Wandering around Kappabashi-dori, an area of Tokyo filled with nothing but kitchenware and restaurant supply stores, it's often hard to make the distinction between what is a toy and what is a serious kitchen appliance.

Many of the baking stores seemed to focus on the utensils for forming cake into nothing but saccharine cuteness. Homewares stores had whole sections devoted to making lunch adorable to children from carving instruments that turn hot dogs into elephants to rice presses used to press cakes into the shape of Mickey Mouse.

When you remove scarcity from the equation, food can be a wonderful form of play for adults or children and it is a fad that has been picked up on at the Tokyo Toy Show.

Over the past three years, the International Tokyo Toy Show has showcased an interesting food trend: the massive growth in cooking toys at a time when an ageing population and financial crisis is sending the toy market into decline. Writing in the newspaper The Daily Yomiuri in 2009, writer Tom Baker noted that while overall toy sales declined by an estimated 1.2 per cent over 2008, the category for cooking toys grew 37.2 per cent. Many of these toys are collapsing the distinction between toy and real cooking, none more than konapun.

Originally released by Japanese toymaker Bandai in the 1980s, konapun is a miniature model kitchen in which you make minute versions of popular dishes using a powder and a little water. The sets slowly fell out of fashion until their rerelease in 2006. It has since had a resurgence in Japan, but has never taken off anywhere else. What sets the konapun apart from other play kitchen food is that the miniature food looks worryingly real and the processes simulate the real thing.

The video evidence is oddly compelling. Here’s a short clip making donuts, a slightly suspicious hamburger, French fries and hot dog, and an omelette. The fake foods that come out of the mini kitchen kits are non-toxic but not as delicious as they look.

The kits are made from sodium alginate, which is a food additive most commonly used to emulsify and thicken foods. It turns up in processed food as “Vegetable gum 401” where it is used as a magic ingredient to make chunks of anything: chunky cat food, glace “cherries”, turning fruit juice into fruit pieces. Sodium alginate has also made the transition from industrial food additive to haute cuisine. Chefs inspired by Ferran Adria have been using sodium alginate to form jellied spheres filled with liquid. Soups or broths can be made into gelatinous balls that burst in your mouth; faux olives filled with olive juice.

To give the appearance of frying in the konapun kits, a little citric acid is added to the mix which is then “fried” in an alkaline solution – no heat, but plenty of realistic bubbles and the faux-food’s exterior takes on a rough, uneven surface as if the fake food had been dipped in real, hot oil.