Candy Making Sunday!

We bought seven candy-making kits on recent trips and it’s time to make them all. I’ll cover one a day for the next week.

I’ve made Kracie brand kits before on this blog, but not this one which is traditional Japanese ‘fair food’. This one hasn’t been released in the USA so I had to rely on a translator to understand the instructions, but there wasn’t any complex steps so this was arguably not even necessary.

The above shows the contents of the box, and as usual for such kits everything begins in powder form and is mixed with water in the provided trays.

The powders are usually white and odorless and when you add water they take on their final colour and the smell (usually fruit) comes out. This is the candy apple base, which was then added to molds to make the apples.

The banana base was similar, although while the apples were fluid and had to set for a while (to become gummy) the banana material was plastic and sticky. All the other parts of the candies were made using similar means.

Here’s the finished product. If you compare this to the photo on the box you’ll note the grilled corn looks very different from the packaging! This is because the little candy pieces didn’t adhere to the base material. The rest looks good if I do say so myself, and ended up closely resembling the box photos.

The shaved ice (which was fizzy!) and corn (melon flavour) tasted best while the apples and bananas – while not bad – were not as good. The apples had a strange ‘grainy gummy’ texture which was a bit disagreeable, but the shaved ice bore an astonishing resemblance to actual ice!

Overall this was a fun platter of ‘food’ to make and tasty to eat so this kit (as with most Kracie kits) gets two thumbs up.

Let’s Try Gashapon!

KLS got a ‘Gashapon machine’ for her birthday!

It’s a scaled-down version of the real machines and works identically. In addition to the machine itself, the box contained 9 empty gacha balls and four tokens.

You put the token in the slot and turn the handle and out pops a ball. The machine defaults to using the plastic tokens, but can also be set to accept any Japanese coin (except ¥500).

It works well and looks cute, and now we just have to fill it! Every time we visit Japan we bring unopened gacha balls back with us to open over time. On our upcoming trip we’re going to pick up many of the smaller ball prizes so we can use this machine for months. 🙂

Don’t You Go Out In The Rain

We were both exhausted after two very full days. So naturally we woke at 5:30 for breakfast and the place we walked to (on dark, cold and wet streets) wasn’t even open! We returned to the hotel and got room service 🙂

The annual Columbus Day parade was scheduled for today but canceled due to the state of emergency (the rain has caused some flooding). I imagine many were in the city for the parade and hit the streets anyway. So even in the rain, the crowds were thick.

Look at that giant stuffed cat! This was on 5th Avenue where the rich people tourists shop, but I’m sure the cat itself wasn’t for sale 🙂

We visited the ‘diamond district’, which is a block of shops specializing in gemstones, luxury watches and jewelery. Rather than discrete shops, it’s an abundance of arcades each containing dozens of tiny shops on multiple levels. Apparently it’s the densest retail space in America with almost 4000 vendors in a single city block!

We saw some fabulously expensive items for sale. Many stands had large selections of Rolex watches for instance, and I asked the price of one and it was $16,500. Kristin liked a Tiffany bracelet at another vendor and it was a mere $175,000! There were also loads of diamond sellers and you could buy loose stones of any size, colour and cut. We saw loose diamonds costing over $20,000 and those were just the ones with price tags! Fascinating stuff and worth a window-shop if you’re ever in the city.

By now we were close to knackered, and it was time for a last visit to the Japanese snack shops before heading for the train station. I took the chance to buy more turkey Cheetos and cotton candy, and as we headed to the station I doubt there was space in our luggage to stash anything else!

If you wonder about all this shopping, every time we go to the city we find more shops, and this is especially true in the vicinity of ‘Koreatown’. We used to be able to do ‘our rounds’ in a single (very busy) day but that’s not feasible now. Hence the two days of shopping!

Oh and KLS got coffee made by a robot that printed a photo onto the foam! As you can see we had the robot make her a Zoffy coffee using one of our photos.

Another successful NYC trip has ended, and as usual we’ll need a day or two to recover. 70k steps in 3 days isn’t as easy as it used to be!