One evening recently I was overcome with a craving for a chocolate chip cookie. There were none in the house, but I remembered I had a stash of snacks from the Japanese market that I’d hidden away so as not to eat all of them at once. There were two kinds of cookies that combined chocolate with non-chocolate cookie, so I decided it was time to give them a try.

Kinoko no Yama are very cute. The name means mountain mushrooms, and I don’t know about the mountain part, but they do look like mushrooms. I am sure they would be great for decorating a cake in a woodland theme with mushrooms and - toads, maybe?

But as far as eating…. Since the cap of the mushroom is solid milk chocolate with a little cookie-stick stuck in it, the chocolate would have to be really great and.… OK, I am crazy about nearly everything Japanese. But when you think of a great chocolate-making country, you think of Switzerland or Belgium, not Japan. Unfortunately, there is a reason for this. I like the idea of these cookies, but the chocolate is just not good enough to make them worthwhile.

But, never fear: I had another possibility:

When I examined the Crunky package I noticed that the chocolate in the filling in the picture looked odd. When I ate them, I discovered why: it’s not plain chocolate, but it has crunchy (crunky?) things in it. Sort of like a crispy rice bar, but smaller pieces.

There’s no rice in the ingredients, but “malt puff” is listed. I don’t know exactly what that is, but I love the old-fashioned flavor of chocolate malt, so I really liked this. I’ll bet that the chocolate is not of hugely higher quality than the mushroom caps, but the malt makes all the difference.

The cookies themselves are fine, but I did feel the same urge to just scrape the filling out and eat it that some people (not me) get with an Oreo. (With an Oreo I scrape out the filling and throw it away and eat the cookie, but that’s another story.) So I tried separating the two.

The cookie by itself is kind of odd. Another weird ingredient in the list is “powdered rye.” I’ve got no idea what that’s about, but I’ll bet it’s why the cookies taste unfamiliar. I’ve never seen that ingredient in a cookie before. And I don’t know about you, but I definitely never ate a piece of rye bread and said “Hey, wouldn’t this make a fantastic cookie?”

But, together with the filling, the cookie works. I really like the idea of the crunch in the filling, and the malt flavor. And while the cookies are not very big, they are individually wrapped, which I love, so I don’t have to eat the whole box at once before they get stale.

I’m not sure I would buy Crunky again, but now I’m left with a wicked craving for malted-chocolate flavored things. Is there an American cookie that is chocolate malt flavored? Why don’t we have a cookie with a rice-crispy-chocolate filling? Are the Japanese beating us in the snack department? We have an empire to defend – get on it, cookie companies!

Buy Kinoko no Yama Cookies Online:

• at Amazon.com