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 – Okosama Lunch – Very Elaborate
Price: ± €6
Extra supplies: Glass, Water, Scissors, Scotch Tape, Cocktail Picks, Optional: (Sharp Small) Knife, Kitchen Paper: to clean the mould in between.
Most of the Popin Cookin kits have English instructions, which you can find here.
With this kit you create a very cute lunch for children, with it you make meatballs, fries, a shrimp, an omelette and chicken rice. Using the packaging you can also make two flags, which you can put on cocktail picks and stick into the chicken rice, and a plate to put everything on. Making these will take max 5 minutes. It took me about half an hour to make all the candies.
This kit is easy to make, it does take some time, but the many parts of it are fun to make.
The final product looks cute, as long as you take the time to do everything neatly. As you can see on the picture overall it looks similar to the candies on the package, although the colours are a little different, the omelette is a bit more see-through for instance.
This set contains a lot of powders with strong smells, but don’t let that deter you: the candies don’t taste as strongly as they smell. They’re also a lot less sweet than you’d expect from the smell of the powders.
The omelette smelled like banana candies, but tasted like lemon, weirdly enough. The yellow and green balls that were in it, and around it, tasted a little like banana and were less hard to bite through than I expected.
The shrimp smelled a little like tangerine or orange while I was mixing it, but turned out to have more of a chewing gum flavour with a hint of tangerine. The popping candy that the shrimp was coated in didn’t have much flavour to it, but does pop a lot in your mouth. While ‘frying’ the shrimp it actually sounded like you were frying it, this is a pretty fun detail!
I personally didn’t like the chicken rice, it had a bit of a weird texture. The scent of the powder reminded me of banana candies again, but it tasted a little like lemon. It also had a bit of a weird aftertaste to it, although the candy didn’t have a very distinct flavour to it.
The ketchup, which you put on the meatballs and omelette, smelled strongly like strawberry chewing gum. However the flavour was much nicer, it reminded me of strawberry laces but in fluid form. Unfortunately you didn’t taste it much when eating the meatballs, their chocolate flavour was stronger and also tasty.
Lastly: the fries. They tastes a little like sour apple candies. Like the sour apple rings from Haribo. I really likes these.
A set full of different flavours and scents.
TIPS: Take your time, the caviar falls off of the sushi way too easily if you try to place too much of it on top in one go and the rice is pretty hard to shape.
It’s a good idea to clean the moulds and dry them with some kitchen paper, before you start ‘frying’.
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 jelly to create the omelette, chicken rice and shrimp. You could make these out of fondant or modelling chocolate instead. This can also be used to make the meatballs. You could replace the ketchup with strawberry juice or jam and the vegetable balls with sugar pearls.
You can of course keep and reuse the flags.
