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! :)

Sunflora Bento!

Hello Everyone!

 Merry late Christmas and I'm sorry I haven't been posting. I'm really busy this year and I will try to post more bentos if I can.

 Anyway yesterday I made this Sunflora bento to celebrate the Wonderful World of Pokemon! This is a Sunflora (credit pokemondb.net)

 So I guess this is 1/2 of my response to the poll I had in July, asking "Which Kyaraben would you like to see made?" The winner was a tie between Iron Man and Pikachu/Pokemon, so I will be planning an Iron Man bento sometime... (:

Pokemon is my favorite cartoon and I love it so much! I decided to finally attempt a Pokemon bento after waiting so long in fear of messing it up.

 Anyway here's the bento......

To make Sunflora's body I used an American candy called AirHeads. It is a chewy, stretchy candy that comes in artificial fruit flavors like Blue Raspberry, Cherry, Orange, Pink Lemonade, etc. This one is Watermelon. 

The candy that comes right out of this wrapper was not long enough to carve out Sunflora's body so I used a rolling pin to roll it out. This works best when you sandwich it between wax paper so it doesnt stick to your pin. :)

                                        

I carved out Sunflora's feet, body and leaves using a regular kitchen knife. To do the stem of the leaves,

I cut it out of cucumber.

For the face, I cut a circle out of Mozzarella cheese (for the light yellow color) using the bottom of a steel cup as my stencil. 

I cut the petals out of Cheddar cheese, cutting out the first carefully and using that as my stencil to cut out the rest.

I used scissors and an X-Acto blade to cut out the face features.

I placed Sunflora on a parotha (flaky fluffy Indian bread), added a side of yogurt and a side of chicken curry (flavorful Indian stew made with onion, curry powder, chicken, mustard seed, cumin and garlic).

I added cherry tomatoes in an arc to add some color. If you plan to use AirHeads, I would recommend using a layer of wax paper as they are very sticky. 

And as always, thank you for reading my blog! :)

Snowflake Egg Bento

Hello Everyone!

I am so sorry I haven't been able to post lately - I am busy juggling many things, including continuing flute (best. instrument. ever.)! I was so excited to be able to make this bento since I hadn't made one in a while. This one accompanied me with Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family. I know I messed up my tradition of kyarabens and movies but how do you do Madea?

Anyway this is the bento!

The container the egg is sitting on is a wooden bamboo container that I just got for my bento inventory (yay!!). 

To do this bento, I toasted a chapathi (Indian wheat bread) and broke it into edible pieces (I toasted for too long though, so it came out really crispy), and placed it with a side of yogurt. 

I put my side dish, a spinach and cottage cheese curry, on lettuce and put that in my new container. I placed orange cherry tomatoes inside along the edges.

For the egg, I cooked it sunny side up and then cut it with a cookie cutter. I punched out my laughing smiley face with my nori puncher and put it on top (I was inspired by the tutorial at kwbentodiary http://kwbentodiary.blogspot.com/ - thank you so much Karenwee!).

As always, thank you for reading my blog!

Crab Sandwich Bento!

     Hello Everyone! I'm sorry I haven't made any posts lately - I've been busy with all sorts of stuff.

    Today's bento will be a crab croissant sandwich (idea credit pictures on the internet and the Disney Family Fun Magazine). I wanted to make these a while back but never got around to it - until now!

    To start, toast a small, curved croissant and fill it like a sandwich, for the body. This is all of my ingredients for the sandwich - you can never have too much cheese! (:

                   

    For the legs, cut carrots (ideally baby carrots in half but I improvised here because I didn't have any).

    Cut the outer skin of a tomato with a little bit of the fruit, and cut into the claw shapes pictured here.

    For the cutest part, take a small measuring spoon and use it to scoop out cream cheese into little balls. For the face, I used my laughing smileyface Nori puncher (isn't it awesome!) and stuck the eyes onto the cream cheese and the Nori mouth. Don't forget to refrigerate the cream cheese balls if you aren't using them right away!

    Tada! The croissant broke a little because it was too crispy. :(  Difficulty rating: 4.0 (I like saying 4.0) for cream cheese eyes - it's a pretty simple and cute bento! Crabby (I nicknamed him crabby, like the Pokemon) is pictured along with a side of dragon fruit (it tastes like a less sweet but soft version of kiwi and is super tasty).

