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.
Bourbon – Petit Bear Chocolate Train – Very Elaborate
Price: ± €20,-
Extra supplies: Spoon, Refrigerator, Microwave*, Heatproof Bowl or Cup, Optional: Piping bag or Sandwich bag, Cutting Board, Baking Paper, Scotch Tape, Scissors.
* Instead of heating the mixture in the microwave I decided to heat it au bain-marie, with a heatproof glass bowl on top of a pan with a small layer of boiling water. I stirred until all of the chocolate had melted and then took the bowl off of the pan, wiped the bottom dry with a kitchen towel and poured the mixture back in the cup to be able to put it in the mould.
[youtube https://youtu.be/SfNdVlf09SA]
With this kit from Bourbon you create a very cute little chocolate train with a roof made out of wafers and wheels made out of cookies. The back window is shaped like a bear’s head and there’s a cute bear toy in this set as well. There are 3 kinds of cookies and chocolate in the package to create and decorate the little train. On top of that there’s a mould for the chocolate, a base to put the train on and, as I indicated earlier, a toy bear in a random colour. In total this set took up about one hour of my time, if you don’t take the waiting time into account, on top of that I spent 15 minutes decorating the train. You could spend as much time as you’d like decorating the train.
This kit takes quite a bit of time to make, but the separate pieces are easy to make. It’s very fun to decorate the train and put it together, you see it becoming one whole. On top of that I always love it when you get to decorate something however you like.
The final result looks cute, try to do everything as neatly as you can. As you can see on the picture it looks pretty similar to the little chocolate train on the pictures on the packaging, only the chocolate is a little darker than it appears on the packaging.
The flavours of this set are the same as the ones in the Bourbon Petit Bear Chocolate House set, except that there’s one less kind of cookie in this set.
The chocolate didn’t taste like the chocolate I’m used to. It was milk chocolate, but didn’t contain cocoa butter, which made it taste less like chocolate. It seemed to have a little bit of a creamy texture, the chocolate is pretty soft when you bite through it, but it didn’t taste creamy. In fact it tasted a bit fatter than chocolate usually does, but the ingredients did list quite a bit of vegetable oil, this could explain the fatty taste. The chocolate tasted pretty decent, but it wasn’t very tasty. It has a pretty faint taste to it.
And then, the cookies. There were three different kinds of cookies in this kit: rectangular wafers, cylinder shaped cookies, round chocolate cookies and round light cookies. The rectangular wafers together made the roof, these tasted nice and airy and had a very thin layer of filling. I think it was filled with cocoa cream, or something similar, but because there was so little in there it was hard to be sure. The cylinder shaped wafer cookies were nice and crispy and had chocolate on the inside. The round cookies, had a texture similar to Bastogne cookies from LU. Aside from that they tasted a little bit like cocoa.
TIPS: When taking the chocolate out of the mould watch out for the bear heads. The ears break off very easily, unfortunately, so take them out carefully.
If you’d like to work more precisely than with the spoon you could put your chocolate in a (disposable) piping bag or sandwich bag and cut a tiny corner off of this. This works very well when you’re attaching the chocolate pieces to each other, for instance.
When you’re putting the wheels on the two sides of the train you could put these on a cutting board covered in baking paper, which is attached to the cutting board at the back. Do this with the wafer rolls as well, after dipping. This way you can be sure that you’ll be able to them off of the cutting board, even if you used a little too much chocolate.
The chocolate from this kit is ‘fake’ chocolate, also known as compound chocolate. This means there’s no cocoa butter in it and the chocolate can harden at room temperature. This happened to me several time, so make sure not to wait too long in between and to always put the chocolate back in the bowl you melted it in, even if you use a piping bag. Otherwise it’ll harden in the piping bag and it’ll be hard to get it out.
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 make another chocolate train. If you want to do this you’ll need 200 grams of chocolate, in this kit there was 210 grams of chocolate but I had about 20 grams leftover at the end. With the leftover chocolate you could make some more bears or roof decorations. The cookies can be replaced with similar ones. Below you’ll find the measurements of the cookies in this set, you could even cut some cookies to a smaller size or bake your own cookies. All of the measurements are for one cookie.
Rectangular wafers: ±8cm long, ±3,2cm broad, ±0,6cm thick.
Cylinder-shaped cookies: ±10cm long, ±0,8cm thick.
Round cookies: ±2,5cm diameter.
You can also use the mould to shape fondant, for example, if you’d like. You can decorate the train anyway you’d like, with mini stroopwafels as wheels for instance, if you’d want to make it look Dutch!
