Tuesday 29 April 2014

Frozen Elsa & Olaf Bento

Do you remember the Olaf somen I made? Click HERE to check out that post if you missed it. My boys went to rewatch Frozen after that lunch, and they requested me to make Olaf again.

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I took the opportunity to make Elsa, and included a small Olaf for them, lol. This was probably not what they were expecting but they still ate it up without any complaints. :P

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This was for my boys' dinner, they had dry curry chicken, fish cutlets, and stir fried asparagus with prawns. They are quite good with spicy food these days, mild to moderate spicy food is not a problem for them, they just need an extra glass of water, lol. I no longer have to cook another dish just for them when I cook something spicy.

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Elsa was made out of rice (orange coloured with ketchup, blue coloured with deco furi), nori, kamaboko and pasta. Olaf was made using quail eggs, nori, carrots and kamaboko. :)
Bunting---Dots-and-Stripes---Rainbow---11
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Monday 28 April 2014

Kiiroitori Somen

I love making food art using cold somen/soba, the creations are usually quite fast and easy to do, and my boys love eating their noodles cold. Whenever I'm feeling lazy, I'll always look to using somen/soba for food art.

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A Kiiroitori somen, which I made a while back. I used carrots for his beak and stacked nori on cheese for the other parts.

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Grilled garlic miso wings using my air fryer, to go with the somen. I like using miso to marinade chicken and fish, but I've never added garlic together with miso before. I happened to come across these garlic miso wings from Just One Cookbook, and thought I'll give it a try. They turned out really good, do hop over to Nami's site if you need the recipe.

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You can also try creating this using noodles or pasta. :)
Bunting---Dots-and-Stripes---Rainbow---11
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Friday 25 April 2014

Sakura Jelly

No food art for today, decided to blog about these sakura jellies I made on Tuesday first, as I know some of you want the recipe.

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The sakura flowers are pickled in salt and the taste is quite similar to sour plums. You can't eat the flowers straight out of the pack, they are very salty, you have to soak them in water first, before you use them in your recipes.

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Was deciding between Kanten and Konnyaku jelly, ended up choosing the latter as I think the flowers will show through slightly better under Konnyaku jelly.

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I'm so in love with sakura, I've to admit they don't exactly taste fantastic, but they are just too pretty. You can expect to see some sakura bentos and more upcoming sakura desserts recipes on the blog in the following weeks. :)

SAKURA JELLY RECIPE
Ingredients:
10g Konnyaku Jelly Powder
200g sugar
950ml water
5 tbsp sakura honey syrup
a handful of salted sakura
pink food colouring

Method:
  1. Put salted sakura in a bowl, cover with enough water and leave for around 2 hours. Then, dry the flowers on a paper towel. Set aside 5 tbsp of the water from soaking the sakura.
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  3. Mix jelly powder and sugar, stir well.
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  5. Boil 950ml of water and gradually add in the mixture in step 2. Add in sakura honey syrup, salted water set aside in step 1 and a little pink colouring (very little is needed, just dip a toothpick in food colouring, then dip it in the water). Stir till everything is dissovled.
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  7. Scoop the mixture into bowls/mould. Add in sakura flower from step 1, use a toothpick to adjust the flowers. Chill in the refrigerator for around an hour. 
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Note:
  • If you do not have sakura honey syrup, you can replace it with honey.

Thursday 24 April 2014

Swimming Rilakkuma & Pancake

Finally back to clearing my backlog of foodart, lol. My memory these days is quite bad, the problem with blogging about my food art so late is that I sometimes have problem recalling the details of what I made. -_-

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This Rilakkuma by the beach lunch was made quite sometime back. I remembered we were still experiencing a dry spell back then and I wished I could be taking a dip in the pool while walking under the blazing hot sun.

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Rilakkuma and friends were made from rice (brown coloured with dark soya sauce, yellow coloured with deco furi), nori, cheese, egg sheet and carrots.

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They were swimming in Japanese beef curry. I made some ships out of sausages and cut out some fish from carrots. Did you notice Korilakkuma's duckie float?

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I think I made this Rilakkuma breakfast during the first day of our one week break in March. Instead of a waffles recipe, I simply used the Japanese pancake mix in my Rilakkuma waffle pan. Lol, so I guess they should be called pancakes, not waffles.

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This breakfast set was actually mine.  I took a little too long to cook everything. My boys could not wait any longer and were already eating their breakfast as I was taking these photos.

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Served the pancakes with maple syrup. :)
Bunting---Dots-and-Stripes---Rainbow---11
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Tuesday 22 April 2014

Earth Day Bento

Happy Earth Day! This is the third year I'm making foodart for Earth Day. Please click HERE and HERE to check out my previous two years' creations.

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I actually wanted to make something different this year,  and already had something in mind, but it requires more time to complete. I was busy today and did not want to spend too much time on making charaben. I ended up doing a remake of my first Earth Day bento from two years ago. Instead of making two boys, I decided to make a girl hugging Mother Earth instead.

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Did you notice the bow pasta on the top left of the bento? Had wanted to add it to the girl's hair, but did not like how it turned out, so I took it out. The girl is made from rice coloured with ketchup, pasta (her hair), nori and ham. I've been recycling the same idea for making the Earth, using blue coloured rice and blanched veggie. However, I've noticed I've coloured my rice blue using different methods in all three creations. The first one was coloured using natural blue powdered colouring. The second one was coloured using butterfly pea flower and this one was coloured with deco furi.

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Added the finishing touch to this bento by adding some herbs from my mini garden. There's thyme on the girls' hair and some oregano around her. The flowers on her hair are from a pack of furikake. :)
Bunting---Dots-and-Stripes---Rainbow---11
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Monday 21 April 2014

Easter Egg Carton Chicken Bento

Oops, this post should have been up last Friday, but I was lazy to turn on my laptop. How did your Easter break go?  Ours was not as relaxing, as my boys' exams are coming soon, we started on some revisions.  We did slot in some outdoor activities, so it's not all work.

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I managed to make one more Easter bento just before Good Friday. I still have more ideas, I've yet to make any bunnies, guess I'll save all those ideas for next year.

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These egg carton hens and chicks are definitely not limited to Easter, you can make them anytime of the year. I created them in different expressions just for fun.

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I made chickens in egg carton last year as well. You can check out that post HERE.

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Ingredients used for the chickens were rice, carrots, nori and ham. As for the chicks, I used rice mixed with mashed egg yolk, carrot, egg, nori and ham.
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