Jacki's Bento Blog

November 3rd Bento Lunch

2009-11-03T19:31:00.003-04:00

I love Chinatown.

It's definitely in my top five favorite things about living in Toronto.

BF and I went there this weekend and bought homemade dumplings from a dumpling shop, homemade barbecue pork pastries from a Chinese bakery and all kinds of yummy produce.

So, I figured that calls for a bento!
My lunch today consisted of one barbecue pork pastry (my favorite food in the world) cut in half, three gyoza, fried then steamed, and veggies consisting of steamed broccoli, asparagus and lotus root slices (boiled with a little water, sugar and vinegar). For some fruit, I packed pomegranate seeds, raspberries and persimmons. I also included a little sauce bottle filled half and half with soy sauce and rice vinegar for the gyoza.

This lunch was a little heavy on the fried foods and a little light on protein, but it's what I was in the mood for, so it's all good. It was probably one of the most delicious bento lunches I've made. There were lots of great textures with the crunch of the lotus root and pomegranate seeds, the softness of the pork and dumplings and the smooth sweetness of the persimmons. I'm tempted to have the same thing for supper!

Edited on November 4th to Add:

Hello again!

I enjoyed yesterday's lunch so much that I decided to make it again today. I guess that practice makes perfect because I thought it turned out much cuter than yesterday's. So much so that I decided to show it to you.

Here it is:
The only changes I made were to add a few carrot flowers and I switched out the sauce bottle for a panda one because my other bottle developed a leak.

Much better!

And The Winner Is.......

2009-10-09T22:10:00.002-03:00

BentoBeginner!!!

BentoBeginner of http://bentoforbeginners.blogspot.com/, lover of cute shaped onigiri, picked the same number as the random generator so she is the recipient of the free book!

Congratulations BentoBeginner! If you could please email me your mailing address (my email is jackisbentoATgmail.com), I will see that it gets to you.

Thank you, everyone, for your participation. I truly enjoyed reading all of your wonderful comments

I have to say that I was really touched by how many of you said you were happy to see me back. I want to apologize for not posting more frequently. This has been a year full of changes for me and making bento lunches kind of fell off my radar for a bit, mainly because I took quite a bit of time of work so there was no need to pack lunches. BF and I decided we needed a fresh start so we tossed all of our stuff in a U-haul and drove for two days until we hit Toronto. That was two months ago, and for the first month I barely had a kitchen to cook in! I seriously suffered from cute food withdrawl, although it was a good opportunity to explore the cupcake shops in my new neighbourhood.

I'm back at work now, and while I do expect I will pack a lunch sometimes, I'm in a fortunate position where I'm able to come home for lunch, so I'm not sure yet whether I will be able to update as often as I used to. But on the plus side, there are much better resources where I'm living now for different ethnic foods, which I find so exciting! Although I'm still trying to locate a place to buy bento supplies in Toronto. If you have any leads, let me know!

So that's where I'm at right now. This weekend I'm hosting Thanksgiving dinner (My first turkey! Eep!) so I will be putting together a batch of turkey cupcakes. On one of his many travels, BF found me a bottle of root beer extract, so I'm going to try to make root beer cupcakes! I'm pretty excited by this prospect. If they turn out any good, I will share the recipe for sure!

Book Review + Free Give Away! Book Title: Cute Yummy Time

2009-10-02T17:43:00.003-03:00

La Carmina, author of the new book Cute Yummy Time, offered to send me a copy of her book to review. I love any opportunity to check out some new, cute foods so I was happy to oblige, but I couldn't forget about you guys! So I asked if she would send a copy to one of you as well and she said sure!

Here is my review, and at the bottom of this post are the instructions for what you need to do to enter the very first giveaway contest here at Jacki's Bento Blog.

I love that the art of the bento lunch is becoming more and more popular here in North America because as anything grows in popularity, more information becomes available on the subject. When I started making bento lunches about two years ago, it felt like although there were great English books available about Japanese cooking, and even specifically with bento recipes, all of the kawaii bento books were in Japanese. To find the really cute stuff, I resorted to attempting to mimic things I saw on Japanese language blogs.

But it seems that over the past few years, more and more books have been entering the North American market that specifically focus on the cute, artistic elements of bento lunches. While this is a good thing, most of the ones I have read have had lots of great artwork, but not the clear instruction I was looking for, this is the niche that Cute Yummy Time attempts to fill.

The book contains 70 recipes for cute foods. Each has its own two page spread that contains an ingredient list, detailed instructions and coloured photographs. Although the pictures only show the end result (there are no step by step pictures), after reading through this book I feel confident that I can recreate any of the recipes and designs. They all seem really straight forward and use ingredients that I can pick up at my regular chain grocery store, no trip to the Asian grocery store is necessary.

I believe the author is a very creative person as there are ideas in here that I've never seen before, and I spend a lot of time looking at people's pictures of bento lunches! There are little things I never thought of, like using my nori punches to make shapes out of spinach, and there are lots of foods I've never thought of trying to make cute before (I can't wait to try her recipe for piggy bread!). Some of the recipes are very clever, like her Puffin Sushi, a maki sushi roll where the slices look like puffin heads.

The healthiness of all of the recipes really impressed me. She uses whole grains, high antioxidant foods, low fat dairy products, natural sweeteners and lots of fresh produce in her recipes. The recipes are all from scratch, right down to things like doughs and soups. The meals are smartly balanced, for example her recipe for Panda Tofu Soba. It has lots of lean protein in the tofu, soba noodles for carbs and lots of brightly coloured, fresh vegetables. It's perfectly healthy and balanced meal, and it's just adorable.

That said, half of the book, called the "To Go" section, contains recipes that are not portable and therefore not suitable for bento lunches, although you will find lots of great ways to make a cute breakfast. Many of them also require special bento equipment such as animal shaped cutters, and ice cream sandwich molds. A lot of people have these already, but I know there are also those who have a hard time getting ahold of these things.

My only criticism of the book is that for a few of the recipes, it's difficult to identify exactly what animal I'm looking at. I was excited to see a recipe for Hedge Pork Loin because I adore hedgehogs. When I saw the picture, however, it didn't really look like a hedgehog to me, so I won't be making it. But some of them, like the Polar Bear meringues, are spot on.

All in all, I like the book and will definitely be trying some recipes from it. It's well put together, easy to understand and none of the recipes appear to be overly complicated or time consuming. Everything looks yummy and they will definitely add some cuteness to our meals.

Book Giveaway Contest Rules: To enter, leave a comment on this post that tells me your favorite cute food to pack in your lunch. Mine? Checkerboard cut apple slices.

The cutoff is Midnight (Eastern Time) on Thursday, October 8th. On Friday, I will select a winner using a random number generator. So if the random number generator picks 6 and your comment is the sixth one, you win! I suggest that you include a way for me to contact you in your comment (for example, through your blogger account if you have one or by posting your email address). Otherwise, I will post the name of the winner on my blog next Friday and they can contact me through my email address which I will post at that time as well.

Limit of one entry per person.

My Picks for UFC 100. In Cupcake Form of Course!

2009-07-11T19:41:00.010-03:00

Is anyone else excited for UFC 100?? I have been anticipating the rematch between Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir for months and months and months!!!

BF is rooting for Mir. I'm a diehard Lesnar fanatic. So I decided this time to let the cupcakes do the talking!! As always, just click on the picture for a closer look.

They turned out awesome, but it was a long time getting here. First I made a batch of Chocolate Raspberry cupcakes, using the recipe from the book Crazy About Cupcakes.

They were by far the worst cupcakes I've ever made. I was so disappointed. Usually the recipes in this book are really good, but this one was the exception I guess. While I was mixing the batter I fell in love. There were so many fabulous ingredients, like cocoa, raspberries, sour cream and toasted almonds. The batter was so soft and luxurious, I had never made anything like it.

Into the oven they went and when they came out, they had hardly risen at all. As they cooled, the centers sunk into the middles of the cupcakes and the cupcakes pulled away from the liners. The taste was awful. They were gritty, and tasted like unsweetened cocoa despite the 1 1/2 cups of sugar in them. I was so sad. I almost gave up.

Then BF brought me a brand new stick of butter, a bag of sugar and a carton of eggs, gave me a kiss and asked me to try again. I found a jar of cherries in the fridge and made a batch of my tried and true cherry cupcakes. Perfect. I topped them with swirls of chocolate buttercream and popped my fondant decorations on top.

I'm especially pleased with how my fondant rendition of Mir turned out. This was the first time I've ever made a face out of fondant, I'm more of a flower person to be sure. Here he is in real life and in beaten up fondant form:
I cut out all of the pieces (except the letters) freehand. I was a little stumped with how to make his hair look textured, and ended up using the rough edges that occur naturally when you roll out the fondant. I think they turned out great.

BF was very unhappy with this cupcake.

So we've got cupcakes and I made a batch of pulled pork for sandwiches for the party tonight.

Lesnar, GSP, Henderson, don't let me down!!!

Post Fight Thoughts: Hey, all three of my guys won! Maybe my cupcakes are lucky? Now if only the Atlantic Lotto Commission would extend their sports betting to include the UFC, lol.

Spaghetti and Meatball Cupcakes! With Recipes!

2009-07-08T13:21:00.003-03:00

Oh, these were too much fun to make!!

I know I'm a couple weeks late, but these were actually Father's Day cupcakes, I just wasn't able to get together with my dad on the actual holiday (his work sent him to Australia, how awesome is that?). My Dad has a definite silly side, so I thought he would appreciate some cupcakes in disguise. When I saw this idea for spaghetti and meatball cupcakes in the book Hello, Cupcake! I knew it would be perfect!

They really look like spaghetti, don't they?

I loved the concept of these cupcakes, but the actual recipe in the book includes more premade ingredients than I am comfortable using in my baking, so I made everything (except for the meatballs!) from scratch. I made peach cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting, strawberry sauce and Ferrero Rocher chocolates. If you've never had a Ferrero Rocher, I have to say they are probably my favorite chocolate that you can buy at the drugstore. Starting from the center and working out, they consist of a hazelnut in the core, surrounded by chocolate hazelnut cream, a thin chocolate wafer shell, and a chocolate and crushed hazelnut coating on the outside. Just the perfect combination of crunchy and smooth. So decadent! Their size, colour and outer texture make them perfect fake meatballs.

Here are my recipes and the assembly instructions.

Recipe: Peach Cupcakes

Makes about 2 dozen cupcakes

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup milk
1 large can of peach slices

Drain peaches. Cut slices in half lengthwise and then into small pieces crosswise until you have 1 1/2 cups of peach pieces. Set aside.

