Robot Claw

This is a relative of the drink kits from Monday, only this one makes a magical potion.

One of the packets is dissolved in water in the plastic potion bottle, which produces a vivid pink solution:

It looked a bit more purple in real life, since the above photo was taken in direct sunlight.

The next step was to add the second packet. The instructions advised to put the bottle on a tray due to overflow, and suggested the colour would change.

And… it did! The reaction took some time to begin, but was quite effective as it was going. This would be very exciting for a child.

The taste? Just the usual sickly sweet of these sorts of drinks. I consider myself a top-tier fan of sugar but even these are beyond my ability to enjoy.

A fun little experiment then, but not worth drinking 🙂

Today we have a Korean frog-egg kit and…. something else.

The frog kit contained powder that was dissolved in water, and then the the green liquid was droppered into the fluid:

I’d done something like this in a previous candy making kit, and it was no less impressive this time. The idea here is you’re making frog eggs, and it worked well and they looked convincing:

They were very slippery and difficult to remove, but here they are on the included spoon:

The taste was a subtle lime, although my friend (who gave this to me) thought it should have been cola! Regardless, this was a success 🙂

The other ‘kit’ – called Strange Syrup – contained a tray, a plastic spatula, and four little sachets of thick coloured syrup.

These had the consistency of thick honey, and were in four flavours: apple, orange, lemon and ramune (a Japanese sweet soda).

After we added them to the tray…. we didn’t know what to do. The instructions for the kit were terrible, and I even went to the company website and downloaded expanded instructions which were equally vague:

It seemed this was not so much a candy kit as a packet of four flavours you could mix together to use as a drink base? So with the remaining packets I did exactly this:

I then mixed them all together and then dissolved it in water.

It tasted awful. Truly, truly abysmal. I couldn’t pour it out fast enough.

So was this even a candy kit? Or a drink kit? I don’t know. Either way, it was a failure!

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 🙂