When I first arrived in Japan, many years ago, no matter where I traveled (and I traveled alot for my job), everywhere I would see Japanese teens, usually schoolgirls, in their own unique uniform, crunching on little sticks of Pocky. It was a national epidemic and every day after school I'd see dozens of girls nibbling on these little sticks. I immediately had to try these and they were instantly addictive.
Having made a batch earlier with about 100 of these sticks leftover (yes it seriously makes a lot), I sought another use for these sticks. I knew I was going over to M's house and with 2 hungry growing boys, I decided that they would be Pocky recipients!
I wondered what would go well with these biscuity sticks that would appeal to kids...candy of course! And ice cream. A kid's meal trifecta if ever I heard one. I bought some mini M&Ms, mini marshmallows, some colourful hundreds and thousands and crushed up some Jaffas.
For this lot of Pocky sticks (I coated 50 of them in this batch), I needed a 375g bag of white chocolate chips. The sticks themselves were from the recipe that I wrote about earlier and I melted the chocolate in two lots. While the chocolate was drying I sprinkled the toppings (the most fun part). You don't need a lot of the candy toppings, a small 50g bag of any of them would be more than plenty to sprinkle on a dozen of these sticks.
Once the Pocky sticks are made, you could even get a little child labour involved by way of an assembly line with one child dipping (the organised leader) and the others doing whatever task suits their personality. The child with the excess energy could have lots of fun crushing up the Jaffas (and they do need quite a bit of crushing).
Whilst the precise and ordered child could place the Mini M&Ms just so...
Whilst the colour co-ordinated child could do the Mini Marshmallows in an alternating colour order. After all what better way to show children that hard work is rewarded?
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