Pop Chef

As soon as my children saw this product I had been sent to review, they were desperate to try it out.

The product is called Pop Chef from Character and is basically a set of six different shaped food cutters with an added fun factor. The fun part is that the cutters connect to an air bulb via a stem which means that once the cutter has been pressed into the food, the shapes can be 'popped' out using a blast of air.

Every time my children asked the question Can we do the Pop Chef today? - I would put them off saying that we didn't have the right sort of food to do it with. Eventually (as the deadline for the review loomed ever closer), I decided to just go with what I had in the larder rather than buy specific ingredients to use.

We started with bread (we always have bread in the larder!) Dylan chose the heart shape cutter which we connected to the bulb. The cutter pushed easily into the sliced bread and sure enough, made quite a pop as we pressed the bulb to expel our little morsel. The texture of the bread meant that the result wasn't a very well defined heart but when we used the same technique with a slice of cheese, we achieved perfect results. Dylan enjoyed assembling tiny heart shaped cheese sandwiches and eating them!

Next we tried cutting shapes out of potato. This worked well but there's always someone who sees the potential for mischief and turns your Pop Chef into a spud gun!

The children loved having little fried  potato circles for their tea, although the shapes did distort slightly in the process of parboiling.

The Pop Chef comes with a supply of wooden skewers along with ideas about how to transform a selection of fruits into works of art. I will definitely have a go with the children when our fruit bowl contains more promising ingredients than a few 'seen better days' apples.

I am really looking forward to our next home made pizza night. I think the Pop Chef will be fantastic for encouraging the children to be more adventurous with different toppings rather than just piling on the grated cheese. Who could resist flower shaped yellow, green and red peppers?

The kit does include a dislodging tool for those deeply disappointing moments when instead of a POP! you get a whistle and the food stays put inside the cutter.

Pop Chef from Character