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating for a full minute after each addition. Add vanilla.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture to the cream mixture, alternating with the milk and mixing after each addition. Mix for an additional two minutes after all the dry ingredients and milk have been added so that the batter is nice and fluffy. Gently fold in peaches.

Bake at 350 degrees for 22 to 25 minutes until cupcakes test done with a toothpick. Allow to cool completely before decorating.

Recipe: Vanilla Buttercream frosting (Spaghetti colour)

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup shortening
1 tsp vanilla
2 to 3 Tbsp milk
4 cups icing sugar
1/2 tsp cocoa
small amount of yellow icing colour (only use a tiny bit, we want the frosting to be more of an off-white than a bright yellow)

Beat butter and shortening together for about 3 minutes, until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and mix. Add icing sugar about 1 cup at a time, mixing until combined after each addition. Add cocoa and icing colour and mix until colour is uniform. Add milk 1 Tbsp at a time until the frosting reaches the proper consistency.

Recipe: Strawberry sauce

Ingredients

1 pint of fresh strawberries, halved
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp water

Combine the first four ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring frequently, until sauce has thickened somewhat.

Allow the sauce to cool and then puree in a blender or food processor. Return the sauce to the saucepan and return to a gentle boil. Combine cornstarch and remaining water in a separate bowl. Slowly pour into the strawberry mixture, stirring the sauce as you pour. Continue to cook the sauce for another minute or two until it has thickened. Allow to cool completely before using it on the cupcakes.

Now, time to put it all together! (this is the easy part)

Recipe: Spaghetti and Meatball Cupcakes

Ingredients

24 cupcakes
1 batch of vanilla buttercream frosting, spaghetti colour
1 batch of strawberry sauce
24 Ferrero Rocher chocolates
1/2 ounce white chocolate, finely grated

Using a spatula, spread a thin layer of frosting on each cupcake. Arrange cupcakes in a rectangle on the dish you want to serve them on.

Place remaining frosting in an icing bag with a #5 tip (alternately you can just cut 1/8" off of the tip of a disposable bag. I don't use this method because I find it puts a seam in the icing from the seam in the bag).

Squeeze out the icing on to the cupcakes sort of randomly, making sure to cover all of the areas (including the gaps between the cupcakes), so that there is spaghetti icing mounded on top of each cupcake and draping down the sides a little bit.

Coat each chocolate with strawberry sauce. The thinner the coat of sauce, the better because it allows you to see the texture of the meatball better. Set aside.

Take the remaining sauce and gently spoon it onto each cupcake, making sure not to deform the 'noodles'. Again, a thinner coat is better. I recommend putting a little bit of sauce in the center of each cupcake and gently working it over to connect to the other cupcakes using the back of a spoon, adding more sauce where required.

Place a chocolate in the center of each cupcake and sprinkle some of the white chocolate on top of each cupcake. You're all done!

Here are a dozen packed in a foil tray ready to be taken to my Dad's house.

New Bento Book! And my bento lunches are in it!!!

2009-07-07T14:58:00.002-03:00

I'm too excited!!

The photos and recipes for some of my bento lunches have been included in this brand new book called 501 Bento Box Lunches. I've known about it for a while, but I was waiting until I actually had the book in my hand before I was ready to tell everyone.

When I first sent my photos and recipes to the publisher (twenty of which have been included in the book) and she told me she was compiling a collection of 500, I couldn't even begin to imagine the work that would go into organizing all of that information. But somehow, she pulled it off! There are pages and pages of recipes, and pictures of each and every bento lunch. It's all compacted into a neat little package. Like many of the bento boxes I've ordered online, the book was smaller than I expected but it's exactly the size it needs to be to include all of the information.

If you want to check it out, I've included links to some sample pages below (with the publisher's permission of course). I've also included it in the list of my favorite bento cookbooks in the left column of this blog so that you can link to its listing on Amazon.

I love this book and I'm not just saying that because I'm affiliated. I think it is an amazing source of inspiration and I can only turn a few pages before I see something new I want to try. I don't think it's a great beginner book, as it doesn't cover off a lot of the basics of bento making (like how to make onigiri, ratios of rice to meat to veg content, speed tips, etc.) but if you ever need a place to go for new ideas, this book is the best one I've seen.

Here are the links to the sample pages:

Pages 18 - 19
Pages 80 - 81
Pages 94 -95
Pages 126 to 127

Butterfly Fondant Cupcake Toppers

2009-05-30T23:22:00.002-03:00

After the rose cake I made earlier this week, I had all kinds of marshmallow fondant left over. My grandmother said that she had never had a fondant covered cake before, so I decided to make some fondant cupcakes just for her.

This is my first foray into the world of fondant cupcake toppers and I am really pleased with how they turned out (although there is always room for improvement of course!).

The cupcakes are plain chocolate with chocolate buttercream and marshmallow fondant toppers. The recipe for the fondant can be found here and the recipe for the cake is here (it's the one on the side of a can of Hershey's cocoa. Such an amazing cake recipe! And great when you don't have any butter on hand). The design for the toppers was based on some cupcakes I had seen on Flickr earlier this week, so I can't take the credit for that.
I already had lots of blue and white fondant left over from the cake, so I just needed to make some pink by kneading in some colour (I used Wilton Aster Mauve icing colour) with some of the white fondant.

I made the butterflies and the flowers ahead of time, using three different sized blossom cutters and a butterfly cutter (all Wilton) and allowed them to dry overnight so that they would hold their shape. For the butterflies, I left them to dry in folded pieces of cardboard lined with wax paper, laying the center of the butterfly in the crease of the cardboard so that it would dry in the correct shape with its wings angled up. For the larger flowers (although they're all quite small), I first used a small ball tool to made a round dent in each of the petals and then a large ball tool quickly pressed in the center of the flower to give the blossom an overall rounded shape. For each of the two smaller flowers, I used the small ball tool in the center of the flowers. I dried the flowers in Wilton flower formers.

This morning when I made the cupcakes, I assembled the toppers as the cupcakes cooled after coming out of the oven. The first step was to roll out the blue fondant to a little less than a quarter inch thickness and punch out circles the size of the cupcakes. Next I piped on the most of the green frosting, starting with a dot in the center to anchor the butterfly (using tip #12) followed by the vines piped with tip #3. Then I placed the butterflies and flowers on the cupcakes, secured by the buttercream and finished off the vines by piping some leaves on them using tip #352 (I love this tip!! It makes gorgeous leaves of all sizes so easily). The last step was to pipe little yellow dots in the center of each of the flowers and then the body of the butterfly, all using a #2 tip.

Once I got going, I was able to make thirty toppers fairly quickly. I think they look quite nice for how little work they were. After the toppers were complete, I frosted the cupcakes and gently placed a topper on each one. The frosting holds it in place.

I brought some over to my mother's house for Nanny to try and she liked them, so I call that a success. Most of the rest of them will be accompanying BF to his scuba class tomorrow. As of tomorrow afternoon he will be a certified rescue diver! I am so proud of him (not to mention happy that if I get in trouble when I'm learning to dive this summer, he will be able to rescue me, lol)

I can't wait to try this technique again. I think I need to work on getting the edges of the toppers to line up properly with the edges of the cupcakes as you can still see parts of the wrapper when you look at the cupcakes top-down. Suggestions welcome as always!

And here is another picture of my army of butterflies

Earth Day Cupcakes

2009-04-26T18:42:00.002-03:00

Today BF and I connected with a bunch of his scuba diving buddies and celebrated Earth Day with a good old fashioned beach cleanup. Of course, I made cupcakes.

I thought they turned out pretty cute. The cupcakes are cherry flavoured with almond buttercream (The recipes are on one of my previous posts, here). As usual, when baking for people I don't know well, I went with a tried and true recipe that has gotten good reviews in the past.

To keep with the Earth Day theme, I swirled the icing by colouring half of it leaf green and the other half sky blue (nice nature colours!) and filling the pastry bag with half of each (one on each side of the bag). In the center of each, I placed a foil-covered chocolate planet Earth. I picked these up at a local candy store (Sweet Janes near Spring Garden Road for all of you Haligonians out there) and did my best to match the frosting colours to them. The frosting was piped with a 1M tip as usual.

Everyone really liked them and there were none left to bring home, so I think that counts as a success!

Easter Bunny Mango and Coconut Cupcakes Recipe

2009-04-10T22:28:00.004-03:00

It's BF's birthday tomorrow!!!

And it just so happened that his birthday fell on Easter weekend this year, so that means Easter themed cupcakes!

Since it's his birthday, I let BF pick the flavour of the cupcakes and he decided on mango. I saw this idea for Easter bunny cupcakes on the Kraft website and I thought they were too cute so I decided to do something similar. Instead of marshmallow bunnies I used these adorable belgian chocolate bunnies that I found. They are wonderfully detailed with cute little faces. I fell in love as soon as I saw them. Each bunny sits on a bed of grass (just mix 1 tsp water with some green food colouring, throw it in a ziplock bag with some shredded coconut and shake!) and is watching over a couple of the tiniest Easter eggs I've ever seen (Cadbury Micro Mini Eggs).

When they were finished I thought they looked like a little army of bunnies. BF approved.

Here's the recipe:

Mango Cupcakes

Ingredients:

1 cup butter (2 sticks), room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs, separated and at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla
3 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup mango puree (it comes in a can)
1 mango, peeled and diced finely

Recipe makes about 3 dozen cupcakes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease or line muffin tins.

In a large bowl, cream butter on medium speed for about a minute. Slowly pour in sugar and beat for 3 minutes, until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and mix to combine. Add yolks, two at a time, beating for a full minute after each addition.

In a second bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add to the creamed mixture in three additions, alternating with the mango puree.

In a third bowl, beat egg whites with an electric mixer on high until stiff peaks form. Gently fold into the batter.

Fold in diced mango pieces. Fill cupcake cups 2/3 full and bake for 22 to 25 minutes until tests done with a toothpick. Allow to cool before frosting.

I topped these cupcakes with coconut buttercream, the recipe for which I previously posted here.

Easter Basket Cheesecake Cupcakes

2009-04-10T22:10:00.003-03:00

These cupcakes were also inspired by the Kraft website. I had never made cheesecake cupcakes before and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it. Because the cheesecake doesn't rise and puff up like a regular cake, they don't quite reach the top of the cupcake cup, leaving ample room to fill them with Easter goodies.

