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 – Oekaki Stick Chocolate – Simple
Price: ± €6
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 kit you create two cute chocolates with patterns on them, one of them with a stick in it. There are several versions available, each with their own patterns. Placing the chocolate balls takes the most time, this takes about a maximum of 10 minutes, unless you create your own pattern. The colours of the chocolate balls differ per set. 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 enjoying it.
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 some chocolate did get on the chocolate balls. As you can see on the picture it looks pretty similar to the pictures on the packaging, with the exception that I did create one other pattern.
The brown chocolate tasted like milk chocolate, it reminded me of a ‘koetjesreep’, which is a Dutch chocolate bar. The pink, blue and green 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 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 use your own chocolate. The set contains 25 grams of brown chocolate, this is what you’ll need for two chocolates. You’ll have some chocolate balls left over, you could make another pattern with these. You can replace these with sugar pearls, when you run out of the chocolate balls, in whichever colour you’d like to use.
