#other features

Purchase and Bokksu Boutique Experience: It turns out, you can only checkout orders from the Boutique once your order passes $40 in value, which makes sense given all the snacks on there that cost $1-2 each. At a 50% discount, the sweets box was only $20 each so I had to buy two. (Not a big problem in this case, but for future purchases of smaller snacks, I do wonder if I have to strategize to pass that $40 barrier. Guess we'll see around Black Friday!)

With shipping, this came to around $65.

Shipping: Ordered August 14 + shipped same day → Arrived August 18 (due to the easily meltable chocolate, these had to be signed for at delivery, which the order page warned me about).

This was shockingly fast delivery. The tracking said it came from Japan so maybe I just caught them at a great time and they got it exactly on the perfect plane over to my house. It arrived in a box so the baskets wouldn't get damaged.

Contents of one box: Chocolate Crunch Bars (2x orange flavor, 2x grape flavor, 2x strawberry flavor), Amaou Strawberry Kirara Sandwich Cookie (3x), Milk Pudding Baumkuchen Cake with Caramel Sauce (2x), White Chocolate Langue de Chat (6x)

I ate half the contents before taking these photos but you can see still the packaging and basket. The basket was more like a wicker box with the roundish rectangular shape you see in the photo and a non-latching lid. It's not weak but doesn't feel terribly sturdy either, definitely more of a decorative piece. Unlike the snack boxes, this order didn't come with any extra guide, labeling, or sheet of paper with nutritional information about the snacks, so you only have the description from the website to go off of.

I'm trying to step up my photo game. It's not working too well.

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Snack Review

I split the last set of snacks with my parents and we agreed on these thoughts collectively.

Chocolate Crunch Bars (3 flavors)

Site description: "Fruity and refreshing [INSERT FRUIT HERE] flavor in an addictive crunchy chocolate bar that’s finished with an elegant white chocolate coating."

My description: Like a rice krispie only instead of the rice puffs being held together by sweet marshmallow fluff, it's held together by white chocolate touched by a hint of fruit flavoring. About three bites long and a 1.5 fingers wide. Any mention of "chocolate crunch" will obviously bring to mind Nestle's Crunch bar but this was nothing like the stiff American chocolate bar. It was more rice puff than chocolate and quite soft on the tongue.

Thoughts: The theme of this sweets box seemed to be "sweet but not too sweet" and that mildness really rang true with these crunch bars. For me, it was just the right level of low sweetness. There were different fruit flavorings (orange, grape, and strawberry) but they were all quite light. Grape was the strongest which made for nicer treat, and until I reread the site description I totally thought orange was a lemon flavor.

Texture-wise... You know the way white chocolate is always sort of fresh-out-the-fridge buttery soft no matter the temperature? Yeah, that was this bar. Easy to break with your hands on account of it being 60% some kind of rice pop crunch, and fun to eat overall. We wouldn't call it addictive so much as a pleasant snack we wouldn't mind having again (because you're sort of underwhelmed after finishing just one).

Amaou Strawberry Kirara Sandwich Cookie

Site description: "Luxurious and gentle taste of Amaou strawberries and smooth chocolate. Corn flakes kneaded into the whipped chocolate and the crunchy cookie dough give it a savory and satisfying texture."

My description: Pink! Very interesting sandwich cream cookie with a distinct texture and memorable strawberry taste.

Thoughts: I really enjoyed the corn flakes incorporated in the chocolate filling. It made for a pretty... special texture? Like if eating pop rocks wasn't painful and also sort of smooth? There's no way for me to explain how it was both crunchy and gentle at the same time, but that's how it was.

It had a similar flavor profile as the chocolate crunch bars i.e. soft sweetness and smooth flavors. This one was slightly richer with the thick chocolate filling, but the cookie parts had a delicate touch that still kept the whole thing light. The strawberry flavor was also much stronger, making this easily the sweetest thing in the box (not a hard competition). It was also the ideal snacking size, leaving me satisfied after completing it.

Milk Pudding Baumkuchen Cake with Caramel Sauce

Site description: "Made from non-homogenized "Ito Monogatari" milk from Itoshima, Fukuoka, each layer of this Baumkuchen cake is carefully baked layer by layer for a luxuriously moist and flakey texture. It’s then dipped in caramel sauce and caramelized in the oven, creating a mild sweetness that is perfectly balanced with the aroma of burnt caramel."

My description: Pretty much the same as Chinese chiffon cake (槽子糕) only with even less nuanced flavor somehow?

Thoughts: A sweet has to have some other dimension other than sweet in order for the flavor to count as having flavor to me. That's where this cake fell short. Despite having an enticing honey caramel milk "aroma" that promised some sort of honey, caramel, and/or milk dimension to the flavor, there was none of that at all, just an airy sweetness behind each bite. If I had to describe the flavor, it would be a little bit of white sugar in skim milk. No richness to it at all. So that was disappointing.

I will give this to the site description though, it did have a nice texture. Dense but not dry, but also not quite moist. I wouldn't call it "flaky" in any sense of the word but if you let a bite sit on your tongue, it would dissolve into a pleasant buttery feel. (This review is entirely based on notes I took while eating this yesterday btw. I have no recollection of this cake a day later.)

White Chocolate Langue de Chat

Site description: "Two crispy cookies made with “Ito Monogatari" milk from Itoshima, Fukuoka sandwich a fantastically smooth white chocolate spread. The sweet milky flavor of this Langue de Chat is a real treat!"

My description: Wow that site description was dead on the money. I was thrown off by the name at first—"Langue de Chat" are cat tongue cookies, referring to how the traditional French cookies resemble the shape of cat tongues, while as you can see, these are squares. But it turns out, Japan has their own specific version of the langue de chat which are specifically "a square sandwich cookie, made of a layer of white chocolate between two square cookies."

Thoughts: These were the favorites of the basket. They truly lived up to the hype! The milk flavor really shone through and filled out that white chocolate richness in exactly the way you would want. It almost felt like we were eating a layer of sweet cream cheese but without much cheese flavor. That soft filling served as a nice contrast to the crisp buttery cookies on the outside. Such a light, perfect flavor.

I would totally buy these again except (A) the Boutique doesn't offer these separate from the sweets box and (B) the individual packaging is so limiting for such a thin cookie whereas I need to consume a sleeve of these like Oreos.

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Final Thoughts

I would recommend the Bokksu Original Sweets Gift Basket for the following people:

Anyone who needs to gift someone a fancy food-based gift basket for a special occasion

Anyone who really likes white chocolate

Anyone who wants to try the essence of how Japanese sweets manage to be sweet without caving in your teeth, in contrast to American sweets (I fell into this latter category, so I would recommend others in this category to wait for a sale)

That's all for this review! Have a good one, folks