I think that no cheesecake is complete without a crust, so I started with a vanilla wafer crumb crust topped with vanilla cheesecake. Once that had was finished baking, I allowed the cakes to cool completely and then refrigerated them. I finished them off with a chocolate topping and basket decorations made from shredded coconut, green shoelace licorice and jelly beans. They turned out wonderfully rich and decadent, I can't wait to serve them at BF's birthday party tomorrow!

Here are the recipes. Makes approximately 20 cupcakes.

Recipe: Vanilla Wafer Crumb Crust

Ingredients:
1/3 cup butter
1 1/2 cups vanilla wafer crumbs

Melt butter. Mix with crumbs until fully combined. Spoon 1 Tbsp of the crumb mixture in each muffin cup. Firmly press the crumbs into the base of the cups using the back of a spoon. Be sure the crust reaches out to the edges of the bottom of the cup.

Recipe: Vanilla Cheesecake

Ingredients:
3/4 cup sour cream
2 8oz packages of cream cheese
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp flour
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place sour cream in mixing bowl and beat for a few seconds until fluffy. Add cream cheese and continue to beat until evenly combined and fluffy. Add sugar, vanilla and flour and mix until combined. Add eggs one at a time, mixing on low speed just until combined.

Spoon into muffin cups on top of the vanilla wafer crumb crust, so that muffin cups are 3/4 full. Bake for 22 -25 minutes or until centers are almost set. Cool to room temperature and then refrigerate for about an hour.

Recipe: Chocolate Topping

Ingredients:
5 oz semisweet chocolate (5 squares)
1/2 cup sour cream

Melt chocolate over a double boiler. Remove from heat and stir in sour cream. Place a thin layer of the chocolate on top of each cupcake using the back of a spoon (to avoid getting chocolate on the paper wrapper).

Take a 4" length of shoelace licorice and press each end through the cheese cake about 2mm from the edge of the cake, forming the handle of the basket. Sprinkle the cupcake with coconut and place a few candies in the center of the cupcake.

Coconut Cupcakes Recipe

2009-02-26T11:50:00.004-04:00

Once in a while, something will come out of my kitchen that truly amazes me.

These coconut cupcakes definitely qualify.

I was inspired to make these by an episode of Good Eats. The talented Alton Brown was on a quest to make the perfect coconut cake, and I was so intrigued by his recipe, that I had to try it out.

There were two reasons I wanted to try out this recipe.

It uses not one, not two, not three but four different forms of coconut
I get so excited when I see a recipe that uses a fresh ingredient where I've always been using ready made ingredients, in this case shredded coconut. I've always used the dessicated kind that you buy in a bag so I was stoked to try to take a whole coconut and make it into a bowl full of perfect shreds of fresh coconut.

Lastly, I'll say that I was extremely tempted to add pineapple flavour to these. It took all of my self control to just allow them to be plain coconut flavoured, without so much as a hint of vanilla. And am I ever glad! They turned out light and fluffy with the most exquisite coconut flavour I've ever experienced. The light, airy texture of the cupcakes meant that too much frosting could overpower them, so rather than pipe a big swirl, I just spread the frosting with a spatula and then flipped them upside down and dipped them in a bowl of the fresh, shredded coconut.

To make the shredded coconut, first drain the coconut by using a hammer to poke holes into its three 'eyes' with a screwdriver and then placing over a bowl until all of the coconut water drains out. Place the coconut on its side and hit with a hammer a few times until it cracks and you can split it in half. Separate the meat from the shell by sliding a dull knife (I used a butter knife) between them, and then cut the brown rind from the meat using a paring knife. Wash the white parts of the coconut to remove any bits of fibre and place pieces in a food processor using the grater disk.

Here is the recipe, which is Alton Brown's with the following changes:

Adapted from a cake recipe to a cupcake recipe
Used buttercream frosting rather than 7-minute frosting (I ran out of eggs)

Recipe: Coconut Cupcakes with Coconut Buttercream frosting

Ingredients

14 1/4 oz cake flour,approximately 3 cups
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup coconut cream
8 oz butter, room temperature
16 oz sugar, approximately 2 1/4 cups
1 tsp coconut extract
4 egg whites

1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 shortening
1 tsp coconut extract
4 cups icing sugar
5 Tbsp coconut milk
Grated coconut from 1 coconut, approximately 8 to 10 ounces

For the Cupcakes:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin tins with paper liners. Makes about 30 cupcakes.

Place the flour, baking powder and salt into a large mixing bowl and whisk to combine.

Combine the coconut milk and coconut cream in small bowl and set aside.

Place the butter into the bowl of a stand mixer and using the paddle attachment, cream on medium speed until fluffy, approximately 1 minute. Decrease the speed to low and gradually add the sugar slowly over 1 to 2 minutes. Once all of the sugar has been added, stop the mixer and scrape down the sides. Turn the mixer back on to medium speed and continue creaming until the mixture noticeably lightens in texture and increases slightly in volume, approximately 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the coconut extract.

With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture alternately with the milk mixture to the butter and sugar in 3 batches, ending with the milk mixture. Do not over mix.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Fold the egg whites into the batter, just until combined. Fill cupcake cups about 2/3 full. Place in the oven on the middle rack. Bake for 25 minutes or until cupcakes start to become golden brown around the edges and a toothpick pressed in the center comes out clean.

Cool the cupcakes in the pans for 10 minutes then remove and transfer to a cooling rack.

For the Frosting:
Cream butter and shortening together until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes on medium speed.Add coconut extract and mix to combine.

Gradually add icing sugar until combined. Add coconut milk, 1 Tbsp at a time until the frosting reaches desired consistency.

Spread frosting on top of each cupcake and then dip cupcakes in shredded coconut to coat the tops.

Feb 24th Snack Bento

2009-02-24T19:31:00.002-04:00

Most of my time this morning was spent making breakfast (four-grain strawberry and banana pancakes. Yum!), so I just threw together the quickest of snack bentos as BF was getting ready to leave.
The dumplings are gyoza from a batch I made this weekend (recipe: here). I couldn't get my hands on round gyoza wrappers so I ended up buying square wonton wrappers instead. Originally I had planned to cut them into circles, but when I discovered that you can fold the square ones into these adorable pyramids, I left them the way they were.

To fold dumplings this way, first brush the outer perimeter of the square with water and then place about a teaspoon of filling in the middle. Fold in two diagonally opposite corners and pinch the tip to connect them together. Fold up the remaining two corners and press together the seams to seal them. Pinch the tip once more.

I like the way these look so much that I might start doing them this way on a regular basis. I cooked them by frying them until the bottoms were brown and then steaming for an additional 7 minutes. Wonton wrappers are thicker than round gyoza wrappers so they hold up really well when frying.

To add some colour and to stabilize the gyoza, I included a few pieces of steamed broccoli and some blackberries. The sauce bottle contains a mixture of rice vinegar and soy sauce.

February 19th Bento Lunch

2009-02-19T13:57:00.002-04:00

The honest truth is that I've been making more bento lunches than I've been posting.

The thing is though, because we're in the middle of winter (There's a blizzard raging outside as I type this!) I've been using the thermal bento sets almost exclusively. I am so in love with these bento boxes! I packed hot yakiudon in them this past weekend for a ski trip. The lunch boxes sat in a freezing cold car for 4 hours while we skiied and by some miracle, they were still warm at lunch time. I was amazed.

When I first purchased these, my intention was to pretty much live off Thai curries for the winter, and although I've definitely had my share of curries, I've expanded into soups, stews and chili as well.

And the thing is, those kinds of foods are...well...ugly.

So, given the fact that I already find it challenging to make the thermal bento lunches look cute just due to the size/shape of them, and then compound that with the fact that most of the foods I've been using have been inherently not cute, I've been a bit reluctant to post most of the lunches I've been making.

On the positive side though, the lunches have been incredibly delicious! Here is today's:
In the main container, there is some home made lamb stew (the recipe is here, on my other blog). Although hideous, it's an incredibly hearty and flavourful mix of carrots, potatoes, onions and the softest bites of lamb you can imagine.

In the container on the right, I first placed a sweet potato biscuit in the bottom. The recipe is from Paula Deen's website and they are heavenly. I've made two batches in one week! For the bento, I've sliced it in half, buttered it, and then cut it into bite sized pieces. On top of that are some cheddar cheese flowers to go with it. I've also included a Valentine's heart shaped truffle for dessert.

The container on the left contains simple apple pieces (rubbed with lemon so that they don't brown) and some blueberries.

I would love to hear any ideas that you have to make these types of lunches cuter!

My Biggest Baking Project Ever! Valentine's Day Cupcakes with Sugar Cookies

2009-02-18T15:27:00.003-04:00

I love any excuse to bake. I especially love any excuse to bake cupcakes.

BF knows this, so he will often volunteer me to provide the baked goods for events we go to, and then he lets me know later.

Last week he came home from work and said "I may have mentioned to my boss that you would make Valentine's cupcakes for everyone in the office."

Me: "How many are we talking?"

BF: "No more than 70 I think."

I mulled that over in my mind for a moment. I had never made 70 cupcakes at once before. It seemed like a whole lot of work, so why stop there?

I said "What if you brought me a list of everyone you work with and I'll make everyone a special sugar cookie with their name on it and then put the cookies on top of cupcakes?"

BF said that sounded like a great idea, and that's how I dug myself a huge hole.

Oh my.

What a lot of work it was.

In total I made 85 cupcakes. 81 were personalized and I included 4 extras in case I missed anyone and because if there's one thing I know, it's that a batch of cupcakes will always attract more people than you expected.

Making treats for such a large group of strangers presented some new considerations from my usual cupcake making. I had to be careful to choose flavours that were widely appealing and to accomodate any allergies. As it turned out, only one person had an allergy and that was to wheat, so I made her marzipan covered cherries since they are quick and easy to make and anything with flour was out of the question. I chose to do plain vanilla cupcakes with a dollop of chocolate batter on top of each one for a sort of marble cupcake. Knowing that the cupcakes were plainly flavoured and that the cookies would be plainly flavoured, I kicked up the frosting a notch, using a pomegranate buttercream rather than something plain.

I made the cookies using the same method and recipes as the snowflake cookies I made at Christmas, sugar cookies with royal icing. Where I was baking such a huge quantity, I decided to use only recipes and techniques that I've used before and loved rather than trying something new and risking making a mistake or an inferior product. I love to experiment, but not when people are counting on me.

The pomegranate molasses in the frosting lent itself best to making the frosting a pale pink, so I chose colours for the cookies that would go well with pale pink and keep with the Valentines theme. I went with purple, white and a bright pink. I reserved about 1/4 cup of each colour of icing to do the lettering.

