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 – Taiyaki & Odango – Elaborate
Price: ± €7
Extra supplies: Glass, Water, Scissors, Scotch tape, Microwave.
Most of the Popin Cookin kits have English instructions, which you can find here.
With this kit you create three cute wagashi, traditional Japanese confections and a cup of ramune. The three wagashi you’ll create are taiyaki, ichigo daifuku and dango. The packaging can be used to create a wrapper for the cup and to cut out a ‘tablecloth’ with ‘plates’ on it. These take almost no time to cut out and put together, because you don’t have to fold anything. Making the three wagashi and the drink took me around 15 minutes.
This kit is an easy one to make, as long as you own a microwave, but most of all it is fun to make because of the cute components it’s made out of.
The final product looks cute, although the taiyaki didn’t come out of the mould as well as I’d hoped. Luckily you use two of them, one for on the bottom and one for on top of the chocolate sauce. You can put the prettiest on top. As you can see on the picture everything looks very similar to the picture on the packaging, the colour is a little different, but aside from that it all looks good.
I personally liked the chocolate sauce the most. This combined well with the mochi, which was tasty and slightly sweet, and the strawberry gummy candy, which tasted like sweet strawberries.
The taiyaki was also very tasty, the little cakes had a vanilla flavour and were a lot fluffier than I’d expected. I assumed they’d be very dense, but the cakes were pretty fluffy instead. The little cakes also combined well with the chocolate sauce.
The sauce that was on the dango wasn’t really to my taste, the flavour was a bit salty and just a little weird. I didn’t recognize the flavour, but I thought it was a bit fishy. The mochi tasted pretty nice, a little sweet but otherwise neutral.
The drink, ramune, tasted a bit like chewing gum and had bubbles in it. The bubbles were unexpected, because you create it out of water and powder. The flavour wasn’t very special, but also not gross.
TIPS: If you want to fill the tray up till the line, to make the mochi, you can use 5 scoops of water for this. For the cup of ramune you’ll need 6 scoops of water.
Use the pick, for the dango, to spread the chocolate sauce on the taiyaki.
On the box there are instructions for microwaves with a wattage of either 500 watt or 600 watt. I used an 800 watt microwave at full power and put the taiyaki in it fora bout 15 seconds.
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 fill the fish moulds with fondant or mochi, for instance. You could also put melted chocolate in the moulds, but make sure the melted chocolate isn’t too hot because it might melt through the mould otherwise. You could fill the strawberry mould with jelly. You could use chocolate to make the chocolate sauce, or you could use a little bit of cocoa powder, icing sugar and a small bit of milk, mixed together. For the dango and ichigo daifuku you could also use mochi or fondant.
You could reuse the pick.
