Chestnuts signify the presence of winter in many cultures. Although I’ve never actually tried chestnuts roasted by an open fire, I have tried the Japanese version of chestnuts simmered in simple syrup, or kuri no kanroni. However, I had never taken the initiative to prepare a chestnut dish because the task of peeling always seemed so daunting.

But this display, staring me in the face as I entered my local market, made me want to take on the challenge.

The sheer number of chestnut peeling Youtube videos on the internet gives you some insight into just how problematic these nuts are.

It would have been nice to have one of those handy tools for the peeling process… But I only had a knife and 10 fingers so I tried this method.

Cut bottom of chestnut with scissors and peel the rest by hand. I also found it helpful to shimmy one of the scissor points between the nut and shell and gently cracking it open.

Cut

Peel

To get rid of the inner skin, bake in a 400˚F degree oven for 10 minutes.

This out layer will be easy to remove after it’s dried out and crackly.

Kuri no kanroni is considered a special treat in Japan. The chestnuts are simmered in simple syrup and have a beautiful deep yellow-mustard color to them. The chestnuts are also chiseled in a way that none of the brain-like crevices of the chestnut remains. Mine, on the contrary, are au naturel as I did not chisel them down. They also don’t have a uniform color to them because I did not pare them down.

Kuri no kanroni are most often served alone or in red bean paste desserts. Considering the labor that goes into peeling and simmering a whole chestnut, in tact, I now understand why these are so expensive.

Chestnuts are part of Japanese New Year festivities, most commonly as kuri kinton or mashed sweet potato with chestnuts. I am invited to a New Years Dinner this year and am very excited to bring a chestnut dish as my festive contribution.

Kuri no kanroni (Chestnuts Simmered in Syrup)

INGREDIENTS
1/2 lb peeled raw chesnuts
10 tbs of sugar
Water

METHOD

1. Peel the chestnuts. (This will no doubt be the hardest task).

2. Put chestnuts in a saucepan and cover with water.

Bring to a boil, then decrease to low heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.

3. Raise chestnuts in a collander and rinse with cold water.

4. In the saucepan, add 1.5 cups of water and 5 tablespoons of sugar.

5. Melt the sugar on med-hi. When the sugar dissolves, add the chestnuts. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat off.

6. Cover with a paper towel or cheesecloth and leave for at least 5 hours.

7. After at least 5 hours remove the cheesecloth and add 5 more tablespoons of sugar. Bring to a boil, then turn heat off immediately. Mix so that the sugar dissolves while being careful not to smush chestnuts.

8. Wait for at least 5 more hours.

9. Preserve in jars.

These chestnuts will have the texture of a dense sweet potato. Because the only ingredient enhancing its flavor is sugar, kuri no kanroni is a very good dish to showcase the unique flavor of chestnuts which seem to curiously possess an expansive sweet and savoriness to them that makes me nostalgic for some reason. The Japanese word to describe the taste would be yasashii (gentle/kind).

Mine did not come out looking much like professional kuri no kanroni, instead the look (golden brown) and feel of them (firm but moist) was much closer to those zip-packs called Muki kuri that are sold at convenient stores and grocery stores throughout Japan. I can still imagine using these for Japanese sweets cooking though. I will try submerging these in my mizu yokan.

Full of fiber and protein these are great for taking along for a picnic. Or make the squirrels jealous as you pop them in your mouth while hiking.

Akemashite omedetougozaimasu! (Happy new year!)

In honor of this last day of Hanukkah, I made sufganiyot (jelly donuts). Believe it or not, this is a Hanukkah tradition, right along with latkes (potato pancakes). This was the first time I’d made them so I used Martha Stewart’s recipe. They came out great!

*This post first appeared on Erin Gleeson’s website Forest Feast on December 27, 2011.

By Kenji Miura

I celebrated Christmas in Japan by making wagashi, or traditional Japanese sweets.

Santa is shaped out of shiro-an (white bean paste).

The holly is made out of ogura tsubu-an (red beans boiled with sugar, skin-on).

The tree is comprised of shiro-an and kanten (agar agar). The kinton (mashed substance, in this case the shiro-an and kanten) was then pressed through a special lattice seive. Thick strands pushed through the sieve were then arranged into a mound to depict a Christmas tree.

