Welcome to my happy place, the world of silly snacks!

It’s a well-known fact that I like to snack. I love snack-foods of all kinds (except for most flavored potato chips and any sort of meat product that’s been rendered chewy and dehydrated…aka beef jerky, deer jerky, fish jerky, etcetera). And when I’m in foreign locales, I love sniffing out local candies and snacks and developing unhealthy obsessions with them. So when I took a trip to Hong Kong a few years ago, I came back with a particular love for these little chocolate crème-filled cookies called Koala's March. Technically, the little koala-shaped snacks hail from Japan (of course), but seeing as how I’ve never been to Japan, I associate them with Hong Kong. There’s a Japanese grocery store—Sunrise Mart—in Manhattan’s East Village where I stock up on my Koala’s March and Pucca—little chocolate-filled pretzel things in the shape of fish, also an obsession leftover from the Hong Kong vacay. I usually buy them in November to take to my sister for her birthday. This year was no different except I could only find pancake-flavored! And this is why I adore the Japanese—the creators of Koala-shaped cookies filled with pancake-flavored crème.

P.S. Ummm....my beloved cookies were actually recalled in October 2008, since they were manufactured in China and may be contaminated with melamine. So, even though I love them dearly, you should probably steer clear for a while. Actually, this explains why I could only find the pancake flavor, as those were not recalled, while the King Size and Family Pack chocolate, strawberry, white chocolate and chestnut flavors were. Yeah, thanks China. Thanks a lot.