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.
Meiji – Kinoko no Yama – Simple
Price: ± €7
Extra supplies: Glass, Hot water, Scissors, Refrigerator
With this kit you create 8 very cute mini chocolate mushrooms, the stems of the mushrooms are cookies that are included in the kit. If you take the waiting time for melting the chocolate and letting it set out of the equation, this set doesn’t take up a lot of your time, I estimate it took me about 5 minutes before I was done making the chocolates.
The kit is easy to make, as long as you make sure the chocolate is entirely melted you can make fun designs with very little effort. After doing this it doesn’t take long before you can enjoy the chocolates!
The final product looks pretty cute, as long as everything goes well. As you can see on the pictures they resemble the chocolate mushrooms on the box pretty closely. The most fun part is; you aren’t limited to certain patterns. You can make any pattern you’d like, for instance I made a chocolate mushroom with dots.
The chocolate tastes good, as expected from Meiji chocolate. The white chocolate doesn’t taste like white chocolate as I’d expected, but a little more like the milk filling of a liga milkbreak cookie. The milk chocolate tasted a little different from what I’m used to of Dutch milk chocolate, a little bit more of a mild flavour, and this also had a hint of coffee flavour, in my opinion. The pink chocolate already smelled very strongly when I was making the chocolate mushrooms, but not appalling. It didn’t have a very distinct strawberry taste, it could’ve also been raspberry or forest fruits.
The cookies made the whole taste a little bit like pocky, because of the combination with the chocolate. Aside from it reminding me a little of pocky, the cookies separately reminded me of liga cookies when it came to taste and texture.
TIP: On the box it says that the water should be 50 degrees Celsius, while this does work it doesn’t give you a lot of time to work on your design, because the chocolate will harden again pretty quickly. If you use water that’s a little warmer the chocolate will stay in liquid form for longer.
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. You can reuse the mould from the set to make more chocolates, but you can also shape fondant or marzipan in it.
In total there were 17 cookies in my kit, with these you can definitely enjoy this kit at least twice! To make your cookies last longer you could break or cut them in half and only use half of a cookie for every mushroom. When you have no more cookies you could replace them with a different kind of small thin cookies, or you could cut off a small piece of a breadstick and use this with the bigger mushrooms.
You could also make some cookies in the right size yourself. In that case I’d choose to follow a pocky cookies recipe and change the shape of them.
The chocolate will be gone after you’ve used the kit once. For this mould you’ll need about 50 grams of chocolate, which you could even colour with food colouring powders or food colouring with an oil base.
