bread Snack

Sometimes I try something which is abysmally bad and I figure that someone somewhere has a very different sense of taste than I. I figure that any sort of passionate response to the taste of something probably means the product was test marketed to people who are unlike myself.

This is not one of those times when I have sampled something I hate. This is a time when I wonder if someone bothered to test market something because taste testing would certainly have revealed that no one could possibly care to eat this product as anything than a desperate last choice for sustenance. The indifference I feel to this snack is immeasurable.

This was made by Yamazaki Baking Company which I know well for it's packaged baked goods, its own chain of convenience stores, and for having a partnership with Nabisco in Japan. In the early 90's, they were also involved in a flap about potassium bromide use in their products and the detrimental effects on the health of anyone who consumed them. Despite their spotty history, I'm a great fan of their cake products, especially their mont blanc which is commonly sold in 2-packs in supermarkets here. In fact, any Yamazaki cake product which incorporates whipped cream tests my self control. Given the companies history of pleasing me as a customer, I wasn't expecting this item to underwhelm so awesomely.


I have to ask myself who thought this type of product was a good idea. Didn't they actually eat it? When I consider the possibilities, I'm left with only one conclusion: this product was created to use up bread scraps created by the company's bread production. It's the only excuse I can come up with. These things are little more than bits of lightly fried, dried out bread. I wonder if someone at the company got a big promotion, or at least a pat on the back for coming up with a way to recycle leftovers by making these edible packing peanuts.

They taste like stale bread with a few molecules of flavoring added. Despite what appears to be a liberal dusting of spices of some sort, these have very little flavor. They have the barest, and I'm not exaggerating, hint of something sweet, but no maple flavor that can be detected on the human tongue. They smell like a mixture of maple and nondescript fried food oil. I'm guessing this comes from the fact that they're fried in pork fat. "Maple sugar" is an ingredient, but it's very far down the list as one might expect from something which is barely detectable. About the only good thing I can say is that they're very crunchy as promised on the front of the bag, but I'm guessing any sliver of stale bread you've left lying around would be too if you tossed it in a pan of butter and fried it and rolled it in maple sugar. In fact, I recommend that over eating these. It may be worse than these. It may be better, but it can't possibly be as lame.

On the bright side, each 55 gram bag has 266 calories. Since no one is ever going to eat these, even if they make the mistake of forking over 99 yen (about a dollar) to buy the bag, that's 266 calories that you won't have to worry about burning off on the treadmill.

Maple Melon Pan

One of the first things you notice when you enter a convenience store in Japan is that there are many different and highly interesting looking baked goods on display. It's a bit like the Hostess displays that you might see in American 7-11's or Sheetz. The main difference is that the Japanese ones are not nearly as sweet and have a much heavier overtone of bread rather than cake. Also, there is rarely a pie of any sort in sight.

After you sample a few of these things, you find that a lot of them are pretty vile and bland white bread-based items. Many of the savory options are little more than hot dog buns with corn, mayonnaise, and small quantities of tuna, eggs, ham, or sausage.

The sweet options sometimes provide a little more promise, but they also tend to be your basic white bread buns or rolls filled with various flavors of whipped cream, jellies or beans. I've got nothing against the fillings, but putting them on a hamburger or hotdog bun is just gross.

Fujipan (the "pan" means bread) makes a variety of bread products in Japan with a heavy emphasis on sandwich bread, "stick" bread, and various snacks. They also market bread snacks based on the Japanese animation character "Anpanman". In various convenience stores, it's not uncommon to run across one or two of their current line of snacks in the baked goods area. At my local shop, two types of Fujipan melon pan were in stock. One was chocolate chip and looked suspiciously like it may actually have been melon- flavored. For the record, a lot of melon pan doesn't taste like melon. It only looks like it.

Since I am not keen on the idea of chocolate flavor mixed with melon, I decided to give the maple flavor a go. A bag with 4 pieces cost 100 yen (about 95 cents USD) so they're fairly cheap. Each piece is more like a soft cookie than a bit of bread. Melon pan is actually made of both bread and a cookie topping. The inside of these cookies is like regular bread dough that has been spread with a maple-flavored fat spread (this is literally what it's called in the ingredients list) and then a cookie dough topping is poured on top of it. It is baked and the bread rises a bit, the filling is largely absorbed into the interior, and the cookie shell is supposed to get a bit hard. The inside is actually hollow and is coated with the residue of the maple fat spread.


