Mister Ito Languly Uji Matcha Biscuits — 12 Pieces

A thin, crisp biscuit with a matcha cream between two of them, twelve to a box. The honest version: the biscuit is the strong part here, thick, properly crisp, better than it needs to be, and the matcha is light. You taste a gentle green sweetness rather than a bracing bowl of tea. If you want a matcha biscuit you can eat three of in a row, this is it; if you want matcha that bites back, this is not the one.

ラングリー 宇治抹茶玉露入り. Look for the deep green box with the little paper tag and the red parasol on it.

What you're getting

• The biscuit is the reason to buy it. A langue de chat, a thin, crisp, buttery biscuit, but thicker than the delicate French version the name comes from, so it snaps rather than shatters. The browned rim on each one is deliberate, and the bakery treats it as the sign of a good bake.
• Real tea is in the cream, and so is gyokuro: a shaded green tea, both as ingredients in their own right rather than flavourings. The maker adds the gyokuro deliberately as a background note, and almost nobody picks it out as a separate thing.
• The caveat, said plainly: the matcha is not strong. This is not a dark, bitter, ceremonial-grade hit, the cream tastes closer to a sweet white chocolate with green tea through it. As an easy-to-eat green-tea biscuit, it is a good one.
• The green is not all matcha. Gardenia and turmeric are on the ingredient list as colouring, alongside the tea. Worth knowing, since the colour is the first thing that sells it.
• Twelve biscuits, as four sealed packs of three: so it is four sittings rather than one, the rest stay crisp once you have opened the first, and the box survives a bag without turning to crumbs.
• Allergens: contains wheat, egg, milk and soy. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

Gyokuro is the shaded tea described above; you are not meant to taste it as a separate thing. Uji is the Kyoto tea district the maker names this cream after, no farm or grower is named behind it, so read it as the pack's own name for the flavour rather than an address. People divide sharply over how sweet the whole biscuit is, and every box tastes the same: some find it restrained and some find it a sweet biscuit with a green cream. It is the same biscuit as the vanilla and chocolate Languly: across the range only the cream changes. Ito Biscuits has been making the Languly line since 1979, and had sold 150 million units across the whole line by its fortieth anniversary — that record belongs to the line, and this is one of its seasonal editions rather than one of the two year-round flavours, so it comes and goes: the chocolate and vanilla are the ones that are always there.