Tuesday, June 24, 2008

June 24th Bento + Last Night's Cupcakes

Wow!! My blog has had 5000 hits!! That didn't take long at all!

I didn't have a plan this morning, but I think the bentos turned out pretty nice regardless and it was particularly tasty. I think I'm getting better at on-the-fly bento lunches.
I wasn't feeling like rice so I decided to boil up some soba noodles (they take two or three minutes). I already had dipping sauce for them in the fridge, so I just filled up a small container of sauce and tucked it in a silicone muffin cup, under the noodles. One of the tiny tomatoes is perched in the center of the noodles (it's smaller than a raspberry!). I really liked the way this sort of looked like a cupcake with a cherry on top (it's a little hard to tell from this angle, but the soba noodles were piled up, resembling frosting), so I put it in the top right of the bento where I usually put the dessert.

For protein there is a bacon wrapped chicken breast that BF baked up last night, cut into eight bite sized pieces, and the onigiri under it has ground chicken and hoisin sauce filling. There are a few cubes of cheddar cheese beneath the noodles as well.

For veggies, there are the standard asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini slices as well as some steamed red swiss chard. This was the first time I tried red swiss chard, and it was yummy. Tastes a lot like beet greens.

For fruit there is half of a fig (I think these are so gorgeous!), raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and some locally grown strawberries (these were much more juicy and tasty than the ones we usually get, but they were more expensive). I also included two of these freaky little fruits called langsats. They look similar to lychees, but they divide naturally into wedges. I don't care a whole lot for the taste, but BF likes them. There is a truffle for dessert.

And here are some cupcakes I made last night by special request from BF. They were made from scratch (!!!) and were vanilla flavoured loaded with raspberries. The frosting was a plain buttercream and the letters and stars were made from fondant. I ran out of fondant decorations so I put candy coated chocolate sprinkles on a few of them.

2 comments:

Dominique said...

Yay, two bentos in a row! I was starting to really miss your bentos over the past week.

Your bento has given me some really good inspiration. Unfortunately there's hardly any produce in the fridge...I'm stuck with a boring salad tomorrow, but luckily I've got some dumplings on hand.

I also want to make a quick trip to the grocery store now that I've seen your bento, but with gas prices the way they are over here, it's gonna have to wait.

And your cupcakes look lovely! Cupcakes from scratch always taste better to me.

Jacki said...

I was missing them too! lol...I ate a lot of junk food instead of healthy lunches last week!

Gas prices are insane! I'm fortunate enough to live within walking distance of everything I need so I don't own a car. I don't think I could go grocery shopping as often as I do if I had to drive there. I feel like as long as you have dumplings in your freezer though, you'll be okay :)

I'm still new to making cupcakes from scratch, so I'm not great at it yet :P These ones came out a bit heavy. I know you make awesome cupcakes, are there any recipes you recommend? I've been just using recipes out of "Crazy About Cupcakes"