At first I was a little shaky with the writing (and daunted by the thought of fitting some of the longer names on the small cookies. It took me three tries to fit "Anastasia" on a cookie) but as I progressed, the letters became neater and the spacing of the letters became more consistent. This project definitely increased my confidence in my piped lettering. I used a Wilton #1 tip. The end result was absolutely adorable cookies that sort of resembled Love Hearts candies. I was so thrilled when they were done and they were all perfect.

Once the cookies were done, I started on the cupcakes. I made two batches of vanilla cupcake batter and one batch of chocolate and then combined them in each cupcake. The last step was to frost them and place a cookie on each one.

Here is a close-up of some of the cupcakes so you can see how they looked. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

I didn't have a big enough cupcake carrier to hold so many, so BF brought home some lids from paper boxes and we filled them up. It completely filled three of them.

To make distribution easier for BF, I ordered them by the seating arrangement at his work, separating the cupcakes by team, and then indicating where a team ends by placing a manager's cupcake which had a larger cookie. That way he could easily scan the cupcakes to determine which section of cupcakes went to which section of his office floor.

Amazingly, the whole thing went off without a hitch. There were enough cupcakes for everyone and by the end of the day, there were none left for BF to bring home. I'm so proud of myself for pulling this off and it's reaffirmed for me that I would like to be a baker as a profession. Spending an eight hour day in the kitchen flies by for me. I just love to bake! BF said that everyone loved them and was excited that they were personalized. It was definitely worth the effort.

Bailey's Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting Recipe

2009-02-05T17:45:00.004-04:00

My friend had a birthday celebration this past weekend (his champagne birthday, no less!), so of course I made cupcakes. He asked for Bailey's flavoured, so that's what I made!
I was worried that these would come out boozy, with that unmistakenable alcohol taste because there is so much Baileys in them, but they actually turned out really nice. The Irish cream flavour of the Bailey's is definitely present and bold, but they don't have an alcohol aftertaste. I was really pleased with them.

I went with chocolate buttercream for the frosting because it seemed like a natural pairing, inspired by one of my favorite winter drinks, Bailey's and hot chocolate. My friend appreciates silly things, so I went with a traditional kid's birthday cake sort of look, with purple polka dotted cupcake wrappers and dinosaur sprinkles (both Wilton). He loved them!

Recipe: Baileys Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting

Ingredients

Cupcakes (Makes approx. 30 cupcakes)

1 cup of butter, room temperature
2 cups of sugar
4 eggs, separated and at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup of Bailey's liqueur

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy (about 3 or 4 minutes). Add egg yolks one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition. Add vanilla and mix until combined.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add to creamed mixture, alternating with Baileys and mixing well after each addition. Batter should be thick, but if it comes out dry, add a splash of milk.

In another bowl, beat egg whites with clean beaters until stiff peaks form. Gently fold into the cupcake batter until the colour of the batter is uniform.Fill lined cupcake cups half full. Bake 22 to 25 minutes or until they test done with a toothpick.

Frosting

Ingredients

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup) at room temperature
1/2 cup shortening
3 1/2 cups icing sugar

1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp vanilla
3-4 Tbsp milk

Cream together butter and shortening. Add vanilla and milk and mix well. Combine icing sugar and cocoa and gradually add to the creamed mixture. Add more milk if necessary.

February 4th Bento Lunch

2009-02-04T14:20:00.004-04:00

I broke out the thermal bento box today. Please excuse the condensation on the lids. I keep the lids on until I'm ready to take the picture to keep the heat in the thermal container and to keep the other two containers from drying out.
The main component of the lunch is a delectable Thai red curry soup (the recipe is here) that is full of noodles and veggies in a yummy coconut milk broth.

In the container on the left, I also threw in a heart shaped bonito onigiri for some additional carbs. I had some yummy honey mustard chicken I wanted to put in this bento, but BF said he would rather have more pulled pork so that I what I used. There are a few pea sprouts for colour and crunch in there as well.

In the second container there are three stalks of steamed asparagus along with some tangerine wedges and a few honey dates. Once everything was packed up, I put a little individually wrapped After Eight mint for a sweet bite.

In hindsight, I realize that I forgot to pack a spoon for the soup! Hopefully BF can snag one while he's at work.

February 2nd Bento Lunch

2009-02-02T12:58:00.002-04:00

I was determined to get back into the bento lunch making habit this week, but I ended up not having much time this morning, so this is what I managed to pull together.

There are two onigiri filled with a mixture of bonito flakes and soy sauce. One is upset that he is going to be eaten for lunch while the other is happy to see that I'm making bento lunches again! I decided to cut out the nori by hand rather than with punches because these are quite large onigiri and I think the punches would have made eyes that were too small. It's actually not to hard to hand cut the eyes if you start with a small square of nori. For the mad eyes, I cut two small triangles from the square and cut off the outer corner. For the happy eyes, I just cut out an even smaller square from the original nori square.

For protein, there is some pulled pork leftover from the weekend (the recipe for it is here). For veggies we have zucchini, carrots and bean sprouts that have been steamed as well as some raw red pepper strips. For fruit there are some peeled blood orange segments (the colours aren't as bright if you don't peel them) and I included a little green tea flavoured tea cake for dessert.

Quick and simple!

New Year's Cupcakes

2009-01-03T22:26:00.002-04:00

A little late....

BF was supposed to go scuba diving on New Years day, but it got cancelled because we had a blizzard (I have no idea how he can hang out underwater when we have snow on the ground, but he swears he doesn't get cold). It got rescheduled for tomorrow morning, so I decided to make New Year's themed cupcakes anyway, even if we're four days in.
These are pretty simple. Chocolate and beer cupcakes with vanilla buttercream, as per BF's request. I used a wheat ale this time (Rickards White) and it really toned down the beer taste. At some point, I'd like to try these with Guinness to see how they turn out.

To decorate them, I did a mound of blue frosting using a Wilton 2D tip, and then a white swirl around it using a 1M. The year is piped with a #3 tip.

I think they turned out pretty cute for how simple they were. Just a tiny bit of extra work, but I think they get the message across.

Candy Cane Cupcakes

2008-12-13T00:05:00.004-04:00

I feel like I've been making cookies all week, so I decided to take it easy today and make some cupcakes.

Here they are; candy cane cupcakes!
I'm not going to post the recipe because these were really simple. I took a vanilla cupcake recipe (makes 36 cupcakes) and crushed about a dozen candy canes and added it to the batter along with 1/2 tsp peppermint flavouring. I crushed the candy canes by putting them in a ziplock bag and hammering them with the bottom of a wine bottle for about three minutes before deciding that the food processor would be easier (which it was!).

The frosting is a plain, white buttercream with peppermint extract instead of vanilla. To get the red and green swirls, I 'striped' a disposable icing bag. Just use a small paint brush to paint a stripe of icing colours up the inside of the bag. I did one green stripe and one red stripe opposite the green. The only downside to using this method is that you have to use a new bag every time you need to refill. The last touch was to use cupcake cups with candy cane coloured stripes. They're made by Wilton.

Here's a picture of the inside of the cupcakes. The candy canes melted while the cupcake baked, leaving little flecks of colour and a mild minty flavor.

I think the trick with these is to make sure the mint is present but not overpowering. I think I managed a pretty good balance with a mildly minty cake and a stronger flavour (but not toothpaste strong!) in the frosting.

Yum!

Two Types of Christmas Cupcakes + Recipes

2008-12-06T11:04:00.005-04:00

Two Types of Christmas Cupcakes + RecipesChristmas baking is my favorite kind of baking.
I have a whole list of things I plan to make this year and all kinds of pretty boxes and cellophane to package it and give home baked gifts to friends.

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to wrack my brain for a way to include cupcakes in my holiday baking, given their relatively short shelf life compared to something like cookies which can be frozen and thawed as needed. I generally don't like to serve cupcakes past their second day.

So, in the end I decided to make cupcakes all month before Christmas and distribute wherever I see the opportunity, and save the traditional baking for the week before Christmas. I came up with three types of cupcakes that I want to make this Christmas, two of which I made yesteday.
BF has a "Christmas Dive" today, where he and his scuba diving buddies are actually decorating a tree underwater. And what is a Christmas party without cupcakes?
I decided to go with contrasting flavours; one light and airy, and one dense and rich. I made gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and eggnog cupcakes with eggnog and orange buttercream.

Wait, eggnog and orange?

I was amazed to discover that these two flavours combine so naturally and deliciously, like a spicy creamsicle. I was doing some Christmas shopping yesterday and stopped for a smoothie break and the holiday flavour they were serving was eggnog and mandarin. I was a bit apprehensive (I automatically thought it would be curdle-y) but decided to give it a shot and was instantly in love with this combo.

In keeping with the light and airy theme, I used blue snowflake cups and sprinkled the cupcakes with a little icing sugar to represent snow. I think they turned out beautiful and were incredibly fluffy.

For the gingerbread, I had wanted to use a whipped cream frosting, but since it would be about 5 hours between when they left the house and when they would be eaten, and BF wasn't sure he would be able to refrigerate them, I went with cream cheese frosting instead. Whipped cream shouldn't be left to sit out more than 1.5 hours max.

You can't see from this picture, but they're packed in adorable cupcake cups with gingerbread men on them (they're Wilton, but they're not on the site, so I can't link to them). I also found tiny gingerbread man shaped sprinkles at my local bulk food store.

BF brought both flavours to work yesterday as well. He said that people immediately went for the bright eggnog cupcakes, but that the people who were 'stuck' with the gingerbread ones ended up being really impressed by them. Despite their modest appearance, they are truly rich and delicious.

I expect I will end up making more of these before Christmas (I've already gone through two batches of the eggnog ones!), and I plan to make some candy cane cupcakes as well. I'll post pics and a recipe when I do!

On to the recipes! The eggnog cupcake recipe is adapted from the vanilla cupcake recipe I've cited many times. The gingerbread recipe is adapted from a recipe from allrecipes.com.

Recipe: Eggnog Cupcakes with Eggnog and Orange Buttercream Frosting

Makes about 3 dozen

Ingredients

1 cup butter (room temperature)
2 cups sugar
4 eggs separated (room temperature)
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch of cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups eggnog

1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1/2 cup shortening
4 cups icing sugar
1 tsp orange extract
6 Tbsp eggnog
Orange icing colouring (just a tiny bit!)
Icing sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease or line muffin tins.

In a large bowl, cream together first portion of butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy (about 4 or 5 minutes). Add two egg yolks and mix for an additional minute. Add remaining egg yolks and mix for an additional minute.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and spices. Alternate between adding dry ingredients the eggnog to the butter mixture, a little bit at a time.

