Halloween Pocky for Pocky lovers!! I love pocky. It is not an overstatement if I say Pocky represents Japanese snacks. Pocky has been around in Japan as long as I can remember and they are a really cheap snack in Japan.
Pocky comes in many flavours and can be purchased at Daiso in Australia for $2.80. However, when I was young, Pocky was such a precious treat that I could only afford to eat it on special occasions like school excursions in Autumn or when I had Otoshidama (New Year’s money gift for children) and saved up for it. Pocky was about ￥150 and it was a lot to me when my pocket money was only ￥30 a day. That is the equivalent of 50 cents! So If I was that desperate to eat Pocky, I had to go without Oyatsu (kid’s afternoon snack) for three days. This was a significant endurance (gaman) for a Japanese kid. Or you could buy Pocky when you received around ￥300 for excursion snacks. That was the most memorable, fun event at school. In Autumn, schools organised one day excursion for each grade. Usually schools in Japan provide lunch for students. But, on special days like excursions, when we were outside of the school, parents were asked to make Bento for their kids. We sometimes received a special allowance to buy our own snacks to take. That was the most enjoyable part of all excursions, buying snacks at a set price by the school a day before. So School excursion fun began a day before – and Pocky was always on my list.
Now I live in Australia and pocky are available, but they are a little bit expensive so I make Pocky when I can. It is quite easy to make and like making Gyoza, it is a fun thing to do. Many Japanese people are they are crazy about cute decorations and costumes. Halloween is a big thing, along with Christmas in Japan nowadays. So I wanted to make something Halloween themed. I was looking through Pinterest when I saw stick pretzels coated with white and green icing, I had a light bulb moment. I thought I could make a Pocky version of it using Japanese flavour – Matcha! You can read the original at catchmyparty.com
Making this Halloween pocky took for a while because I made those eye balls from scratch too. I wanted to use ready made marzipan from supermarkets, but they were too big and I could not find a smaller size eyeball in Brisbane. Usually pocky are thin sticks, but I wanted to make it a little fatter so that it will be easy to attach those eyes and look more like mini Frankenstein, Mummies and Ghosts. You also need to be careful with the temperature when melting chocolate. The temperature should be around 50 degree Celsius. If it goes any higher temperature, the chocolate will separate and when you add matcha. In this case, you add powder matcha, not liquid. As soon as any liquid or moisture is added to melted chocolate, seizing happens. Melted chocolate becomes grainy and lumpy rather than a smooth melted texture. Apart from those two points, making Halloween Pocky is an easy and fun activity.
Halloween Pocky
Ingredients
- 150 g Plain flour
- 1 tbsp Sugar
- A pinch of salt
- 50 g Unsalted butter
- 3 tbs Milk
- 100 g white chocolate
- 1/2 tsp matcha powder
- store bought eye balls for decoration
- dark brown or black Icing pen for decoration
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180c.
- Add all the dry ingredients into a food processor and pulse one or two times.
- Add the chopped butter into the food processor and pulse two or three times until it turns into something like bread crumbs
- Add the milk and pulse again.
- Wrap the ball of dough with saran wrap and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes.
- Roll it out between a baking sheet and the wrap until it's about 8mm thick.
- Cut off the excess dough to make a rectangle shape and cut it 8mm apart into thin sticks.
- Bake it in the oven for 20 minutes.
- Melt white chocolate in a double boiler.
- divide the melted chocolate into two and add matcha powder in one.
- Dip each pocky stick and attach eye balls then set aside for the chocolate set.
- draw the face with a decoration icing pen.
Notes
Nutrition
so cute and funny!
thank you xDD
Wonderful!
Thank you Anita
I love Pocky! These are so cute for Halloween! 🙂
Me too Marsha 😀 Thank you!!