Bento Accessories - Hello Kitty Sandwich Cutter review

This is a sandwich maker mold I bought from one of the Hello Kitty licensing stores in Dubai last year. I was pretty surprised to even see it in a store! Heh, shortly after coming back to Amsterdam, I tried it out.

Below are the instructions found within the packaging.

Pretty straight forward, I thought, so I just ran to the nearest Albert Heijn (*thats one of the largest Dutch supermarket chains) and grab some square bread to test it out.

Unfortunately, my end result was nowhere as good as the ones on the packaging! It was pretty disastrous. I made them in the morning, and by the afternoon, the edges of Hello Kitty's face was all dry, jagged and loose. Nothing like it wassupposed to be "sealed" at all!

Later on, I tried it again, with the same type of plain square-type sandwich breads. The only difference is:
I sprinkled some water on the bread to make it a little damp and put it in the microwave to warm it up a little, just before I put it into the mold in step 1.

and it worked!

So in short, whether this mold works or not, depends on the white bread you are using. To test it out, take a piece of the bread and fold it in half. Pinch it real hard with your thumb and index finger. If it makes a good finger impression on the bread and it hardly looks like its going to spring open, I guess its pretty suitable.

If it springs open like a mousetrap, the bread is probably too dry, just sprinkle some water and nuke it a little before proceeding to Step 1 :)

All in all, I still have not regretting buying this mold. The sandwich, being sealed, prevents nasty accidents like having the top slice of bread sliding off, jams leaking all over and all that.

Cute factor: 8/10
Ease of cleaning: 9/10
Wastage: about 15% ( this means that after making the sealed sandwich, there's about 15% of the bread remaining, like the brown hard skin, surrounding areas being cut off, etc)

End result of the hello kitty sandwich measures about 11.5cm x 9cm, so you might want to make sure that you don't try squeezing it into one of those bento boxes thats too skinny.