Piplup, Pikachu — we bake you!
We’ve seen a lot of amazing Pokémon sweets appear in Japan over the years, but surprisingly, some of the cutest confections aren’t official creations but ones made by diehard fans.
Now, Pokémon is stepping up to the plate to right that wrong with an official release of their own called the Cookie Kit. Released at the Pokémon Centre online store just the other day, the new kits created a buzz amongst fans and instantly sold out online, but we were lucky enough to buy a couple to try out for ourselves.
▼ We bought a Pikachu kit and a Piplup kit, priced at 1,320 yen (US$11.40) each.
The kits contain a cookie mix, chocolate pens, and the pièce de résistance — official character moulds, which allow you to create perfectly shaped Pokémon every time.
It’s surprisingly difficult to mould dough into the shape of Pikachu’s face by hand, so in the absence of official moulds, fans have had to make their own or resort to using rabbit moulds instead.
Official Pikachu moulds is something home bakers have been dreaming of for years, so for us, the moulds alone were already worth the 1,320 yen we paid for the kit.
We’re not the best bakers, though, so we still had some reservations about whether these would turn out to be any good at all.
▼ Could we achieve the same results on the packages?
After rolling out the dough and using the cutters as instructed, we found they were a breeze to make. The thinner the dough, the easier it was to cut, and the smaller stamping implement was great for adding facial details while helping to push the shape out once it had been cut, giving us a clean finish every time.
Look how cute they are! Neat, uniform, and adorable — something we’d never have been able to achieve without the use of moulds.
Each kit makes about 10 cookies, and they grow quite a bit in the oven so it’s best to leave some space between them before baking. After 15 minutes in the oven, we pulled our tray out and left the cookies to cool for a bit before getting to the fun part of decorating them.
The little ridges and marks created by the stamp we’d used on the cookies prior to baking really came in handy for creating a professional-looking finish with the chocolate pens.
To see how well the cookie kit worked, we baked and decorated one Pikachu cookie without any moulds for a comparison.
▼ Our poor man’s Pikachu…
▼ …and the Pikachu made with the official kit!
With results like these, we’ve gotta say, these kits are pretty amazing, and definitely worth the hype surrounding them. The shape and balance of the character features on each cookie were spot-on, and we were able to achieve equally impressive results with the Piplup kit too.
▼ We just need a liiiitle more practice with the chocolate pen to perfect our Piplups.
While the Pikachu and Piplup Cookie Kits sold out when they were released online on 7 March, they were restocked the following day…only to sell out again.
This means it’s likely the cookie kits will be in stock in limited numbers each day, but you’ll have to be quick to catch ’em before they sell out. Because nobody should settle for unofficial Pokémon cookies that look like knock-off merch or these scary Mister Donut doughnuts, which were deemed too uncute to live!
Related: Pokémon Cookie Kit
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