Kabaya Saku Pan Choco Monaka Panda Wafer

Hi again!

Spire here, and this time we have something much simpler than our usual fare :)

The panda shaped snack is apparently pretty popular, to the point that it even has it's own DIY kit. The kit has since been pushed out of production but you can still find it in some speciality stores as part of it's last run.

I got this from Shojikiya for RM 3.90, making it one of the cheaper things you could buy there. The snack comes in two flavours, strawberry and chocolate. I decided to get the chocolate one because I have little faith in strawberry flavoured cream snacks ^^;

What I find rather amusing about this snack is that the back portion actually shows you how to eat it. So you can apparently either start eating it as is, or you can easily snap it in half to share with a friend (or save it for later) I suspect its just a Japanese thing to include helpful  instructions on everything :)

Opening up the package, I was hit by quite a strong whiff of chocolate. Then I was greeted by some very obviously heat damaged panda :(

At least it still vaguely looks like a panda.

The back looks happier than the front

Simply put, the snack can be roughly described as a wafer with cream filling in cream and chocolate flavours. The cream is firm and stays in place pretty well but is still fluffy to the touch. True to the instructions at the back, the wafter is quite crispy and snaps in half very easily too.

Now for a taste.

*crunch*

In terms of taste, the panda snack is very milky creamy with the darker bits having a mild chocolate flavour. It's not particularly strong tasting or sweet, and it's rather light and airy despite you actually sinking your teeth into a large dollop of cream filling. It's also not very sweet either so that's definitely a good thing.

Spire sez: Generally I didn't find it all that enjoyable because I'm not a fan of cream filling and the texture didn't entirely agree with me. Yes, it was tasty but it's not something I see myself trying again in the near future. But if you like tons of cream on your crackers you would probably find this much more enjoyable than I did.

Spire's Ratings

Flavor: 3/5

Price: 5/5

DIY level: Nonexistant

Fun: Nonexistant

Kracie Happy Kitchen Cupcakes

Heya guys, it's another week, so it's time for another candy review.This time we're looking at one of Kracie's DIY microwaveable candy kits; Cupcakes!

Unlike Kracie's Popin' Cookin line of DIY stuff, their Happy Kitchen kits are a little more complicated as they require microwaving to create the treats. If I'm right this kit cost RM 15.90, and it can sometimes be found at Isetan but I generally saw a lot of them at Shojikiya during it's run, it's unfortunately been discontinued but there's still some floating around in the market.

There's a fair bit of stuff in the box in this one. You get two icing bags, two sachets of 'mix' in both vanilla and chocolate flavour, the usual strawberry and vanilla cream, a bag of candy decorations that are milk flavoured and plum flavoured. You get a generic sachet of sprinkles too.

You'll be doing your baking using the three cute molds included in the kit. We have to chop up the entire plastic construction as usual and it falls into four compartments; the measuring 'spoon' which is their standard triangle shaped thing, the molds, one compartment to stir up your mix and the last compartment for the icing creams.

Just pour in either the vanilla or chocolate mix and fill in the required amount of water as indicated by the box.The resulting batters did smell fairly sweet, especially the vanilla. They were a little thick (and hard to pour out) so I ended up adding a little bit extra water so it flowed slightly better.I washed out the mixing compartment between flavours but you could also mix the two to make a cute swirly design as well.

When that's done just pour it into the molds and off they go into the microwave! depending on your micro's wattage, the cooking times are slightly different but it's between 20-30 seconds. I just watched it just in case.

The cupcakes rose in the microwave fairly quickly, and after letting it cool down for a short while they turned out very nice and fluffy. The smell was pretty nice too, a rather gentle sweetness.

Unfortunately I neglected to clear out the mold inbetween cupcakes so the chocolate ones came out pretty bad due to sticking to it. They might come of better if you oil the moulds very slightly (like with one tiny drop of oil and spreading it) before baking they will likely be easier to remove as well. I just cut off a little section of the malformed chocolate ones and shaped it a little so it looked nicer.

Now came the icing cream. Most of the time the instructions require you to mix it in the respective container and then scoop it into the icing bag, which is a terribly messy and wasteful thing to do in my opinion because I'm a massive fail and can never get all of it out properly. So in favour of trying to be more efficient, I simply poured in the powder and water directly into the bag and mixed it in there.This works just as well as long as you make sure you mix it really well.

You can also put the vanilla into a second icing bag but I wanted to spread it so I used the thing properly as it was intended. These are the usual stock icings that Kracie uses in a lot of kits so the taste wasn't exactly fantastic in any way (in my opinion) but they were fairly sweet.

Decorating went quite fast with the included spoon and icing bag though I decided to forgo the plum flavoured candies completely; they tasted rather bizarre to me.The milky candies tasted quite alright; but they're not something I'd eat all the time; they taste funny after awhile.

