Pink Owl Bento

Hello Everyone!

Today's post is more food art than bento, as I wanted to eat dinner at a reasonable time last night. Originally this was going to be a bento honoring the 2003 film "The Last Samurai", starring the amazing Tom Cruise. I was going to do a sword and Japanese characters on the plate that said 'bushido', the code of honor Samurai had to follow (both to be made out of nori). Sadly I ran out of time, so I decided to go with a pink owl sitting on a Sakura branch.

Oh and by the way I have a brand new inventory for my bento tool kit! I got 10 food markers, 4 vegetable cutters and 4 cookie cutters (squirrel, heart, flower and star), so I was excited to use some of that in today's post. :)

From these, I used the Sakura flower vegetable cutter, 'Daisy' cutter (the one with so many petals) and my orange and pink markers.

Here is the owl food art!!

The actual sandwich is made with eggplant curry (Indian dish that we call "Bengan", meaning eggplant), mozzerella cheese, lettuce leaves and a dinner roll. 

I used the Sakura cutter to cut out the flowers from mozzerella cheese, and colored the tips with my pink food marker. A tip about working with these markers is that they use food coloring, so dont shake them or food coloring will spill everywhere, and if it does spill, clean it up right away or it will stain. I learned this the hard way as there are still some pink stains on the counter. :p  The flowers are colored sparsely because the pink marker didn't work so well with the cheese. 

To make the branch, I cut a strip from a Hershey's chocolate bar and placed it on the warm bread. I was too hungry/lazy to do the traditional Bain Marie melting method, where you place the chocolate in a pan on top of another pan with hot water and stir it. I lucked out because I didn't realize chocolate melted fast in small amounts and forgot the bread was warm :) . As it melted, I spread it out with a fork a little so it would look more natural and less rigid. 

For the owl, I used a pink Starburst (apparently is is supposed to be watermelon). Starburst is much lighter and less dense than AirHeads, and I used the rolling pin method again to get it flat. I drew the owl body onto wax paper, cut it out and put it over the candy to cut out. I put this in the fridge and took out my magenta AirHeads. 

This version is a special flavor, Zoomberry, for the promotion of the Disney movie Turbo. Normally, AirHeads does not come in a magenta color. I used the circle (smooth) side of the Daisy cutter on the AirHead. Then, I used the Daisy side to cut out the semicircle with frilly edges, so they could be wings. I also put these in the fridge and took out a square of nori to work with.

I put the remaining wax paper with the owl shaped hole over the nori and cut out the same owl. This was a tedious process as I was using an X-Acto blade, which rips nori if you aren't careful. Then I made a cut inside, and used scissors to complete the rest of the outline. Scissors work a lot better for nori than an X-Acto blade. 

I also cut out the inner eyes and feathers freehand using the scissors (I'm still gaining experience with nori and scissors - I see that the eyelashes came out way too thick).

The eyes, beak and feet were also freehand. Since I couldn't find something easy to use and orange, I went with the food marker and colored it.

Thank you for reading! :)