Make Your Own Miniature Taiyaki Ice Creams!
The first clear mold for Craft Kitsune, perfect for UV Resin. The December kit includes the exclusive 3D taiyaki ice cream mold, UV Resin, supplies to shade the taiyakis, and more!
The mold has 4 parts - two sides of the taiyaki and two sides of the ice cream. Fit the parts together using super glue or UV Resin (all parts have a completely flat side).
This configuration gives a lot of crafty possibilities.
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What is Taiyaki Ice Cream?
Taiyaki: A Japanese fish-shaped cake. It mimics the shape of a real fish, called tai. Usually they are filled with red bean paste.
Taiyaki Ice Cream: An evolution of the traditional Japanese Taiyaki involving a slightly different shape to accommodate ice cream. I'm not entirely sure where the first taiyaki ice creams popped up but it has been made popular within the U.S. largely due to Taiyaki NYC.
The Inspiration
I've had the idea for this mold for over a year now. Back in August 2019 I wanted to make some miniature taiyaki ice creams out of clay. However, there are so many details on the fish itself that I wanted to buy a mold.
I ran into limitations with the current molds out there. I found some molds but they were either flat, meant for 2-part resin only, or not easy to alter for ice cream. Eventually I settled on buying a mold for making actual taiyaki in the smallest size I could find (seen above). I used air dry clay, deco whip, and glue. It kind of worked but I wasn't 100% happy with the results.
Fast forward a year later. I've leveled up my skill in 3D modeling. I also have a supplier to make exclusive molds. However, clear mold are much more expensive to set-up with suppliers (the cost just to set-up to produce clear molds is $1,000). Craft Kitsune has grown and I hope this box will be a big hit. So, I can justify the set-up cost and can include a clear molds in the kits plus lots of other supplies.
The Execution
The 3D design for this mold took around 3 weeks of me working on it anywhere from 4-12 hours per day. That's over 100 hours on the design.
This is the most challenging thing I've 3D modeled! I decided to make my own model from scratch so that it could be 100% perfect for what I envisioned.
This involved a lot of trying things from one angle and then scraping it and starting over. Eventually, I settled on how to model the taiyaki itself and it was time to prototype! I used a 3D Resin printer to do so and then made test molds from the pieces. I also went through this process for the ice cream as well. I went through a few runs of each, changing the design after each iteration.
Finally, I had settled on the final designs! I sent them off to my mold producer. Then, I heard back that the ice cream portion could not be made due to limitations in the mold making process. So, I made a new ice cream all over again. Once that was fixed, the production of the molds finally started!