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 – Sushi – Elaborate
Price: ± €6
Extra supplies: Glass, Water, Scissors.
Most of the Popin Cookin kits have English instructions, which you can find here.
With this kit you create cute sushi, with salmon, egg and even caviar, all without using fish of course. I’m not a fan of sushi at all, but I had to give these candies a try. You can cut some saucers out of the packaging as well, to put the sushi on. It took me about half an hour to make all the candies.
This kit is easy to make, although placing the ‘caviar’ neatly is quite a struggle.
The final products 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 shapes are hard to get exactly right. On top of that they look a lot less edible on the box.
The rice had a very strong bubble-gum scent to it while I was mixing it, luckily the taste was a lot less strong. It tasted like bubble-gum, but also like lemon. The soy sauce tasted like cola, personally I thought it was a little too sweet. The seaweed, or nori, taste a little like lemon as well, but had a bit of a weird aftertaste. I don’t quite know how to describe it any differently.
The egg and the salmon only had a very faint flavour to them. The egg tasted a tiny bit like lemon and the salmon a tiny bit like raspberry, or something that’s similar. The caviar sort of popped in my mouth when I bit it, this was pretty funny. There wasn’t much flavour to it, except for the lemon flavour of the water that you create the caviar with. It was a little bit salty.
So in general quite a bit of lemon flavour in this set.
TIP: 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.
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 egg and salmon. The seaweed can be replaces with fondant or black taffy. You could use fondant to replace the rice, or something like mochi. The caviar you can make again yourself, if you search online for ‘artificial ikura’ or ‘artificial salmon eggs’ you should be able to find a recipe.