The cupcakes themselves were very nice. They were soft and spongey and generally tasted like very light versions of regular vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. The icings were, as expected rather mediocre.

Spire sez: Of the many kits by Kracie I've tried, this one I would categorize as one of the light ones in terms of it's simplicity. The end result on the other hand isn't really all that special but it was still quite fun decorating up the bite sized cupcakes. Also, who puts plum candies in with creamy tasting stuff? maybe it's a Japanese thing but I didn't find them very nice at all.Perhaps if they had included proper chocolate syrup or something else besides their stock vanilla and strawberry icings I'd give them more for their flavour score. Girls will like this kit a lot nonetheless.

Spire's Ratings

Flavor: 3/5

Price: 3/5

DIY level: Easy

Fun: 4/5

Popin' Cookin' Doughnuts Part 2!

Now finally being able to get around to the next bit, we have Popin' Cookin; Doughnuts Part 2!

[Part 1 can be found here]

Also, for those checking, the price was RM 15.90 from Shojikiya. Most of this stuff can be found there and/or bought from Isetan KLCC as well, in the candy section.

Picking up where Silvy let off, while the doughy stuff was 'setting' I set about to handle the icings. You get three sachets of icing, in the flavours of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate.

As expected, it was the usual goopy stuff. Just add a little water using the supplied cut-off plastic measuring-cup-triangle-thing and dump it in. The strawberry was very strong smelling, as expected, and also as expected, the vanilla and strawberry icings didn't have any redeeming qualities.

 They just plain tasted weird. Creamy, but weird.

 The chocolate icing on the other hand (not pictured) came out a lot more liquid after mixing, and it was surprisingly tasty! Which pretty made it the saving grace of this kit.

After the doughnuts had set, we opened up the two other sachets that had the obligatory sprinkles and little cookie crumbs so we could get started.

Decorating got a bit silly, as you only get the mixing spoon and a small icing bag to distribute the icing. The whole while we had to actually control ourselves from eating up the chocolate icing because, dammit, it was freaking tasty. THE TASTIEST thing I've ever had that came out of a sachet.

Well here we are, the finish product. There's one less in the picture because we gave one to the nice gentleman that let us sit at his store well after closing time to let us finish this up. The icing is a funny thing. It tends to liquidize slightly after applying them onto the little spongy doughnut candies and then drip.

 Suffice to say, they didn't taste too bad. Of course, they didn't have the texture of real dougnuts, but it was a pretty fun kit. And we wish there was more chocolate stuff. Really, we do.

Also, a newer version of this kit has since hit the market under the same brand, so keep an eye out for different packaging.

Spire sez: This is a very nice kit, and if it weren't for the weird tasting vanilla and strawberry icing, I would recommend it in a heartbeat. The doughnuts themselves are a bit fiddly to get out of the molds because they tend to fall apart a bit, but overall I give it a thumbs up.

Silvy says: This kit was surprisingly fun and entertaining for me. The doughnut molds were rather fiddly (the 'dough' kept breaking up) but once they've popped out, it's pretty much smooth sailing all the way. Vanilla and strawberry icing tasted horrible, but the chocolate was divine! Give this a try when you can, you'll love it :D

Spire's Ratings

Flavor: 4/5

Price: 3/5

DIY level: Moderate

Fun: 5/5

Silvy's Ratings

Flavor: 3/5

Price: 3/5

DIY level: Moderate

Fun: 5/5

Popin' Cookin' Soft Cream Pt 2

Silvy here, reporting for the continuation of our experiment :)

So the last you saw was on the cream in the piping tube. We started making ice creams! Trust me, it's harder than it looks!! Especially when we have giant hands that are unused to creating tiny items.

The silly mistake I made here was to snip off the tip a wee bit too big, so our works ended up looking rather clumsy :(

Here's how it looks like, with Spire holding it up to the camera

I call this the wafer boat, and our task is to fill this up and decorate it as creatively as we could. Well, we tried anyway haha.

So first, according to the illustration (because we couldn't read Japanese) was to pad the bottom with some wafer bits, which we did.

Time to fill up the boat! This was pretty fun, since it doesn't really require absolute precision skills! :D

So once the base has been covered, Spire proceeded to decorate the top...with swirls! :D

Yay one is done! Of course, it's not exactly perfect or awesome at the moment, but the basic boat is done anyway.

Creative-time! Spire continues by adding Hershey-like drops to the boat. This was fun, though the cream was pretty thick that it became fiddly to get the shapes the same for all.