*Kenji Miura is a professional photographer based in Tokyo.

**Article translated by Yoko Kumano, from Japanese to English.

There’s a big financial crisis pillaging through the poor, run down viking villages of Denmark. It’s the revisiting ghost from 2008.

Even though we’re still doing better than many of the South European countries, a lot of people are being laid off work and therefore no one’s shopping. At all.

All my self-employed friends who own stores are quietly sobbing into their entire Fall/winter 2011 wardrobe which still hangs in the store windows untouched and unbought. Soon it’ll all be on sale and the hoarding vultures will stand in lines like it was a bread shop in the former Sovjet anno 1983. It’s just sad.

Even in my own family we have decided to keep a gift spending max of $54 on each family member this year in order not to send anyone into unwillful Christmas gift-giving ruin.

Which is why I’m also making my own confections this year. I wanted to save money and thought it’d be cheaper just to use leftovers from my glögg session this weekend.

I had some pomerans (bitter orange) and some almonds lying around, so all I needed to buy was some chocolate.

INGREDIENTS
10 pieces

100 g blanched almonds (about 3/4 cup)
100 g good dark chocolate (about 3/4 cup)
1 Sevillia orange/pomeran
Some marzipan if you have any

+++

If you can afford it, spend some money on really good chocolate, like this 64% Valrhona.

It’s really worth it. Around $6 for 100g.

Chop it up good. Divide into two piles.

Chop the blanched almonds and the pomerans well and mix it up.

This is some kind of very rugged marzipan.

The pomerans has a soft, tangy, orangey flavour which goes super well with almonds.

Now comes the annoying part. I hate the super complicated process of melting chocolate.

Supposedly it’s all about the crystals and how fast it’s heated and how slowly it’s cooled down.

I read online in some forums that you should divide the chocolate into two groups. Heat up one part to 41˚C/ 106˚F (use a thermometer) where it’s all melted well, take it off the heat and add the other part of the chopped chocolate.

The chopped, unmelted chocolate still retains the “good kind of crystals” which then spread into the melted ones. Keep it around 31˚C/81˚F and you should be good to go.

If you have marzipan, mix it up now with the chopped almonds and pomerans. It’ll make it stick together better.

I didn’t have any lying around, so I had to do without. I formed a little ball on a teaspoon and dipped it into the chocolate.

It sort of falls apart of course, but that’s the charm here. Place it on baking paper and drop some more chocolate on top so you end up with rugged piles of joy.

Let the chocolate cool off.

They look kinda messy but they taste so good.

The crunchiness of the almonds together with the underlying orangey flavour from the pomerans really has something special to it.

The chocolate didn’t end up so well after all even though it did retain some gloss and some good bite = ok crystals but could be better. Well, I’m no pro. This piece of chocolate would be $5 a pop in stores so it is cheaper to make it yourself. And once you start eating these you just can’t stop.

Next time I’ll try to add a bit of marzipan to the mix making it all stick better together and I might end up with some pretty good looking chocolate balls.

Brownies come many a kind — I like these particular ones because they’re very light and discrete in flavour which means you can eat the whole cake and not feel overstuffed (even though you most certainly will be).

To me, brownies should be heavy, soggy, small bricks of chocolate. This is a recipe I’ve been playing around with for some time and made super basic, and whenever my friends sink their teeth into it they fall in love.

INGREDIENTS
100g butter (7 tblsp)
200g white sugar (little less than a cup)
2 eggs

60g white flour (1/4 cup)
1,5 tblsp cocoa powder
100 g walnut halves (1/2 cup)
1.5 tsp vanilla sugar
0.5 tsp baking powder
3 g salt (pinch more than a 1/2 teaspoon)

QUICK RECIPE
1. Melt the butter and mix it with the sugar and the eggs. Use an electric mixer.

2. Mix together all the dry ingredients and add it to the butter/sugar/egg mixture.

3. Whisk it up real good.

4. Add walnut halves and mix it through using a spatula.

5. Find a good-sized baking pan (perhaps 18 x 26 cm or perhaps a bit smaller) and cover it with wax paper. Pour the dough.

Note: It’s important that the pan isn’t too small as you want the dough to flow out when melting and then rise up into a very low cake.