In small bowl, beat egg whites on high until stiff peaks form. With a rubber spatula, add about 1/2 cup of the egg whites to the mixture and fold in gently, to separate and lighten the batter. Add remaining egg whites and fold in gently until no white streaks are present.

Fill cupcake tins half full and bake for 22 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cupcakes comes out clean.Allow cupcakes to cool in the pan for ten minutes before removing to a wire wrack. Allow to cool completely before decorating.

For the frosting, mix remaining butter and the shortening in a medium bowl until light and fluffy (about three minutes). Add orange extract and mix until combined. Add icing sugar a little at a time, mixing until combined after each addition. Once all of the icing sugar has been mixed in, add eggnog 1 Tbsp at a time until icing has reached desired consistency. Mix in a small amount of orange colouring to acheive a colour that will contrast with the white icing sugar dust, but is not too dark.

Frost cupcakes using a 1M tip to make a swirl and dust with icing sugar by placing a few tablespoons of icing sugar in a small strainer and gently tapping the side.

Recipe: Gingerbread Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Recipe makes about 2 dozen cupcakes

Ingredients

1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 egg
1 cup molasses
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup hot water

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), room temperature
1 8 oz package cream cheese, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups icing sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease or line muffin pan.

In a large bowl, combine the sugar and butter and beat on medium speed until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in the egg for an additional minute, and mix in the molasses.
In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Blend into the creamed mixture. Stir in the hot water.

Fill muffin cups 2/3 full. Bake for 20-25, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow cupcakes to cool in the pan for ten minutes before removing to a wire wrack. Allow to cool completely before decorating.

For the frosting, cream butter and cream cheese together with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy, about three minutes. Add vanilla and mix. Add icing sugar and blend until consistency is uniform.

Frost cupcakes by piping a swirl with Wilton tip #2A. Garnish with sprinkles.

Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes with Pomegranate Frosting Recipe

2008-11-07T18:05:00.005-04:00

For the past month I've been taking Wilton cake decorating classes at Michaels. I thought I could use some help learning how to pipe flowers. It's been pretty fun so far, my sister is taking them with me. We started course 2 yesterday and we finish course 1 on Monday. So far we've worked on how to assemble and frost a cake, transferring patterns onto a cake, piping stars and shells, and piping roses, rosettes, rosebuds and chrysanthemums. Next week is royal icing.

I've had to make a cake every week for the classes, so making cupcakes on top of that seemed excessive. Which is sad, given the quality of my class cakes. I've just been using cake mixes and they require you to use the Wilton recipe for the frosting (translation: Waaaaaaaayyyyy too much shortening and tasteless). The frosting tastes so terrible I'm almost embarassed to give them away but I do anyway because they wouldn't get eaten here. I think it's worth making a few terrible cakes to learn some new skills though, so I plan to take all of the courses.

My aunt is visiting this weekend, and as a regular reader of my blog, she requested cupcakes so I made a batch especially for her.

I'd been planning to make matcha cupcakes for a long time now. I've made matcha frosting successfully, and I wanted to see how it would work in the actual cake. I was going to make these for Halloween because of the freaky green colour, but I made a Wilton cake instead, lol.

The cupcakes themselves turned out dense and moist and not too sweet, and the green tea taste is really mild but nice. I'm happy with them. The frosting is a buttercream made with pomegranate molasses and it's incredible. Definitely one of the best I've made. The two flavours work together well. All in all these are some pretty yummy cakes!
Recipe: Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes with Pomegranate Frosting

Cupcakes (Makes approx. 15 cupcakes)

Ingredients:

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), room temperature
1 cup of sugar
2 eggs, separated and at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 Tbsp matcha powder plus enough all-purpose flour to make 1 1/2 cups
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy (about 3 or 4 minutes). Add egg yolks one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition. Add vanilla and mix until combined.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, matcha, baking powder and salt. Add to creamed mixture, alternating with milk and mixing well after each addition.

In another bowl, beat egg whites with clean beaters until stiff peaks form. Gently fold into the cupcake batter until the colour of the batter is uniform.

Fill lined cupcake cups half full. Bake 22 to 25 minutes or until tests done with a toothpick.

Frosting

Ingredients

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup) at room temperature
1/2 cup shortening
1 lb (500g) bag of icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 Tbsp milk
2 1/2 Tbsp pomegranate molasses

Cream together butter and shortening. Add vanilla, milk and molasses and mix well. Gradually add icing sugar. Add more milk if necessary.

Note: The pomegranate molasses turns the frosting an ugly shade of brown, so you may wish to add a little bit of red icing colouring for a frosting a little more reminiscent of pomegranate.

The flavour of this frosting is relatively mild. If you want to kick it up a notch with some sourness, I recommend drizzling a little more of the pomegranate molasses on top of each cupcake.

Thanksgiving Turkey Cupcakes

2008-10-12T20:17:00.002-03:00

These were so much fun to make!

For Canadians, this was Thanksgiving day weekend. I hadn't made cupcakes for a week or two, so I went all out for this one!
I don't usually go to this much trouble to decorate cupcakes, but when I saw this idea in the book Hello Cupcake! I couldn't resist.

The cupcakes are pumpkin pie flavoured. I picked this flavour because it's a good traditional Thanksgiving flavour and because BF is allergic to it, so now that he's out of the country for a bit it's one of the few chances I have to make it (although of course I would rather have him back than all the pumpkin cupcakes in the world). They turned out perfect! So moist and fluffy, I was really pleased. The recipe is from Crazy About Cupcakes and it's basically a regular golden cupcake recipe with less milk and 1 1/2 cups of pureed pumpkin and lots of spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves). They were so good!

The tricky part was getting the same number of regular cupcakes and mini cupcakes. I basically just filled the muffin pans one cake at a time. It was a little nerve wracking though, because since I had exactly the same number of small cupcakes and regular cupcakes (the recipe made 20 of each), I couldn't eat one before decorating to test them out. This is the first time I've ever served something to people that I haven't tested myself so I was a bit scared, but luckily they turned out great.

The frosting is just a plain vanilla buttercream, spread on with a spatula rather than piped. The eyes are piped frosting.

For his tail feathers, I used maple cookies that are pretty common around here. They're sandwich cookies like Oreos, so I just split them in half and scraped off the frosting with the back of a butter knife. I think they turned out really pretty because they're such a nice shape for feathers. On each one, there are three pieces of candy corn attached with frosting. The nose is also made of candy corn, with a waddle cut from a piece of Fruit-by-the-foot.

For added decoration I used some cute Wilton autumn cupcake cups and rolled the cupcakes in some sprinkles (before the rest of the decorations of course).

I'm really pleased with how they turned out and they weren't nearly as difficult or time consuming as I would have expected. My sister helped out too so we were done really quickly. They were definitely a hit!

Update

2008-10-03T15:38:00.003-03:00

Hi Folks,

It's been a bit of a crazy week so I haven't been making bento lunches or posting.

BF was offered an opportunity to go the the Phillipines for the next couple of months. We weren't given much warning, so the last week has been pretty hectic while he gets ready to go.

I thought it was important to let everyone here know because, given that he's the one I make the bento lunches for, it means I won't have anything to post for the little while. I expect to be going back to work in the next couple of weeks though, so I'll be making bentos for myself then.

In the meantime of course, I will continue to post the cupcakes I make (I'll have to find new people to eat them!)

So I do apologize for the lack of bento lunch posts. I'm pretty excited though about everything that's going on around here. Positive change is a good thing. Although I will miss him a lot!

Cherry and Almond Cupcakes Recipe

2008-09-27T11:28:00.006-03:00

I've wanted to make these cupcakes for about a week now but I had a tough time finding a recipe for cherry cupcakes that used maraschino cherries and wasn't chocolate. In the end I wound up adapting a vanilla cupcake recipe myself. They turned out incredible! These are might just be the best cupcakes I've ever made. They are incredibly moist and fluffy andthe different flavours are strong but not overpowering.

Recipe: Cherry Cupcakes with Almond Frosting

Ingredients

1 cup butter (room temperature)
2 cups sugar
4 eggs separated (room temperature)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup milk
2/3 cup marashino cherry juice
1 10oz jar of marashino cherries, finely chopped

1/2 cup salted butter
1/2 cup shortening
1 lb bag of icing sugar
2 tsp almond extract
4 to 5 Tbsp cold milk

1/2 cup slivered almonds

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease or line muffin tins. Recipe makes about 3 dozen cupcakes.

In a large bowl, cream together first portion of butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy (about 4 or 5 minutes). Add two egg yolks and mix for an additional minute. Add remaining egg yolks and mix for an additional minute. Add vanilla and almond extracts and mix in.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, combine milk and marashino cherry juice. Alternate between adding dry ingredients and liquid ingredients to the butter mixture, a little bit at a time.

Fold in chopped cherries.

In small bowl, beat egg whites on high until stiff peaks form. With a rubber spatula, add about 1/2 cup of the egg whites to the mixture and fold in gently, to separate and lighten the batter. Add remaining egg whites and fold in gently until no white streaks are present.

Fill cupcake tins half full and bake for 22 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cupcakes comes out clean. Allow cupcakes to cool in the pan for ten minutes before removing to a wire wrack. Allow to cool completely before decorating.

For the frosting, mix remaining butter and the shortening in a medium bowl until light and fluffy (about three minutes). Add almond extract and mix until combined. Add icing sugar a little at a time, mixing until combined after each addition. Once all of the icing sugar has been mixed in, add milk 1 Tbsp at a time until icing has reached desired consistency.

In a dry frying pan, toast almond slices over medium heat until they become fragrant and turn light brown. Keep the almonds moving and flip frequently so that they don't burn.

Pipe a swirl of frosting on each cupcake using a Wilton 1M tip. Place three or four toasted almond slices on each.

Here's a picture of the inside so you can see the pretty pink colour. Somehow I managed to cut this one where there were no cherries, but in general, there were a lot of cherries in each cupcake. You may decide you want to add more though.

September 26th Bento Lunch

2008-09-26T12:24:00.002-03:00

I've had a bunch of early morning dentist appointments this week, so I haven't been around to make bento lunches. Poor BF has been eating food court food. Today I was home though so he got a home packed lunch.

On my trip to the grocery store yesterday, it seemed that the store had transitioned overnight from light summer foods to autumn foods. What immediately caught my eye was a bin of fresh chestnuts. When I got home, I went through my Japanese cookbooks for a chestnut recipe. In Japanese Cooking - A Simple Art, I found a recipe for chestnut rice (kuri gohan) that was described as "as autumnal in Japan as pumpkin pie is in America". BF is allergic to pumpkin pie, so I immediately wanted to make this in the hopes that it it would be a nice fall food for him although I made it in onigiri form rather than served hot.

