Willy Wonking Tuesday!

  • April 14, 2026

It’s time to make a bug:

We bought this at a grocery store in Beppu after seeing an article about it on TV. At the time this was apparently the best-selling candy making kit in Japan, and the article documented the challenges the company overcame bringing it to market, such as convincing stores that it wasn’t a bad thing having a bug-based food item on shelves 🙂

It’s a fairly simple kit and includes an impressively strong mold for the rhinoceros beetle pupa it makes.

The two packets are combined with water to make a lemon-soda flavoured jelly. It seems impossible that the tiny amount of water the instructions require will be enough, but the powders dissolve quickly and the little tray ended up full of a gelatinous goo which was then poured into the mold:

We’d done a similar step once before in a candy kit but the material was more fluid and leaked out the mold. This wasn’t a problem here:

Next it cooled in the fridge for a half hour and then was ready:

Or at least it was supposed to be! Ours didn’t seem to set correctly and while it popped out of the mold easily it quickly disintegrated when touched. At least it tasted good.

Fun to make, but apparently something went wrong 🙂

Willy Wonking Monday!

  • April 13, 2026

It’s time again for a week of candy-making kits from Nippon (and one Korea). Eight kits over five days, all made by me! Let’s start with this pair:

We did a drink last time, and I initially suspected the one on the right is identical just with different branding. As you can see both of these are licensed, and both took moments to ‘make’.

The above is the contents of the Chiikawa drink, which is based on a popular series about cute creatures facing the tedium of normal life. To make this, you add the fizzy packet to the cup and add water. An amoeba could follow the instructions without problem.

The powder was so fine I assume it had been weaponized. Since the drink is lemon flavoured I expected a lemon smell but it was more… metallic?

The finished drink was cloudy and unspeakable awful. Back when I was a feral child, the land I lived in was so primitive that painkilling medicine needed to be dissolved in water. This created a vile fizzy beverage I dreaded as a child and this Chiikawa thing tasted exactly the same. I almost gagged.

I like the cup though!

The above is the contents of the other packet, and is based on a streaming group I’d never heard of called Colorful Peach. The left packet was dissolved in water and the right two were mixed with a little water and then mixed to create a very impressive foam:

The foam was delicately placed atop the drink and voila:

During the development of this particular drink, I imagine someone on the team spake thusly:

“Yo dudes I just tried that Chiikawa drink and it low key tastes just like dissolved aspirin from 40 years ago. That’s cool and all but I think our Colorful Peach drink needs to be a bit more up-to-date.”

And thus they put their heads together and produced a drink that tastes even worse than Chiikawa and very strongly resembles repulsively sweet cough medicine. I did gag.

And the cup isn’t even cool!

Wildlife Update

  • April 10, 2026

Ok I’ll be honest: I forgot about our new wildlife camera. It had been happily sitting at the edge of our back patio, snapping away for four months now and when I rediscovered it yesterday there were more than 1600 images on it!

Most were empty and probably the result of snow, rain or a rogue leaf triggering the sensor, but there were quite a few animals to be seen as well.

As usual there were a lot like the above (which was taken on Christmas Day while we were in Japan), but also this shot of a squirrel being a bit more industrious:

Is that an acorn in his mouth?

There were also many – hundreds – of rabbit photos, all of which were at night in the snow. As you see there’s two in the above shot (taken early January), but what also caught my eye are the footprints in the top right. Here’s a better photo of them from a few days earlier:

They’re fairly big which suggests a deer, but they could also simply be a rabbit hopping through the snow? Unfortunately the camera didn’t catch them being made.

Two different cats visited these past few months, one quite a bit portlier than the other. Each was only in a single photo, so they were just passing through.

Here’s the fox from the last set, also passing through. Was he looking for rabbits, or perhaps smaller prey?

Such as whatever the above is? This is too small for a chipmunk so I assume some sort of mouse, and as we can tell from the blur it was legging it past the feeder. The white streak is its eye reflecting the UV light from the camera.

Chipmunks are also speedy little guys and difficult to catch on these cameras so the above is a good photo of one. This is fairly recent, so maybe it’s gotten warm enough for them to emerge from their burrows?

Birds are also somewhat rare on these photos, but here we see a mystery bird, a cardinal and a robin. Can anyone identify the one on the left.

And lastly this skunk visited us one night! There were a half dozen or so pics of it, all at very close range so his face was never visible. The camera is right next to the house so he came very close. I wonder if Loppi (who often monitors the yard from a window perch) saw him?

And if you’re wondering, there wasn’t even a single deer photo. This is highly unusual to say the least. I wonder where they’ve been?