6. Bake at 175˚C / 350˚F for 20-30 minutes.

7. Decorate with powdered sugar, leaves, ice cream or white chocolate.

I might experiment next time with adding chopped dark chocolate bits.

+++

RECIPE + PHOTOS

I apologize for the yellowish, muted photos. Denmark is in its darkest period at this time of year and it’s so overclouded that there’s barely any good photo light in my kitchen even though I turn on all the electric light.

Most of these ingredients are organic, but normally it’s hard to find that stuff in plain Danish supermarkets. I hope it gets easier. As usual Berkeley is far far away.

Also I personally prefer barn eggs (free-range) instead of organic eggs as barn chickens get more space, light and access to digging into the real ground. Organic chickens might live in small cages in the darkness and it would still be legal. So support your local barn chicken farm.

200g white sugar in my old-style kitchen scale.

Melt the butter before mixing. You don’t have to melt it into an all gooey pool of fat, just soften it enough to make it mixable.

Spoons with vanilla sugar, baking powder and cocoa powder.

Mix all the dry ingredients together.

Add some sea salt.

Mix butter and white sugar.

Fluff it up.

Add barn eggs and mix…

…into a silky smooth butter texture.

Add the bowl with dry ingredients and mix it all up.

Now it’s starting to look like chocolate cake dough.

Find a good baking tray and cover in baking paper. This is slightly too big, but rather that than too small.

Place the dough in the pan and off it goes into the preheated oven (175˚C / 350˚F). Don’t worry too much about getting it all flattened out in the pan — it will flow out by itself as it warms up.

Bake it…

…and then it will rise and fill out the bottom of the pan.

Bake for 20-30 minutes. Take it out and let it cool on a rack.

Cut into square pieces and serve with vanilla ice cream, green tea ice cream or sour cream. Or eat it right now.

Personally I prefer to let it sit for a good while — it’s almost better the day after when it’s cooled down and become chunky and full of flavour.

Perfect for those long winter nights when you’re prepping the holiday shopping lists, wrapping Christmas presents and in reality wanting to escape to the moon or Hawaii instead, no?

As I’ve written in a post some years ago, Iceland is a nation of candy addicts. Especially if the candy is chocolate mixed with liquorice. It’s crazy how much candy the Icelandic people eat – but since there’s no fresh ice cream tradition like in Italy or warm, salty pretzels like in Germany – I guess you can’t blame them. This is what they got.

Check out this shitload of nammi – candy in Icelandic. It goes all the way to the end and continues on the other side.

This and many more aisles are standard equipment in all supermarkets of Iceland.

They also have a lot of darkness in Iceland. In the winter there’s hardly any light so the body and mind needs something to get a little positivity from when you’re curling up under the blankets while it snows outside and the lava and volcanos are bubbling underneath the floor boards. This is the exact opposite of sunny Los Angeles where people wake up every morning under a palm tree and blue skies – no need for anti-depressives or truckloads of candy in the city of angels…. oh, never mind.

The island of Iceland is a vast, windy, miserable, mysterious and very evil place to live.

Out driving and having fun on the icy roads. Well, actually we almost died, but that’s another story…

But it can also be very very beautiful.

Especially the Icelandic horses are super friendly, brave, strong and very well bred.

And they’re always ready to give you a ride to the nearest supermarket.

Like, for example BÓNUS, the most popular discount chain in the country.

Here you really have a visual company identity with Icelandic attitude: shocking yellow featuring a pink fucked up piggy bank on drugs.

It’s so awful that it totally rules. You can see from miles a away when someone’s been shopping in BÓNUS with one look at their plastic bags. Great branding.

This is where most Icelandic peeps get their daily groceries from. A yellow/pink plastic hell.

There’s a very long way to Berkeley’s green farmer’s markets and organic outdoor hippie stalls.
At least that little dude is eating a banana. It’s not nammi time all the time after all.

So, back to Copenhagen where for dessert last week,  my Iceland-resident (but American) friend brought nammi (candy) from Iceland. And I thought I’d snap a few photos and talk about it.

Basically, it’s all chocolate with liquorice. Not everyone likes that mix, many people don’t even like liqourice in the first place.
But this is Scandinavia and babies are fed liquorice from before they can walk.

Lakkris sprengjur (liquorice bombs)

Liquorice flavoured hard caramel covered in chocolate.