To prepare the chestnuts, they should be soaked for two hours to soften the shell. The shell can then be cut off and the inner layer of skin can then be removed from the nut. It's a painstaking process to peel off the inner layer, but it removes any bitterness.

I made the rice by combining 3/4 cup rice, 5 chestnuts cut into sixths and 1/4 tsp salt in the rice cooker. The onigiri is filled with a little lotus seed white bean paste.

For protein there are some breaded pork strips that have been fried in a little oil as well as two gyoza.

The vegetables include steamed broccoli, asparagus and sugar snaps, as well as julienned carrot that has been fried in a little sesame oil and wrapped into bundles with chives.

For the first time in months, I couldn't get my hands on any blueberries. I think this may be the very first bento lunch I've ever made without them. I lucked out though because they had miniature kiwis instead which are about the same size. They're called grape kiwis and they don't have furry skin so you don't have to peel them. I like to cut them in half so that you can see the seeds inside.

I also included a few raspberries and slices of a pepino melon, which is a small melon (about the size of pear) with a thin rind that can either be peeled or eaten. In this case I left it on to protect the dumplings from the moisture of the fruit.

For dessert I included half of a dorayaki pancake sandwich (recipe is here) although it was probably overkill given that I also packed a dozen cupcakes up to take with him. I'll post pictures of them as soon as I get the recipe typed up.

September 22nd Bento Lunch

2008-09-22T11:28:00.002-03:00

A note to my readers: Hi Everyone! I've been starting to feel like my blog has only been covering a small part of my kitchen adventures and as a result, it's been slipping away from its focus of bento lunches and cupcakes (muffin post, anyone?) because I want to share so much of what I create in the kitchen with all of you. So rather than fill this blog with all kinds of other stuff, I've decided to start a second blog. That way, if you want to see bento lunches and cupcakes, there's no other 'filler' here, but if you're interested in finding out about the other foods I've been exploring, it's all online for you to see.

My new blog is here: http://jacki2.blogspot.com, and there's a link to it in the right sidebar of this blog too. I'll also be linking back to it from here from time to time if I put a food in a lunch for which the recipe isn't very 'bento'.

Hopefully this works well and isn't too confusing. Basically, everything will continue as per normal on this blog, but there is a second blog if you would like to check out additional content. Enjoy!

Okay, on to today's lunch!!!

No Japanese food today! Today's bento lunch was mostly made of leftovers from last nights very North American supper.

The main component of the bento is BF's amazing chili. He makes it from scratch in the slow cooker and it has everything from sausage to lamb pieces to okra to peppers. And it's super spicy! He made a tonne, so we'll be eating it for a couple of days. The thermal bento really came in handy for this.

In the larger side container are hearts cut out of cornbread I made last night (recipe is here) and a few pieces of steamed broccoli and sugar snaps. This is one of the very few times I used a plastic food divider in a bento lunch and that is because I don't want the natural moisture of the vegetables to make the cornbread soggy in parts. Generally I don't include bread products in a bento lunch, so this usually isn't an issue.

I cut the cornbread into small hearts so that BF can easily mix them into his chili if he likes. The dark hearts are cut from the bottom of the cornbread and the light hearts are cut from the tops (right now I'm snacking on the pieces left over from where I cut out the hearts. Yummy!)

I added the veggies mainly for color this time. Because there are so many vegetables in the chili, I think the lunch would have been balanced just fine without the additional greens.

In the small container is some apple crisp, also from last night (recipe is here) and placed in a silicone muffin cup, as well as some strawberry slices and blueberries.

This is definitely a heavier lunch than I typically make, but BF is working late tonight, so I think he will appreciate it.

Honey and Peanut Cupcakes

2008-09-20T10:39:00.002-03:00

Here are some cupcakes I made earlier in the week.I followed this recipe almost exactly. The cupcake is a chiffon cake base sweetened with honey rather than sugar and with a layer of salted peanuts inside. The frosting is a cream cheese base, also sweetened with honey (as if the icing sugar doesn't sweeten it enough, right?) with chopped and salted peanuts on top.

The cupcake itself was a little on the dry side. I think that the baking time given in the recipe is too long. Next time I think I would cut it down to 19-20 minutes.

The frosting, on the other hand, is incredible. It is one of the most delicious frostings I have tried and is definitely the best cream cheese frosting recipe I've used, in terms of taste and how well it pipes. Often cream cheese frosting is too soft to hold its shape when piped, but this frosting holds a soft, delicate shape without losing the cream cheese taste and texture.

The concept is wonderful. The sweetness of the cupcakes combined with the saltiness of the peanuts is to die for. This is a great way to spice up an otherwise ordinary cupcake.

Overall, I would definitely make this style of cupcake again, but would most likely try a different cake recipe.

September 19th Bento Lunches

2008-09-19T12:09:00.005-03:00

I couldn't resist using the new bento boxes today.

Please excuse the picture, I haven't figured out the best angles for these bento boxes yet and I was really rushing to get the pictures done so that the food didn't get cold before I had a chance to close the containers. In the thermal container we have lamb panang curry and rice. The picture was taken before I put the rice in BF's lunch so that you can see that there is in fact curry in there. I put the rice on top rather than on the bottom or mixing it in so that it acts as an insulator, keeping the curry hot a little longer.

I used this recipe, substituting store bought curry paste rather than making my own and adding shallots and sweet potatoes for vegetables, as well as some sliced fresh kaffir lime leaves for flavour. It was good but not great, so I will post a new recipe when I find one that I like better.

Panang curries are meant to be drier than red or green curry, in case you're wondering why it looks like mush rather than soup. I think the fact that I cut the sweet potato slices into pretty flowers was completely lost by how thick the curry turned out.

In the first smaller container there are two gyoza, a few pieces of asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps all placed in a circle. In the center of the circle are some carrot flowers. all of the vegetables are steamed.

In the second small container are half of a tangerine, a strawberry cut into slices and a couple of blueberries.

I really enjoyed figuring out how to fill the small containers. They're a bit deeper than a regular bento box, so you can stand things like dumplings up on their ends. I think they're really pretty in their simplicity, which is a wonderful thing.

The thermal container did not disappoint!

I made the bentos at 8am this morning and at 1pm this afternoon when I opened it, the curry was a perfect temperature. It wasn't piping hot of course, but it was warm and delicious. I also really enjoyed eating out of the thermal container because it sits in your palm like a rice bowl unlike a regular bento box which I find is better suited to leaving on the table in front of you. Also, because you have to leave about an inch of the container empty for the deep lid, there's lots of room to mix the rice and curry together.

All in all, I'm really happy with this bento box. Everyone should have get a thermal lunch set for the winter!

New Thermal Bento Boxes!

2008-09-18T11:02:00.004-03:00

I had been eyeing these bento boxes for a long time. Almost for as long as I've been making bento lunches. Somehow though, I couldn't justify the expense because they were quite a bit pricier than any of our other bento boxes.

Then I discovered Thai curries.

I haven't been able to get the image of having hot Thai curries for lunch on a cold winter's day for about three weeks now. And I know it's not exactly winter yet, but it's best to get prepared early, right?

So I finally bit the bullet and ordered these two gorgeous Zojirushi thermal bento sets from ebay (They're available on Amazon.com as well but they don't ship to Canada). They arrived today and I am thrilled with them.
The blue set is mine and the black set is for BF. Each set includes a thermal container with a removable plastic liner. To use it, pour boiling water straight into the metal outside container and let it sit for two minutes to heat up. Then pour out the water, insert the plastic liner, fill it with hot food. and put the lid on it.

There are also two smaller side dish containers, each of which have wonderfully snug fitting lids, a carrying case, as well as a set of plastic chopsticks in a case. The chopsticks have textured tips to help you get a better grip on your food.

Here's a front view so you can see the difference in size. The blue set holds 640ml and the black set holds 820ml which are the perfect size for BF and I. There is a green set in the series as well which is even smaller. The insides of the containers have clear guidelines to help you avoid overfilling them.

Here they are, packed in their bags. The bags are made from nylon and are not thermal. There's a little pocket in the strap for the chopstick case and a drawstring closure at the top. The containers fit into these bags perfectly, there is no room for anything extra.
One neat feature about these lunch sets is that when you've eaten your lunch and the containers are empty, you can compact them to about half of their size. The two small containers nest inside the larger containers with the lids on top. There is a drawstring that you pull on the side to make the bag smaller, and a second snap on the handle of the bag to lock everything in place. I think this will be useful for BF who often goes to play sports straight after work, so that it won't take up much room in his gym bag.

Overall, I'm extremely impressed with the quality of these lunch sets. I can't wait to start using them!

Organizing Your Recipes

2008-09-16T10:03:00.003-03:00

This isn't a bento or cupcake post, but I wanted to share this idea with you because I think it's a safe bet that most of the people who read my blog use the internet as a resource for creative food ideas and recipes.

Previously, I would get an idea in my head of what I want to make, search the internet for a recipe, print it out, take it to the kitchen and start cooking. If it was a dud, I'd throw out the paper when I was done. If it was really good, the paper would usually just sit on my counter for a bit or maybe on top of the fridge or microwave, getting shuffled around (and occasionally thrown out) whenever I cleaned up. So at any given time I would know I have an awesome recipe for cornbread somewhere, but I couldn't always find it in a pinch.

So it was definitely time to get organized.

This system was recommended to me by someone on one of the forums I frequent, and I'm really impressed with how simple it was and how nice the end result is. I tried to give really detailed instructions on how to set it up the way I did. Hopefully that won't make people think it's complicated because it's not, it's really easy.

To get started, you will need:

A nice binder
A package of sheet protectors
A package of dividers
Paper
Access to a colour printer
Document editing software (I use MS Office 2007)

Keep in mind that this binder will probably be spending a lot of time in your kitchen so choose items that will be okay if they get splashed with water or spatter from your mixer (that's why we're using sheet protectors). Avoid fabric binders and use dividers made from plastic rather than paper if you can.

The system is simple. Start a Word document and set it up to format your recipes the way you like. I used a preset theme in Word (called Verve) that set up font formatting for everything from the title of each recipe to the ingredient lists.

