Odangoyasan DIY Kit

Oh boy, finally a legitimate diy kit! I wagged my tail excitedly when I first saw it, and now it's going into hyper drive as I'm about to try it. Like a propeller. I've really wanted to build things and then eat them for a while, and while I've received DIY kits from Japan Crate in the past, they've seemed a bit... simplistic. But this one has plenty of components to it--5 in fact, which are, in reading order, a matcha roll, strawberry daifuku, kuzu manju, shiritama anmitsu, and kashiwa mochi.

I definitely know what the first two are. The kuzu manju I thought was taiyaki, but seems that kuzu manju can have it as well. Although it seems to be about the same composition as taiyaki being a cake with red bean paste in it. The anmitsu seems to be your typical mochi, paste and dumpling combination. The kasiwa mochi is a red bean stuffed mochi surrounded by an oak leaf. Now that I know what all of these are, let's get into it!

Surprisingly, the bag already had a nice sweet smell in it that was like a combination of pastry and red bean paste, which... sounds about right. The contents are five bags, two molds, a small bag, and a cute little scooper utensil. All that's needed otherwise is water and scissors. Let's get started!

The first step is to make the red bean paste, which uses a section with a heart on it (cool that they used symbols to identify the rectangular tray sections). And here it was when I realized that my method of using a cup full of water to pour would not be good, as it was very hard to pour into this small container and spilled all over my paws! Better find a fountain. Anyways, the small tray also made it difficult to pour in the larger packet of red bean paste, but by being very careful I got it. Stirring was also quite difficult because of the small tray size. If my paws were any bigger I would certainly have a rough time!

The next step involves the jelly, and considering a lot of the instructions tell me to do this quickly, I'm scared, but I'll certainly try. This step involved putting the gelatin base into the bag and shaking it until jelly was formed, then by cutting off a corner of the bag squeezing the jelly into the fish and square molds. With the fish mold being filled with red bean paste on the way up. Unfortunately being the greedy pup I put in too much jelly on the first layer of the fish and then too much red bean filling, so there's a bit of an overfill and aberration at the bottom, but hey, presentation doesn't matter when only I'm eating it right?

The next 3 packets went about the same: Or at least, they should have. For all three of them the instructions were to mix water with them, put some in tray sections, the rest on the plate... until I realized my errors when doing what I thought was the white packet. I had actually mixed up the white packet and gelatin base! As such I removed the white goo from the square shaped molds and used that to make some balls, but the white stuff in the fish is long gone. Hope it won't affect the taste too much...

And the final step was just assembling each of the desserts using the different components created. Try not to laugh at my creations too hard! The white goo/gelatin mixup did affect me heavily, especially with the kuzu manju (which looks nothing like a fish) but I'm sure everything will taste fine. Actually I KNOW it will because I definitely at some point started using my paws to assemble and licking them when it was time to move onto the next thing. That has to be the real fun of these kits.

First up was the strawberry daifuku which actually tasted very nice! The combination of the white goo and strawberries and red bean paste works very well. The pink goo is definitely my favorite of the 3 from licking my paws, so I'll take anything involving that. The kuzu manju... hard to say because it's wrong, but again a good idea with the red bean filling. The two with the green goo had the same ingredients, but were both very good, and it was nice to have a touch of matcha in the mix! The anmitsu, being the only dish (in my version) with gelatin was quite good. The gelatin is probably the sweetest of any of the goos, but not overly sweet, because all of them are pretty spot on with the flavor-sweetness balance. Too bad I didn't make the kuzu manju right because I would've loved to try the pure red bean and gelatin combination.

All in all despite my mistakes, the kit was fun and straightforward, a little difficult in execution for some parts but every part of it was very yummy. It does reuse many of the same components in the desserts which can get a bit old but hey, why add even more steps?

Rating: - Rowf!