They’re really good, but watch your teeth. They might crack when biting into a bomb.

Oh, and what is this? Lakkris konfekt. I wonder if this is available outside Scandinavia? It sure is popular here.

Yes, the theme again is liquorice, you guessed correctly. Those other colours are stuff that tastes of sugar, marzipan and mint.

Quite good. Very toxic. Stay alert for spontanious rashes.

But wait, there’s more. Nizza Lakkriskurl (liqourice chippings bar) is super popular in Iceland with many variations in flavour and colour.

This one’s the classic.

It’s a chocolate bar with bits/chippings of salt liquorice inside.

Can’t really say I dig this one, actually.

The milk chocolate tastes cheap–like the hollow chocolate bunnies you get in Easter holiday gift baskets from people you don’t like. Low-quality factory chocolate for children with undeveloped tastebuds.

Big bits of liquorice inside. I can’t eat the whole bar unless I want to see my lunch again.

Last bag of nammi: Perlur (Pearls). Stökkar súkkuladiskeljar med lakkrískjarna (Crazy chocolate shells with a liquorice core):

They look like mint drops, and they actually taste like that; mint, chocolate and liquorice.

The taste is kind of busy, there’s too much going on. Again, the taste of the chocolate reminds me of kids’ Christmas calendar candy.

In spite of the above general fails of icelandic nammi sampling, there’s still a lot from the dark island that is very good and edible.
And if your local kiosk doesn’t carry these jewels do not despair, www.nammi.is is a webshop dedicated to ship Icelandic goodies across any borders for you to munch in.

You should try the Lakkrísreimar Fylltar, the Marzipan Liquorish Rolls or the handmade by local farmers Rhrubarb Caramels.

Happy nammi shopping!

Before I start this week’s post, let’s congratulate Kayoko and the crew for revamping the Umamimart site to a whole new level. Orange is my favorite color, so this is cool, and soon enough, we will be FAMOUS bloggers!! Hooray.

As you’ve seen from my past posts, I’ve made cakes for basically all of my friends birthdays in recent years, and since I made pink Barbie cake for my friend Derek, there’s a lot of pressure now. I have to top each birthday cake with something better, crazier, and funny as hell.

My friend Mike’s birthday was coming up, and I decided to make a crazy cake for him. What shape or flavor should I create? Fun shape, fun flavor, what could I do?  After talking with friends, we came to conclude that it had to relate to his recent injury. He broke his foot pretty badly when he was playing gay football. Don’t ask me about the difference between regular football and gay football, but it has something to do with less protection? Flags or something? Since I don’t follow sports whatsoever, I have no idea when he talks about his “gay football league”.

Anyhow, he is recovering pretty well, and ready to get back to playing, which is good.

So what is broken leg cake? It could be a X-ray photo of broken leg on top of  square cake, but that’s kinda too realistic and gross, so I googled around “broken leg cake”, and someone has made it look like a leg in a cast. Great inspiration.

Knowing that his favorite cake was chocolate cake, I found an interesting German chocolate cake recipe that uses a lot of coffee.

INGREDIENTS

4 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cup cocoa
3 tsp baking powder
3 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
4 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup butter, melted
2 tbsp vanilla extract
2 cups hot coffee

METHOD

Preheat oven to 350˚F degrees.

I used two cookie sheets to make this, just like my wedding cake. My idea was to make a jelly roll.

In the large bowl of a standing mixer, stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add eggs, buttermilk, melted butter and vanilla extract; beat 2 minutes on medium speed.

Stir in the hot coffee.

The batter is soooo runny, and I may use 1 cup of coffee next time. Pour batter in evenly, spread it out and bake for about 15 minutes or so.

The cake is INCREDIBLY soft. Maybe buttermilk, maybe coffee, but whatever it was, this was almost too soft to make shapes. I was suddenly reminded by the horror story from my wedding cake endeavor, and realized rolling them wasn’t an option.

Me being pretty good at improvising, I decided to just layer them. By the way, above recipe makes way too much cake. You basically need half this to create the leg.

Meanwhile, I made raspberry jam-esque stuff using frozen raspberry, sugar and corn starch, to make the filling look like blood. How clever!

Not a great picture, but you can see how much it broke when cutting, assembling this soft cake.