To set up your theme in Word 2007, click the Page Layout tab, and you will see the themes in the top left. Select the one you like, click on it and then click the Home tab. If you look at the bottom of the "Styles" box (over towards the right), you'll see a little arrow. Click on that and a new window opens next to your document listing the different types of texts (like Title, Subtitle, Heading, Normal Text, etc). Now you just need to highlight words and click on something in that list to format your document.

When I find a new recipe that I want to hang on to, I start a new page, click "Title", type in the title of the recipe and paste in a picture (Either one I've taken myself, or I do a Google image search to find something suitable). The pictures are really handy because they let you find recipes quickly and if, for example, BF wanted me to make something but didn't know what it was called, he can just find the picture of it.

Below the picture, I just copy/paste the recipe. The formatting is simple. I highlight the words "Ingredients" and "Directions" and click on "Heading 1" to tell Word what type of text it is so that it can format it correctly (bold pink text). I highlight the ingredients and click on "List Paragraph" to put it in bullet point form. Next I highlight the directions and click "Normal" to change the font and spacing to match the rest of my recipe book. Lastly, I go under page layout and select Page -> Page Break so that the next time I go to enter a recipe, I start on a new page.

After that, I might set up the text into columns or shift things around a little so that a long recipe fits on one page, but overall, the whole process takes less than a minute per recipe and all of the recipes are uniform in appearance and clear and easy to read.

Print out the pages of the recipes you've just added and figure out how you want to organize your binder.

I'm using six dividers labeled "Proteins", "Complex Carbs", "Dumplings", "Vegetables", "Fruits", "Desserts" and "Soups" because that's how I think about food and plan my meals. You can use any categories you like though.

Next, put the pages in the sheet protectors in the order you like. I include two sheets in each protector, one facing in each direction. I put the recipes in each section in alphabetical order and if I have a recipe that takes two pages, it has its own divider. By having each recipe on its own page, I'm able to move things around easily when I add new recipes so that I can keep everything in order.

Now whenever I find a new recipe, I can just add it to the document and print out any new recipes whenever I get a chance, to keep my binder up to date.

I've included pictures of a few sample pages for you to check out. Just click on them to get a closer look. I also threw together a quick title page and a label for the spine of the binder.

September 15th Bento Lunch

2008-09-15T09:59:00.003-03:00

I managed to get up at a reasonable hour this morning, so I had time to put together this bento lunch.
The main dishes are the onigiri and pieces of honey glazed roasted duck leg, both of which I made yesterday. The onigiri are filled with a mixture of bonito flakes and soy sauce and wrapped with little nori strips.

The recipe I used for the duck is from the book Into the Vietnamese Kitchen (in the carousel on the left side of this blog). It's time consuming to make, but it's such an amazing recipe that I don't mind taking the time once in a while.

The duck is first marinated for 15 minutes in a mixture of sake, salt and ginger juice. I then added the marinated to the water in my steamer and steamed the duck leg for 25 minutes, to make it soft and juicy inside.

The glaze is made from a combination of ginger, garlic, sherry, Chinese 5-spice powder, honey, salt and soy sauce that is heated to boiling and then and pressed through a sieve to remove the garlic pieces and make it smooth.

The duck is roasted in the oven at 425 degrees for a further 35 minutes in order to crisp up the outside. The glaze is brushed on and then it is roasted another 5 minutes, followed by another coat of glaze and another 5 minutes of roasting time.

The dipping sauce is made by reheating the leftover glaze and mixing in some hoisin sauce for added thickness and sweetness. (There's a container of dipping sauce hidden under the kumquat slices).

I also made lotus root kinpara this morning by peeling and slicing about 2" of lotus root which is then soaked in cold water. Drain and saute in a bit of canola oil for a couple of minutes. Add a mixture of 1 Tbsp soy sauce, 2 Tbsp sugar and 2 Tbsp mirin and cook for three more minutes, then drain.

I like the sweet crunch of this dish. I think lotus root goes well with a small serving of rice like the one in this bento, because with the lotus root's starchy, potato-like texture, the two foods together make up the main carb component of the lunch.

I included two gyoza with a bottle of dipping sauce tucked underneath. For veggies, there are steamed asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and snow peas. For fruit, I included some honey kiwi flowers and of course, blueberries.

Yummy!

Cherry Cheesecake Brownie Cupcakes Recipe

2008-09-14T21:48:00.006-03:00

The double dulce de leche cupcakes disappeared in about two minutes, and I got yet another cupcake idea last night, so I ended up making more this afternoon. At any given time I have a list in my head of at least four or five recipes I want to try, so maybe I bake too many cupcakes, but it's either that or fall behind! Although I got a lead on a good chocolate chip cookie recipe today, so I suspect that I'm no further ahead.

These cupcakes were inspired by a recipe for cherry cheesecake brownies that my Dad used to make when I was little. Don't let their humble appearance fool you. These cupcakes are dense, moist and packed with flavour. They're topped with a fudge frosting so rich that you only need a thin layer on top rather than a big swirl. Really, they don't need frosting at all.Here's the recipe. You should definitely try them!

One quick note about the recipe: I was running out of butter and cocoa towards the end of this, so I just threw together the frosting out of what I had. Feel free to use a different recipe, I just included this one for completeness.

Recipe: Cherry Cheesecake Brownie Cupcakes

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Makes approximately two dozen cupcakes

Ingredients:

Brownie Batter:

1 cup butter
2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cherry Filling:

1 8oz package of cream cheese
1 egg
2 Tbsp flour
1/2 cup sugar
2/3 cup maraschino cherries (chopped)

Chocolate Fudge Frosting

1/4 cup butter
2 (1 oz) squares unsweetened chocolate
1 lb icing sugar
2 Tbsp cocoa
4 Tbsp milk

To make the brownie batter, first melt the butter. Add ingredients in the order listed, mixing until combined after each addition. Mix flour, baking powder and salt together in a separate bowl before adding to the liquid mixture.

In another bowl, beat cream cheese and 1 egg with an electric mixer until light and fluffy (about three minutes). Add sugar and flour and stir until combined. Mix in cherries.

To assemble cupcakes, first put a small spoonful of brownie batter into each cup. The batter will raise while baking, so you only need enough to cover the bottom of the cups. Use a small spatula to spread the batter out to the edges of the bottom of the cup.

Spoon a generous tablespoon of cherry filling into each cup. If you have any left over filling, you can fill any empty spots in your muffin tin with it. Its not exactly a cupcake, but it tastes good.

Top with another spoonful of brownie batter. Using a spatula, gently spread brownie batter out to the edges of the cupcake cup so that the cherry filling is completely covered (add more batter if required). The cups should be about 3/4 full.

Bake for 23 to 25 minutes. Cupcakes are done when the top center of each cupcake is cooked.

To make frosting, melt butter and chocolate in a small bowl in the microwave, stirring every 30 seconds until melted and smooth.

Place icing sugar, cocoa and 2 Tbsp of milk in a large bowl. Add melted butter and chocolate and mix until smooth and uniform. Add remaining milk until the frosting reaches the desired consistency. Lightly frost the cupcakes using a smooth spatula or butter knife.

Here is a picture of what the cupcakes look like inside. As you can see, the batter rises up in the middle, while the cheesecake filling stays the same size, so it makes a stripe across the inside of the cupcake.

Double Dulce de Leche Cupcakes

2008-09-11T16:00:00.007-03:00

Fall is almost here.

I've been in a bit of denial about it. I've been wearing tank tops despite the slight chill in the air. I've seen leaves on the ground twice while walking down the street in the past few days and both times I convinced myself that they must have been there since last Fall.

Foolish right? Well today I decided to give in. I'm still wearing a tank top, but the cupcakes I baked today are a tribute to the chilly season. I put aside the fresh fruit and light ingredients and traded them for dark chocolate and creamy dulce de leche. These are the richest, most decadent cupcakes I've ever made.
I call them Double Dulce de Leche. The cupcake itself is chocolate, made using the "Rich Chocolate Cupcakes" recipe from the book Crazy About Cupcakes. They are filled with premade dulce de leche (President's Choice brand, for all you Canadians out there) and filled using the method I used last time, removing a 'plug' of cake from the middle, piping in the filling and replacing the plug.

For those who aren't familiar, dulce de leche is a luxurious type of creamy caramel made from whole milk. It's delicious on everything from cake, to ice cream, to apple slices.

The frosting is a fluffy vanilla buttercream with more dulce de leche drizzled on top.

I cut one in half to show you the filling inside. As you can see, the seams from where the cake plug was removed are barely visible (I've never had anyone even mention that they noticed it while eating a cupcake filled this way), the filling is nicely centered and the amount of filling is controlled. Yummy!

September 5th Bento Lunch

2008-09-05T12:24:00.006-03:00

It's funny because today's bento looks like I was being lazy, but really I put more effort into this one than I usually do.

I like to make yakiudon on Fridays because by Friday I'm starting to run short on bento ideas and produce, and it's kind of junky so I think it adds a bit of fun to BF's day too.
Last time I made fried noodles, I wasn't happy about how the lunch turned out as a whole. Two many of the foods were soy sauce based or fried, so overall, the lunch was too salty and one dimensional. This time I tried to correct that, and I think I did a good job. I spent quite a bit of time this morning mixing sauces and measuring out ingredients though.

For a salty, soy flavored dish, I made stewed konbu seaweed, on the right hand side of the bottom tier. This was one of those dishes that I thought I wouldn't enjoy since I don't care for fish flavours but I was proven wrong. It has a really mild flavour and the texture is really nice.

To prepare stewed konbu, you first rinse it off and let it soak in cold water until it softens up a little. I used 15 grams of seaweed and 3/4 cup of water and that made enough for three bento lunches. Once it's soft, add 2 tsp vinegar, 3 Tbsp soy sauce, 1 Tbsp mirin, 1 Tbsp sake and 1 Tbsp sugar and boil for 15 minutes. Remove the seaweed from the pot and cut into thin strips. Return it to the pot and boil for 3 more minutes. Drain.

Next, for the yakiudon, I made a light tasting sauce with ginger and lemon flavors. I mixed the following ingredients for the sauce:

1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 tsp grated ginger
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp rice vinegar
1 Tbsp sake

I sauteed some shredded cabbage, grated carrot and chopped green onion in canola oil for about 3 minutes, and then threw in some shredded cooked chicken thigh meat and the sauce and sauteed a little more. Lastly, I added the cooked noodles and sauteed until the noodles were coated in sauce.

It turned out delicious. One pack of udon noodles completely filled the top tier of the bento.

For a little more protein, I fried two pork shu mai in a nonstick pan. I omitted the oil since there was already a fried dish.

