Recently I purchased a few Japanese Candy kits and I will review all of these for AVO. This is not a sponsored review and because of this I won’t mention where I bought this set, if you do an online search using the name of this kit you’ll be able to find this one in several webshops.
Popin Cookin – Kyan Land – Simple
Price: ± €6
Extra supplies: Glass, Water, Scissors, Piece of Kitchen paper, Optional: Small brush for decorating cakes and such or a pipette
Most of the Popin Cookin kits have English instructions, which you can find here.
With this kit you create 4 cute shapes out of candy, the mould differs per package. In my package there was a giraffe, a panda, a parrot and balloons. I made the panda and giraffe pretty thin, which enables me to make the balloons twice. So eventually I ended up with 5 candies to colour. Making the white shapes doesn’t take a lot of time, this took me about 5 to 10 minutes. In total this kit kept me busy for about an hour.
The kit is easy to do, but you can still have a lot of fun and keep busy with it for a pretty long time. You can take as much or as little time as you’d like. On top of this you’ve got a lot of freedom in what you do, you can mix and use colours as you’d like. On the back of the package you see a picture showing some colours you could make.
The final product looks cute, as long as you press down the shapes well and colour them in neatly. As you can see on the picture they resemble the candies on the packaging well. The most fun part about these candies is that you get to decide which colours you make and use. You can make almost any colour combination you’d like, but you are of course limited to creating colours that are combinations of yellow, pink and blue.
The colours each tasted different. Yellow had a pretty strong lemon smell, which made me expect a strong taste as well. However the taste of the yellow colour was pretty mild, the lemon flavour was present but definitely not dominant. Even though this taste wasn’t very strong it was tasty, I’m usually a fan of lemon flavour. I expected the pink colour to be red, because of the red packaging. The scent reminded me of raspberry and cherry and it tasted a bit like cherry as well. Just like the yellow colour this one had a very faint flavour as well, more of a hint of cherry than a real cherry flavour. I didn’t really like the flavour of the pink colour, this one had a bit of a bitter aftertaste, in my opinion. Although I have to admit cherry is usually not one of my favourite flavours. Blue smelled and tasted like bubble-gum, I didn’t expect this because there had clearly been a choice to go for a fruit flavour with the other colours. Regardless this was a nice and again very mild flavour.
I was already able to smell the white candy when I opened the package and it immediately reminded me of the scent of bubble-gum. This also tastes quite a bit like bubble-gum, but there is a slight lemon flavour to it as well. I really liked the taste of it, but I was pretty surprised by the lemon flavour.
Most likely they chose not to make the flavours of the colours very dominant so candies with several colours or colour combinations wouldn’t taste weird. They succeeded at making the completed candies taste good, even though I didn’t like the pink colour I didn’t even notice it in the end result. The finished candies mainly tasted like the white candy in the end, this flavour was dominant enough for me to not even be able taste the colours.
TIPS: Make sure you clean and dry your hands well, before kneading the white candy. Otherwise dust particles or filth might get in your white candy and you’ll be able to see this. Do make sure to knead it through thoroughly, this makes it easier to press it into the shapes.
If you didn’t put enough into your mould then stick a little extra white candy in it, but not on the empty spot. If you do this you’ll end up with a clear line in your candy. Instead it’s better to stick it just a little bit before the empty space and press the candy out into that space. The backside ends up looking a little less smooth, but the final result of the front side will look good. I had to do this for both my panda and giraffe.
Make sure to properly clean your mixing stick in between, you can do this with a piece of kitchen paper, for example. You could also use a little brush or pipette, instead of the added piece of plastic, to put the colour on the candies if you’d like to be more specific when colouring the candies in. I chose to use a small brush myself, that was suited for decorating cakes.
Want to enjoy this kit again?
Clean the mould with warm water, after using it, and let it air dry. Don’t use soap when cleaning this mould.
If you want to reuse the mould you could shape a little piece of fondant or marzipan in it. You could also buy chewing candy, like starbursts, soften these a little by putting them in the microwave for a short period of time, and then knead these and press them into the mould. This way you can make candies, but also decorations for on a cake or something like that.
You could decorate these chewing candies, fondant or marzipan with some food colouring, mixed with for example a few drops of lemon juice, using a small brush. You could make and mix the colours in the mixing tray you got with this set, this you should also clean with some warm water and then let you should let it air dry.
After making these candies you’re left with quite a bit of colouring. You could immediately make more candies, but then you do have to make sure you have the fondant, marzipan or chewing candies around, or you could rinse these colours off and reuse the mould at a later time.