        I'd love for you to try it out - is there anything you would have done differently? Thank you for reading my blog!

     

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Bento!!!

Hello Everyone!!

   Today's post is about making a Ghost Protocol Bento!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Yay!!!!!! Personally Ghost Protocol is the best film in the series. Did you know the Burj Khalifa stunt scene is real??!! Yup, Tom Cruise scaled and sat on top of the tallest building in the world. No biggie right? :D

    I decided to do the Burj Khalifa scene (in the movie). Difficulty rating: 9.5 (out of 10) for detail, time (it took me 4.5 hours!), and the fact that it is a complex bento (lots of pieces to put together between Nori, cheese, wax paper pieces etc.).

   On the other hand, difficulty rating for climbing the Burj Khalifa: 11/10.  (;

   Since it's a long step by step process, I am going to post the final product pics first. "No Plan, No Backup, No Choice" refers to the catchphrase for the M:i-4 theatrical release posters. Personally I think it turned out pretty well (the bento - but the movie was incredible).














      

 

          Burj Khalifa scene picture taken from http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/12/22/box-office-update-mission-impossible/

      

      The pic on the right is my sketch of the bento (I do sketches when its a complex bento like this one). Where it says "legs" pointing to the neck and right arm I mean same as the legs, as in do the Nori outline. If you want that extra detail on your bento, doing limb Nori outlines really helps!

      I started by drawing the blueprint, and making a larger sketch of the body onto wax paper.

      I put the wax paper outline ( I will try to do more pics of the bento process in the future) onto a long slice of cheese  and cut the outline with a knife (I sliced a rectangular block of cheese horizontally-it took a few tries). I left that in the fridge and kept the wax paper outline.

     I cut up all the parts of the outline I wanted to do with Nori (gloves, arms+legs for outlines, pants, black squares as pockets for belt between shirt and top in bento pic, shirt, and shoes).
   
   

     These are the wax paper pieces I wanted to cut from Nori. I took the wooden cutting board (the one below the Betty Crocker) and put the sheet of Nori on it. Then I placed the wax paper pieces and cut them out with an X-Acto knife (this works pretty well). For the limb outlines, I cut the arms and legs out of Nori (the whole thing) and cut the edges off. Here is the finished Nori outline:

   

    

      To do the hair, I cut the head from the cheese outline (I was forced to behead it :(  ), spread cream cheese on it and dipped in cocoa powder - the cream cheese helps it stick, but butter or frosting would also serve the purpose.

      For the building, I took a slice of bread and trimmed of the crust. I sliced cheese to form the borders of the windows, and used food gel to do the blue parts of the windows. If you want evenly blue windows, I would recommend whipping cream cheese and a little butter and then adding food gel for the blue color, so you can spread it like frosting (cream cheese and butter are the essential components of cream cheese frosting, cream cheese makes it dense and butter makes it fluffy, so keep experimenting with them to get the proportions and consistency you want). I didn't realize this until later, otherwise I would have done that instead. 

     The movie was amazing though (an M:i fan - this is my 2nd time watching it). The acting is great (also a Tom Cruise fan - besides Mission Impossible my favorite Tom Cruise movie would be Knight and Day) . He does practically all of his own stunts! Not to mention the music (by Michael Giacchino - especially "A Man, A Plan, A Code, Dubai" and "Mood India" from the soundtrack). In the scene at the end they are actually playing "Ethan and Julia" by Giacchino, from the 3rd film - which makes sense because that's Julia's first appearance. Not sure how they are going to top it as a film in M:i - 5 but that's their own Mission: Impossible right? Which technically means they will, because they always get the mission accomplished! (yay!)

     Thanks for following!

      

First Poll Results!

Hello Everyone!

   The polls are in! I have started a poll asking "Which Kyaraben would you like to see made?"


   This polls choices were
 

    1- Mickey Mouse
    2- Pikachu/Pokemon (my favorite cartoon!)
    3- Matrix (an amazing film)
    4- Iron Man
    5- James Bond
    6- Other (specify in comments)

     And its 50/50 between Pikachu/Pokemon and Iron Man! I guess I'm gonna have to make both (:

   

     For those of you that didn't get to vote, don't worry! I will be posting another poll soon (after I make and post Iron Man and Pokemon).
 

    Thanks for participating and thank you for following this blog! My next bento post is coming soon (hint: it's an action film from 2011). Thanks again!