Oh noes, one side of it drooped! :( But no worries, we had something worked out just for that in the end, you'll see :D

Spire sez: By this point, the thing kinda looked like a sea slug :P

See? Sprinkles and wafer sticks make the boat looks nicer now! All right all right I'm probably exaggerating that a bit, but it's the best we could do! Not bad for two beginners on these fiddly sweets XD

Now that the boat is somewhat done, let's move on to the next sweet. It's time for some soft cream on cones! It's now my turn to start first, and it was HARD. I couldn't stop laughing to the point that my hands were really shaky.

Hmmm....Pink poop?

My attempt looks weird, and it made me want to redo the whole thing from scratch! :(

And the Spire had her turn, and check out how she started hers! It goes to show my creative thinking has just gone down the drain when I started on mine *facepalm*

So we see Spire hard at work with that teeny tiny ice cream of hers :D

Yay the ice cream is done, complete with a stick of wafer stuck to its side too! :D

I didn't like mine looking so weird and ugly, so I tried redo-ing it again. Now it looks like a gigantic sized ice cream hahaha. The one on the left is done by Spire and the one on the right is mine. Yes, both have been sprinkle-fied! :D

And onwards we go to our next ice cream creation! This time it's wafer ice cream. This one was a wee bit more annoying to get it done right cause we totally didn't follow the instructions....much. Hahaha

So I snapped the wafer...only to realize that I should have used the plastic spatula that was included in the set. Now it looks rather ugly :(

We staaaaared at the wafer trying to figure out what to do with it, so here's some experimentation!

Pink flower atop the wafer, decorated with sprinkles? Okay, worth a shot!

So we decided to stick the wafers together (using a dab of the same cream to stick them together) and now it looks like a slipper.

More sprinkles! At that point of time we had really far too much sprinkles so why not add some glamour to the creations? XD

So after a couple of cursing moments, a dash of creativity, and a whole load of fun and laughter, we present to you the final end results of the Popin' Cookin' Soft Cream!

Ta-dah!!! The dishes are served :)

My stomach wasn't feel all too well when we were getting this done so Spire had about 90% of the sweets displayed on the table. Well, I took the ice cream that I made anyway. And somehow the sweets didn't agree with Spire's tummy so she ended up in the toilet for a moment. Whoops! :x

My ratings? Not bad for a DIY kit but definitely not great for kids, and the taste isn't that good either.

Spire sez: If your kids/selves have decoden skills, you might enjoy this more, I think the taste was a bit off because the kit was a little close to expiry but otherwise the overdose of cream-stuff probably isn't good for you anyway.

Silvy's Ratings

Flavor: 2/5

Price: 3/5

DIY level: Medium

Fun: 4/5

Spire's Ratings

Flavor: 3/5

Price: 3/5

DIY level: Medium

Fun: 3/5

Introductory Post: Popin' Cookin' Soft Cream Pt 1

Spire here, and welcome to SugarNom's first ever *proper* posting!

Sil and I decided to start this here blog because I had developed a habit of searching out and trying these newfangled Japanese DIY candies and other random whatnot which is probably destroying my teeth as we speak.

To start, I came across these two sets a few months back, the Popin' Cookin' Sushi and Soft Cream sets.We decided to start with the Soft Cream set first because it was smaller, and thank goodness it wasn't too hard to figure out what to do seeming the entirety of the thing was in Japanese.

But basically with this kit you'll be able to make 2 soft serve ice creams, a tart of some sort and a cake of some sort, with the wafers inside. The set cost about RM12 and I got it at a Japanese fair that was happening in Empire Subang at the time. When opened...box in a box! With instructions!
This is pretty much what it looks like with the wrapper removed. Inside were 2 ice cream cones, two different sizes of wafers, a bag of sprinkles, a small green spatula-spoon thing, a clear plastic piping bag and lastly two sachets of powder, one for vanilla 'cream' and another for strawberry 'cream' The box itself serves as a place for you to stand up your ice creams and to mix your 'cream' up as per instructions. One corner of the box can be snapped off to use as a measuring cup for the water you need for this whole endeavor.

Now sorry for the semi-crappy image quality, we decided to hang out in Coffee Bean to do this because well, freeflow water? And also, waaaaafers.

So first you chop off the little triangle shaped water measure thing and fill it to the indicator. Then you pour out the powder into the compartments like below. Both will be pure white till it gets a hit of water.
Then you stir like the wind! The stuff will turn into a creamy, extremely sweet smelling 'cream' of somekind that makes you wonder if Japan could survive on just miracle powder and water alone. Then when you're done, you need to take that little green spatula and stuff the cream into the piping bag given. We say this is the toughest part if you don't want both creams to mix and turn into an ugly mush.
Its also the part that took us the longest. But between both Sil and I we managed to get both creams in without causing a sugary holocaust on the table.
Tadaa! By this point I was already cursing my ass off, and Sil was laughing at me most of the time. But the real fun was yet to come!

Stick around for Pt 2! When the end results of the madness await!