Robot Claw

Today we’re making crème brûlée! I don’t even know what it is, and if it wasn’t for autocorrect would never have spelled it correctly. While this kit sets to reproduce the look of crème brûlée, it’s actually apple flavoured! I believe this is a candy making kit aimed at an older and more discerning customer, and I bought this one in Japan when I was there last summer.

I forgot to take a photo of the contents of the package, but they were largely the same as the other candy making kits: a plastic tray/mold and several bags of powder. The first step was mixing one packet with water to make a green slurry and then adding a second packet to the mixture, which turned it into a sort of yellow pudding.

Then another powder is dusted on top of the mixture and then put water is dropped on top (one drop at a time) until it is all damp. You need to let it sit for a while then, during which a fourth packet was used to make the butter sauce (and yes it tasted of butter) in the other side of the tray.

This is what it looked like at this point, and after letting it sit for about ten minutes the miracle had occurred:

The surface of the crème brûlée had hardened! Of course the intent here is to reproduce the real dessert where the surface is heated using a blowtorch, and whatever chemical reaction happened between the water and mystery powder it did a wonderful job. As you can see it even cracked when broken with a spoon!

As for the taste: KLS liked it a lot! This kit was fun to make and both looked and tasted good. Two thumbs up!

This Kuromi ‘chocolate’ kit is Korean (all the others this week are Japanese) and can be used to make a lollipop and a few smaller candies.

The box contains a mold, a lollipop stick and three tubes of ‘chocolate’. The chocolate is solid, and the first step is to melt it by putting the tubes in hot water:

As you can see there are three flavours: vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. There’s no specific instructions on how to use each, and the design of each candy is up to you.

The candies are made by squeezing the chocolate into the molds, and Kristin (who made these) quickly noticed it solidified quickly so every few seconds they had to be put back into the hot water. But the worst was yet to come: it turned out the chocolate tube had a crack in it….

Because of this crack, not only did the chocolate leech out into the hot water, but some of the water also leeched into the chocolate. This was inseparable, and the chocolate was a watery mess as it came out of the tubes.

Regardless she pressed on and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes as per the instructions, and here’s the finished product:

The flavours were strong, but for me sickly sweet. The chocolate was waterlogged and didn’t truly set, but it’s still recognizably Kuromi and was edible so it’s not a complete fail. But it would have been better had that one tube not had a flaw 🙂

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.