The main problem with buying melon pan in these sorts of plastic packages for mass distribution is that the cookie shell gets soft. Half of the pleasure of a melon pan is the crispy shell on top of the bread. You only get that half if you buy your melon pan at an actual bakery. That doesn't mean that the texture of these is not interesting or enjoyable. It just means that it is not an optimal melon pan experience.

When you open the package, the melon pan smells of maple. They are soft, but not spongy. The texture is tender and they get a bit doughy as you chew them. The maple flavor is not overwhelming or overly artificial. I'm pretty satisfied with the flavor balance, but I think many Western folks might like them to be sweeter.

Whether or not you like this is going to hinge heavily on how you feel about the texture. The doughy quality and varied texture of the bread and cookie shell may or may not suit some people. I found these pleasant and think they'd make a nice occasional snack with tea or even a light breakfast with coffee. The only thing to keep in mind is that you don't want to eat too many at once as they are 110 calories apiece and almost certainly contain "bad fats". I'm guessing that the "maple fat spread" is probably made with margarine or some other fat mixture that includes trans fats, though it is impossible to know for sure since there's no explanation on the package.

I might pick these up again some day, but I can't see putting them into any sort of regular rotation. Since they seem to be a seasonal item for autumn, there may not even be a choice in the matter. I think sampling these once or twice a year would be just about right.

Natchel Maple Bran Cookies

The pen is there to show you the size of the cookie. It's about 1/3 of the length of an average ballpoint pen.

There are some types of snack foods that will always get a sampling no matter how many times we try a Japanese version and find it lacking. For my husband, maple is one of those things which is irresistible. He's probably sampled most of the maple cookies, pastries, and cakes available at one time or another in Japan and found very few of them to be repeat purchases. Of course, sampling "all" of them isn't saying much. Maple is not something you see included in most foods in Japan.

Dare makes the most sinfully tasty maple cookie he's ever had in Tokyo and they are available on occasion in Japanese shops which carry imports. However, they are expensive and the bag is rather big. It's not the sort of thing you want to leave lying around the weak-willed and hungry. The purchase of a bag of Dare Maple Leaf cookies almost always is followed by a night of regret and physical discomfort.

When something new pops up touting maple flavor (and if it's maple, there's always a maple leaf on the box), I pick it up for my husband to sample. I'm not a huge fan of maple, but I do find it appealing at times. When I saw the tiny box of "Natchel" maple bran cookies pictured above for about ¥150 ($1.40), I tossed them in the shopping basket. The name is clearly meant to bring the word "natural" to mind. The Japanese characters for the word "natural" are rather close to the name of the product.

The filling to cookie ratio is just barely adequate to add maple flavor to the cookies.

The box contains three 5-packs of tiny cookies. And when I say, "tiny", I'm talking about a cookie roughly half the size of an Oreo. The description in green on the box mentions that there is bran in the cookies. You can see little flecks of bran in the biscuit. The cookies themselves are reminiscent of digestive biscuits in terms of their thickness and density and graham crackers in the coarseness of their texture. The cookies smell weakly of maple though the box goes out of its way to tell you that they contain 1.6% maple sugar. The sweet smell of maple really hits you though if you take the sandwich apart and expose the filling.

The biscuit has a hint of an earthy feel and taste from the bran. They strongly remind me of a maple breakfast cookie sold in Japan which I've had before. It's possible that the breakfast cookie was made by Glico (which makes these Natchel cookies) and the basic recipe wasn't modified all that much. They crunch just like a digestive biscuit. The maple filling seems to taste as much of caramel as maple, though the overall sweetness and flavor of the filling is relatively muted.

Though they do have bran in them, these cookies can't be mistaken for something "healthy". Each packet of 5 cookies has 161 calories and one could easily polish off an entire packet as a snack. Fortunately, the way in which they are packaged discourages one from opening up another and scarfing down more than 5. In my case, I managed to drop two on the floor from the first package we opened so we were spared some calories through my clumsiness. The main ingredients are (in order of concentration) flour, margarine, sugar, shortening, bran, brown sugar, dextrin, milk sugar, maple sugar, and salt. Since maple sugar comes in just before salt, you can see there's not much of it in there. Also, there are a lot of different sugars in the mix.

I asked my husband if he'd buy these himself if he was in the mood for a cookie and he said he would. They're not Dare Maple Leaf cookies, but they are pleasant and the size and packaging are very helpful in curbing over-indulgence.

Note: There is also a blueberry version of this cookie according to Glico's web site. However, blueberry is very resistible and my local market didn't carry that flavor.