Blood seeping out of flesh, how realistic this is! I know I was covering up with cream, so I let go of my perfectionism.

By the way, where the foot is, I made a large cake ball (mushing cake, mixing with a bit of raspberry jam as binder, and made a large flat ball shape, to fit how a foot may look like in this shape, and stuck it to the bottom of the “leg” part. I also made sure to use bunch of long wooden stick to secure its placement. You do not want “broken” broken leg cake, right?

I made cream cheese and white chocolate frosting, and first crumb-coated it.

Then I needed toes. Thank you marzipan. The color is pretty close to skin, and it was very easy to deal with. I just rolled them, looking at my own toes (this is important) and shape it like one, then press where the nail is with knife, toothpick, etc., to make a dent for nails.

This gives you a great idea for this year’s Halloween cake, don’t you think? I thought, after all, this was for a gay footballer, I need to flame this up.

It gets grosser! I painted the nails with red food coloring, and added a base to attach to cake.

Attach it to the top of the cake ball, and start piping the white cream, so that it looks like cast.

Then with the widest flat tip (898), carefully piped it, and also made sure each layer overlaps to give it a good “wrapped leg” effect.

Since the party was a block from my apartment, I carefully hand-carried it. While I was walking over, people were like, “WTF is that?!!” Then realized it was broken leg cake.

This was a big hit at the party. Sort of gross to say, but marzipan toes tasted quite good as well.

Happy Birthday Mike!

Last week, NYC pastry chef extraordinaire Pichet Ong was a guest judge on Top Chef Just Desserts (aired September 22).  As he was introduced, some of my photos of his desserts were shown on the episode: Foie Gras Taco and Warm Date Cake (see below). I shot the desserts in his restaurants P*ong and The Village Tart in Manhattan. Those restaurants are now closed unfortunately, but you can still find him, and his desserts, at his newest NYC projects, Qi and Coppelia.

Pichet is so talented and makes the most beautiful dishes that are equally delicious.

photos by Erin Gleeson

Although we don’t see many kudzu vines taking over large patches of land in the west, it is often referred to as the “mile-a-minute-vine” in the South. It all started in 1876 when someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce the kudzu plant from Japan to the U.S. Instead of providing some nice exotic-looking shade, it became America’s first horticultural Asian Invasion. It’s been “so successful” that every year, U.S. power companies spend $1.5 million dollars repairing downed and damages power lines due to kudzu. The costs of controlling kudzu and its negative impacts on native species have been devastating.

I have always been fascinated by kudzu and it took me a LONG time to make the connection that kudzu and kuzu were the same. Kudzu is the mispronunciation of the Japanese word kuzu. Kuzu appears on dessert menus throughout Japan. There is kuzumochi, kuzukiri and kuzuyu. All are desserts using kuzuko (kudzu starch) and usually have a milky white appearance.

Kuzuko (Kudzu starch)

Kuzuko is also used in my favorite Japanese dessert of all time, mizu-yokan. Yokan (red bean paste dessert) seems to be one of the very last Japanese foods to catch on in the states, but there is no way I can contain my enthusiasm for it. The recipe below is from my mom and is a delicious summertime treat incorporating red bean paste, kuzu and matcha. Japanese sweets are often made to showcase tea, and I can’t image a better pair than a cup of green tea and a serving of mizu-yokan.

This dessert is two-tiered. It takes a mizu-yokan recipe and a matcha-kuzu kanten (agar) and plates them next to one another. The processes for both the mizu-yokan and matcha-kuzu kanten are nearly the same so don’t be intimidated.

MIZU YOKAN

INGREDIENTS
3 tsp kudzu starch*
100 cc (2/5 cup) water
1 package (4 grams) kanten powder*
400 cc (1 2/3 cup) water
2/3 c sugar
200 g (1/2 of a typical 400 g package) koshian (smooth) red bean paste*

*You can purchase kudzu starch, koshian red bean paste and kanten at the Japanese market

METHOD

1. Combine kudzu starch with 100 cc of water. Mix well.

2. In a pot, combine 400 cc of water with kanten powder package and place on high heat. Stir the mixture well until it starts to boil.

