Takenoko no sato (or Bamboo Shoots in the village), is shaped like a bamboo shoot with a cookie base and a flavoured chocolate covering. They have a brother called Kinoko no Yama (mushrooms on the mountain), which is pretzel based, and looks like a mushroom.As my husband is a big cheesecake fan I bought this Takenoko for us to try. Takenoko is his favourite, he prefers the cookie base, while I prefer the pretzel base of Kinoko.
While this box is large, it only weighs 23.4 grams and there are 7 large indivdually wrapped bamboo shoots. A major waste of packaging and space. These are 3cm x 3cm, double the size of the normal chocolate Takenoko.
There is no perceptible scent from the cookie. The cookie is covered in a creamy coloured chocolate with Vanilla Bean specs within. The first taste when biting in is a creamy vanilla chocolate, followed by a more milky taste that develops. The crispy biscuit underneath is good, crumbly in texture, sweet but not too much. There is some saltiness that develops at the end that rounds out the flavour.
I found this to be more vanilla flavour than cheesecake. There was no cheese flavour, or tangy yoghurt like flavour that is usually present with cheesecake flavoured snacks. It was disappointing for me as I expected a nice creamy cheesecake. My husband wasn't disappointed though because he loves the cookie crunch and really loved the vanilla flavour anyway.I just wish that Meiji had labelled this better, or developed the flavour better, because it did not deliver it's promise of flavour. This is a really nice cookie-chocolate snack if you don't expect it to be cheesecake. If someone had blindfolded me and told me it was vanilla bean, I would be really happy.
I wouldn't go out of my way to get another box as a) the flavour is quite pedestrian, and b) the contents of the box in no way match the price.
