Category: Food

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 🙂

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!

It’s Easter time again, and for the first time in a few years we (Kristin, Jessica and myself) coloured eggs:

I got two kits: the normal one and a ‘tie dye’ variant. We tried the tie-dye set first.

These are the six colours included. They come in small pellets which are dissolved in vinegar, and in real life look a bit less vibrant than in this photo.

The system to tie dye the egg involved a special frame in which to hold the cloth-wrapped egg while dye was added drop at a time via a dropper. It was fiddly and not easy (for kids?) and difficult to cover the entire egg. We quickly modified the technique to use paper towels without the frame. This was somewhat successful, and our tie-dyed eggs looked like this:

I think they look good. The interesting pattern on a few of them is from the paper towel.

Next we did the normal dyeing kit, which just involves placing the egg into the dye (a pellet dissolved in water and vinegar). In previous years we’d used crayons to put patterns on the eggs but the kit didn’t come with one this time so we had to be creative.

I tried to make one holiday specific! Can you guess who the character in the bottom right is supposed to be?

As usual it was fun and the eggs looked good The bottom right is what one looked like with the shell removed. You can see some of the dye went through the shell, and the brown colour is because she had roasted the eggs.

Here’s my little Easter snack which I am enjoying as I write this. I hope you have a good Easter 🙂