Popin' Cookin' Bento Candy Kit

Hey everyone! I hope your week has been awesome because we have another  post!

This kit is one of the more popular ones, having had a lot of reviews and videos done of it over time. It's still available on the market (yay!) but the kit has had a refresher (aka a change in packaging and contents) but it hasn't had a drastic change, with the exception of it having an additional bag of sprinkles and it no longer features the chicken nuggets. This one I bought for RM16.90 at Shojikiya, and it's still priced about the same for the new kit.

The inner packaging when opened out, had a surface for you to put your ready made bento on; with an illustration of a lunch box you could arrange it all on. The sides had the usual size guides and instructions on how to make the rice balls and how to operate the noodle mix bag. If you're going to use this as a plate or display, we do stress that you should at least give it a rinse first.

Inside, there's the usual plastic mold with all the bento 'food' shapes and mixing compartments. You get a little plastic fork as well and the dreaded plastic bag, on top of the six bags of mix that will create the goodies within.

Just pour the appropriate powders into each compartment and add the necessary amount of water as indicated by the instructions, then stir it with the fork. The liquid has quite the tendency to overflow so if you're a stickler for perfection I suppose you could mix it elsewhere and pour it into the mold instead. The octopus sausage mold made the most spectacular mess when we were getting it done because the tentacles were rather shallow.

While waiting for it all to solidify, we started on the other components.

The rice as expected was quite nice and fluffy when we mixed it up. It's important to follow the instructions when it comes to the water for this one; even the slightest extra will cause it to be goopy and very un-ricelike but too little will make it fail to congeal.

That done, we used the instructions on the inner packaging to make our panda riceballs and onigiri! After shaping it all, we pressed the larger riceball into the black powder molds to create a cute panda face, pressing the triangle in to make an onigiri and rolling the other two smaller balls to make the panda's 'ears'.

The powder was a little sour but had a bit of fizz to it. We ended up licking our fingers a lot! It stuck to the rice very well but there's was a lot leftover too. After that I just mixed up the chicken nuggets powder. It started off a bit gooey like the rice mix but congealed together in the end. 

Once done, we molded the chicken nuggets. They're a little more dense than the rice mix but they sure looked good. Separate the mix into two nuggets and press it each side with the fork to give it the 'katsu' look and you're good!

Next up was the pasta. Not to be defeated by the 'noodle goo' once again, we poured it right into the bag and mixed it there. Just make sure that there aren't any lumps and you're done.That said, simply nip off a corner of the bag and squeeze out the mix to make the 'spaghetti'. You can control how thick you want your pasta too, but thicker is better in this case.

By then the broccoli, egg roll and sausage had solidified nicely. They were all a little jiggly (it's jelly after all!) but weren't hard to remove from their molds. We then folded up the egg roll and it glued itself together easily before placing it all onto the plate.

I neglected to dry the plate before taking photos, so it's a little wet because the gummies had a little bit of dripping liquid when we took them out. I suppose if you left them in longer, they'd be a lot more dry unlike what you see here.

On to the tasting!

The spaghetti had a yogurty-starchy taste. It wasn't bad but at the same time not entirely flavourful either.

The egg roll tasted like grape. A bit strange coming from something yellow in colour but its likely it's white grape (muscat) flavour.

The rice tasted very plain but the slightly fizzy and sourish powder gave it a bit of a tingly kick. Otherwise the rice was just really fluffy and starchy.

I liked the chicken nugget thing a lot! I can't entirely remember what it tasted like but it was kinda yogurty I suppose.

The broccoli also tasted like grape(muscat) and the octopus sausage like strawberry. It's meant to be one of those really sweet kits so nothing here is actually savoury.

Spire sez: Well overall I'd say the kit was quite fun but I wasn't too big a fan of the flavours.. I felt they weren't strong enough and their choices of flavours were a bit out there (but a standard for Japanese candies) perhaps I am more biased towards the Happy Kitchen sets that actually put in more solid ingredients but I suppose that's just me.

If you like making a big mess and like eating the sweet aftermath, I say this kit is one of the 'must try' DIY items.

You could also probably wash out the mold and keep it for future projects using Jello I wager.

Spire's Ratings

Flavor: 4/5

Price: 3/5

DIY level: Easy

Fun: 3/5