3. Add the sugar and koshian to the pot. Using a wooden spoon stir until the mixture is very smooth and silky then bring heat down to low and remove scum off the surface. Keep on low heat for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

4. Add some of the mixture from Step Three to the kudzu mixture bowl with a spoon. Repeat three to four times until everything is in the bowl from Step One. Transfer the mixture back to the pot.

5. While stirring the mixture, make sure to keep the wooden spoon touching the bottom of the pot for five minutes on high. This avoids air bubbles in the end product.

6. Remove the pot from heat and place in an ice bath. Mix well until smooth. Remove from ice bath. Transfer into an appropriate container (i.e. something you use for jello or single serving desserts) and chill for several hours until firm.

… and now let’s do it again, this time with matcha…

KUZU MATCHA KANTEN

INGREDIENTS
2 tsp matcha powder
3 tsp kuzu starch
100 cc (2/5 cup) water

1 package (4 grams) kanten powder
550 cc (2 1/5 cup) water
2/3 c sugar

METHOD

1. Combine kudzu starch and matcha powder with 100 cc of water. Mix well.

2. In a pot combine 550 cc of water with kanten powder package and place on high heat. Stir the mixture well until it starts to boil.

3. Add the sugar to the pot. Using a wooden spoon stir until the mixture is very smooth and silky then bring heat down to low and remove scum off the surface. Keep on low heat for 5 min, stirring occasionally.

4. Add some of the mixture from step three to the kudzu mixture bowl with a spoon. Repeat three to four times until all everything is in the bowl from step one. Transfer the mixture back to the pot.

5. While stirring the mixture, make sure to keep the wooden spoon touching the bottom of the pot, for five minutes on high. This avoids air bubbles in the end product.

6. Remove the pot from heat and place in an ice bath. Mix well until smooth. Remove from ice bath. Transfer into an appropriate container (i.e. something you use for jello or single serving desserts, there are trays especially for Japanese desserts that you can buy at Japanese supply stores like Daiso) and chill for several hours until firm.

Remove from container and cut into single serving rectangles or cubes.

Special tray for Japanese desserts like kanten and yokan, available at Japanese kitchen stores like Daiso

A small, flat spoon works well as a utensil. I would like to buy some small wooden spoons especially for this dessert, but for now I just have a small silver spoon.

The mizu yokan‘s cold, smoothness is a cool treat for the summer. The kudzu in the matcha kanten creates a silky, milky texture that melds with the bitterness of the matcha powder. What a combo.

If tons of kudzu are disposed of in the U.S. every year, I think the perfect solution would be to manufacture lots of premium kudzu starch and export it to China, Korea and Japan. We’d get rid of all that kudzu and dig ourselves out of the recession! Mr. Obama, are you listening?

Japanese snacks are wacky. From matcha-flavored Kit Kats, to dried squid covered in chocolate, to using beans for desserts, the country is filled with surprises in the sweet tooth department.

I’ve seen a DIY sushi-making video, and it was very intriguing. I think the idea is very educational, scientific, and simply fun. Apparently though, the sushi-making kit is very limited edition. Every time someone I know goes to Japan, I ask them to see if they can score one of them for me–no one ever has.

The other day, my friend sent me a pair of fish-boning tweezers (it’s so hard to find good quality ones here) along with this fun DIY gummy kit. Literal translation is “Drawing Gummy Land”.

Inside the package, there is gummy base, coloring powder, and shapes (giraffe, fish, heart and star), plus a fork.

First, pour gummy base.

Then pour the colored powder and mix with water.

Mixing various colors to create different colors. Since the base colors are blue, pink and yellow,  had a limited option to create new colors. I screwed up and made same colors (as you can see on 8 smaller spots on lower left)

Now it’s time to make gummies. Place a mold onto gummy base, and drop colored water onto it.

It dries up pretty quickly, and the gummy is done.

Fish:

Rainbow fish made by Christy. What I learned here was, there’s an order for rainbow colors.

What a shameful Yamahomo not to know this. ROYGBIV: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. We learn something new every day.

Giraffe:

After a while, I lost interest. The taste was horrible, and it gave me an immediate headache.

Last drawing, free hand giraffe landscape.

It was fun for a while to “create” something. But thinking about what’s in this powder, and the artificial colorings, makes me kind of sick. When you want gummy bears, get gummy bears, don’t bother creating it on your own.