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 – Pudding Parfait – Standard
Price: ± €6
Extra supplies: Glass, Water, Scissors, Optional: Tweezers
Most of the Popin Cookin kits have English instructions, which you can find here.
With this kit you create a cute little pudding decorated with a caramel sauce, wafer, cherry, orange wedges, whipped cream and small coloured balls. Making the cherry, orange wedges, whipped cream and pudding doesn’t take any longer than 20 minutes, but you do still have to wait a little while for the cherry, orange wedges and pudding to firm up. This is supposed to take about 10 minutes, but I waited 20 minutes just to be sure. In total this set kept me busy for about an hour.
This kit isn’t very hard but also not super easy to make, piping the whipped cream can be a little tough to do neatly, for example. On top of that I didn’t manage to take the pudding out neatly either, which made the sides a little less smooth.
In the box, on the packaging that also has the ‘saucer’ on it, you’ll find an image with three suggestions on it of how you could decorate your little pudding. I chose a version that wasn’t on the box, because I didn’t want to cover up the cute little star with the cherry.
The final product looks cute, but not entirely like the image on the box. The little pudding didn’t turn out as yellow and was a lot less tall than you’d think if you look at the image on the box. It’s important to make sure you don’t add more water than the instructions tell you to add, otherwise your pudding won’t firm up well. I used the water scoop that was included in the set to add the amount of water needed for the pudding. In total I used 4 scoops, and a little bit, of water.
The little pudding tasted very strongly of vanilla. The texture of the pudding was pretty surprising to me, because I expected it to be a lot firmer. Although it is pretty impressive that it even becomes firmer at room temperature. The caramel sauce had a pretty mild taste. This had a caramel flavour, but also a hint of vanilla flavour. The whipped cream also tasted like vanilla, this was just a little creamier than the pudding, but aside from that it tasted almost the same.
The orange wedges clearly tasted like orange, but the taste was a lot less stronger than I expected it to be. This expectation was created due to the strong orange smell of the powder package. When it came to the texture that also surprised me, I expected a smooth texture just like gelatine candy. I’d describe the texture as bumpy, it wasn’t gritty but did have little bumps in it. The cherry also had this texture and tasted like artificial cherry flavour.
The wafer was a little dry and tasted like a wafer, as expected. It was in the box without any packaging around it so it isn’t weird that it dried out.
It’s pretty fun to see how many flavours were put into the different elements of this kit. For instance, the little brown balls tasted like coffee, the yellow ones had an artificial banana flavour and the green ones didn’t have a very distinct flavour, this seemed like a milder version of the little yellow balls.
I was happily surprised to find out this set didn’t taste super sweet. The pudding, caramel sauce, whipped cream and little balls tasted nice together, but I thought the brown little balls had a very dominant flavour. I generally don’t like a lot of flavours in one bite, so I preferred to eat the little balls separate from the rest.
TIPS: Cut a smaller piece off of the whipped cream bag than indicated, this way you have a little more control over how the whipped cream blobs turn out.
If you want to be very precise when placing the green, yellow and brown little balls then you could use some tweezers.
My wafer broke in the packaging, which caused a lot of crumbs in the mixing bowls and the moulds. It works best to wipe it clean with some kitchen paper.
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 put a small amount of pudding mix in it and put this in the fridge to get it to become firmer. You can pick whatever flavour you’d like, of course. The orange wedges and cherry you could make out of jelly.
The whipped cream you could replace with real whipped cream, which you could whip up with a little bit of sugar or vanilla extract. Put this in a piping bag with a very small opening. Instead of the caramel sauce you could use a similar sauce. The small coloured balls can be replaced with sugar pearls, or you can use the little balls you had left.
