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.
Heart – Chocolate Puzzles Bunny & Dog – Simple
Price: ± €6 for one of them
Extra supplies: Scissors, Spoon, Refrigerator, Microwave*, Heatproof Bowl or Cup, Optional: Piping bag or Sandwich bag
* 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.
With these two kits you create two cute chocolate puzzles, a bunny and a dog. The sets are sold separately. Placing the pink chocolate balls takes the most time, this takes about a maximum of 5 minutes. Melting the chocolate takes barely any time, after this you only have to wait 1 hour for your chocolate to harden in the fridge and then you can start puzzling.
The kits are very easy to make and the puzzles themselves are very simple as well. Despite this I still enjoyed making these sets, especially because these are two very cute sets.
The final product looks cute, but unfortunately I didn’t melt the chocolate very well which caused a few air bubbles in my chocolate. As you can see on the picture it looks pretty similar to the pictures on the packaging, with the exception that it has some air bubbles in it.
The brown chocolate tasted like milk chocolate, it reminded me of a ‘koetjesreep’, which is a Dutch chocolate bar. The yellow chocolate immediately smelled strongly of artificial banana when I opened the packaging. This tasted very sweet and like artificial banana flavour. The pink balls tasted like chocolate and reminded me a little of Smarties or M&Ms, because it was soft chocolate with a coloured layer on it.
TIPS: Melt the chocolate until it’s liquid enough, I didn’t wait for it to get liquid enough but instead used it as soon as it was just melted. This caused the chocolate to not flow into the mould that well and I had to tap the mould, which made the chocolate go over the balls.
You could use a spoon to fill the mould, then you’d have to put the mould in the refrigerator for 10 minutes and take it out to scrape the chocolate that went outside of the mould off. But you could also use a piping bag or sandwich bag instead to make sure the chocolate doesn’t go over the edge at all.
Don’t overfill the mould, but add a little bit of chocolate at a time and shake it back and forth the mould carefully on your work surface, this way you can be sure you’re not overfilling the mould.
Want to enjoy these kits 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 use your own chocolate. Each set contains 25 grams of brown chocolate and 10 grams of yellow chocolate, this is what you’ll need for one chocolate puzzle. You’ll have some pink chocolate balls left over, but not enough to make another puzzle. You can replace these with sugar pearls in whichever colour you’d like to use.