For some bite, I made a dressing for the asparagus by mixing white miso, mustard, a little white vinegar, sugar, nanami togarashi (Japanese chili powder) and salt. I adapted a recipe from the book Bento Boxes, Japanese Meals on the Go to come up with this combination. After the asparagus was steamed, I put the dressing on it (sparingly). The sauce has some serious bite to it! It worked really well, a bland but flavorful piece of asaparagus with a really sharp sauce.

There are, of course, some steamed broccoli and sugar snaps. And for fruit there are strawberries, blueberries and honey tangerine.

I really feel that with this one, I did an excellent job of coming up with lots of different flavours that compliment each other and create a balanced meal. It's balanced in terms of flavour, in terms of ratio of simple carbs to complex carbs to protein, in terms of fried foods to fresh/stewed foods and in terms of getting all the necessary nutrients/food groups in a single meal. Despite it's modest appearance, I think this is one of my best bento lunches yet.

And next time that I use these recipes, I'll be sure to make the sauces in advance in order to save time!

September 4th Bento Lunch

2008-09-04T15:53:00.004-03:00

BF was pretty grumpy this morning, so I decided to break out the big guns for his bento today - unagi nigiri sushi.

Unagi is Japanese for eel. You can buy it from the freezer section of your Asian grocer already barbecued with kabayaki sauce (similar to teriyaki sauce. I'm not actually sure what the difference is). It just needs to be toasted in the oven to reheat it and then cut into slices. And it's BF's favorite food.

Unagi is one of the few traditional types of sushi I'm comfortable putting in a bento lunch because the meat is cooked. Other types include tamago (egg), avocado and any fruit or veggie roll. I'm not comfortable using raw fish in a meal that sits at room temperature all morning (and BF has been known to get too busy to eat until even later in the day) both for health reasons and because raw fish should be served fresh, anything else doesn't do it justice.

I tucked a foil cup of pickled ginger in the top left corner and a restaurant pack of soy sauce on the side (this bento box doesn't have a little shelf on the top to hide things like that). I couldn't think of a way to include wasabi that didn't take up much space or make a mess. Does anyone have any ideas?

Below the sushi there are three gyoza and some steamed sugar snaps. I like to include dumplings with sushi because both contain a combination of carbs and protein. I like to either have one main carb and one main protein, or two items that have both, and sushi and dumplings are a perfect combination!

Above the sushi there is some steamed gai lon with dried cranberries, as well as some carrot flowers that I boiled for two minutes, just enough to soften the outside.

Beneath the sushi there are a few piece of steamed asparagus and three thin slices of kumquat to add a bit of bite. For fruit there was only room for berries today, strawberries and blueberries.

Peanut Butter and Jam Cupcakes

2008-09-03T17:06:00.004-03:00

Marlena over at The Repressed Pastry Chef is an incredible baker. So when she said she had found the best plain cake recipe of all time, I definitely took notice. When she tried this recipe, she made Napoleon cupcakes. I decided to make peanut butter and jam cupcakes out of mine.

The recipe for the cake is here. All in all, I think it's a good recipe, the cakes turned out really light and fluffy, but I think I prefer the golden cupcakes recipe from the book Crazy About Cupcakes which I used last time. For some reason, whenever I make recipes using cake flour instead of all purpose flour, they come out a little on the dry side. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

The cupcakes as a whole came out awesome though. Definitely some of the best ones I've made and they disappeared in a hurry. Seriously, I barely got a picture of these three. The recipe made three dozen regular cupcakes and a dozen minis, and I only have ten cupcakes left an hour after making them. I took some to my Mom's office, BF took some in to work and the neighbours stopped by for a couple. That's really good though, I'd much rather give them away while they're fresh than have them get stale.

The frosting is a peanut butter buttercream, here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (salted, room temperature)
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1/2 large bag of icing sugar (500g)
5 1/2 Tbsp milk

Beat butter and peanut butter on low until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes). Alternate adding icing sugar about 3/4 cup at a time, and adding milk 1 Tbsp at a time, beating until combined after each addition. You may need more or less milk to get a nice consistency. The frosting is pale in colour, so add a little brown icing colouring to it if you want it to be the colour of peanut butter.

The filling is a half and half mixture of vanilla custard (using BF's secret recipe) and raspberry jam.

I had a really tough time filling these cupcakes. I tried to pipe it in but I couldn't seem to get enough filling in each cupcake, and then when I tried squeezing harder, the icing bag blew up and I had raspberry filling all over the place. Luckily it only got all over four of the cupcakes. I couldn't help but laugh.

After that didn't work, what I ended up doing was to use a 1" round cookie cutter to punch a circle into the top of the cupcake about an inch deep. I slid a knife under the circle and popped it out. I sliced a small layer off the bottom of the section I pulled out, spooned about 1 tsp of the filling into the cupcake, and replaced the section I had cut out. It was actually surprisingly fast to do once I got going, and each cupcake was perfectly filled. The frosting hid the seam of where I had replaced the plug.

I'm really happy with how these ones turned out, and would definitely make them again!

September 2nd Bento Lunch & Poached Tamarillo Recipe

2008-09-02T11:51:00.006-03:00

BF and I found an amazing Thai restaurant this weekend. It was so good we went two days in a row! (For my Halifax readers, check out Chabaa Thai on Queen St., near the Italian Market).

We had leftovers that we brought home, so when I was making bento this morning, I asked BF, "Do you want curry or pad Thai in your bento?"

His response: "Can't I have both?"

Sure, why not?

On the left side of the divider is a foil cup of masaman beef curry from the restaurant, made with beef, sweet potato chunks and onions. It is phenomenal, it's the first time I've ever tasted beef that literally melts in your mouth, it's so soft. So, as I'm sure you can imagine, learning to make an amazing masaman curry is near the top of my ever-changing list of cooking goals at the moment.

Masaman curry paste is used in Thai cooking, but it actually contains a lot of Indian flavours like cinnamon and cardamom, so it's a very different taste from green or red curry paste. It's definitely my new favorite.

Surrounding the curry, we have some rice. I used long grain white rice instead of the short grain that I usually use, since that is what is traditionally served with Thai food. There are a couple of steamed zucchini acorns on top of the rice for decoration.

On the right hand side of the divider, there is a foil cup of pad Thai, along with some steamed broccoli and asparagus, as well as boiled edamame. For fruit there are blueberries and poached tamarillo (recipe given below), and for dessert there is a daifuku filled with taro jam. Without a doubt, this is the softest mochi I've ever eaten, it's not chewy at all. I don't know the brand name because it's written in Japanese, so here's a picture of the box that it comes in. If you see it at the store, I definitely recommend picking it up. They make lots of different flavours, which I can't wait to try.

This morning I made poached tamarillo. It takes longer than most bento foods should (about 20 minutes) so I don't recommend this when you're in a hurry, but it's has a really interesting flavour if you have the time to make it. You can also make this the night before and refrigerate. The sourness of the tamarillo contrasts with the sweetness of the syrup and the texture of the fruit is incredibly smooth, smoother than any other fruit I can think of. It's really delicious, but I find the flavour is so powerful that I can only eat a few bites of it, which is why I think it's a perfect bento food.

I thought I would share the recipe, since when I first saw a tamarillo I had no idea what to do with it, so I'm guessing that there are lots of other people in the same boat.

Recipe: Poached Tamarillo with Cherry Syrup

Ingredients:

Tamarillo
Sugar
Water
Slice of Orange Peel
Cherry Brandy

Quantities are easily adjusted depending on how many tamarillos you wish to poach.

1. Blanch the tamarillo by plunging it into boiling water for 10 seconds and then plunging into ice water for 10 seconds. Remove the peel (it should come off easily now).

2. Combine 1 part sugar to two parts of water and bring to a boil. For one tamarillo, I use 1/2 cup sugar, 1 cup water and boil in the smallest pot I have so that it covers the tamarillo.

3. Reduce heat to a simmer and add tamarillo and a slice of orange rind (If you don't have orange rind, you can add orange extract at the same time as the cherry brandy). Poach for 6 minutes if it is very ripe, or 8 minutes if it is not. If the liquid doesn't entirely cover the tamarillo, poach with the pot covered and turn the tamarillo over halfway through cooking.

4. If you're not in a hurry, allow the tamarillo to cool in the syrup, and then remove the tamarillo before proceeding to the next step. If you're like me and are always in a hurry, place the tamarillo and half of the liquid in a bowl, and cover it so that the tamarillo doesn't lose moisture as it cools. Place the pot containing the other half of the liquid back on the stove.

5. Add 1 1/2 Tbsp cherry brandy per cup of water you originally used in the syrup to the liquid in the pot.

5. Boil it down for 7 to 10 minutes until you have a syrup of the consistency you like. I like a light syrup, but if you prefer a heavy syrup, boil it for longer.

6. Allow the syrup to cool.

7. Slice tamarillo and put it in a small container for your bento. Pour syrup over it.

Creamsicle Cupcakes

2008-08-30T15:59:00.003-03:00

I decided to make some simple creamsicle cupcakes this weekend. There lots of ways you can make these (last time I made homemade marshmallow topping using this recipe), but I was feeling kind of lazy this time. And to be honest, my main motivation was to work on getting one step closer to finding the perfect vanilla cupcake recipe (If I ever find it, I'll be sure to post it!). I'm definitely getting closer.

These cupcakes turned out really delicious. For me, a good cupcake should have three qualities: Fluffy cake, Frosting that is either light and fluffy or deep and rich, and amazing flavor. I managed to pull off all three with this one.

For these cupcakes, I used the recipe for golden cupcakes from the book Crazy About Cupcakes and added 2 Tbsp orange extract and about 1/2 tsp orange rind to get a light creamsicle flavour. It's definitely one of the best cake recipes I've used yet. It manages to make a dense, cakey cupcake that is still light and fluffy.

The frosting is a vanilla buttercream, also with orange extract added (I think about 2 Tbsp, I just went by taste).
I split the frosting into two parts and coloured half orange using Wilton icing colour. To get the swirl effect, you add the frosting to the icing bag one spoonful at a time, alternating between colours and pressing the spoon to opposite sides of the bag as you go, so that you have an icing bag that is full of orange frosting on one side and white on the other. You get the best results by adding small spoonfuls, especially at the narrow end of the bag. As usual, I just used a Wilton 1M tip to make big swirls.

Luckily the recipe made three dozen because they've been disappearing fast!!

August 29th Bento Lunch

2008-08-29T12:12:00.005-03:00

I felt like making sushi this morning so making bento took quite a bit longer than usual. I was about halfway done when I realized that everything was green and yellow! Oh well, I'm sure it will still get eaten.

I made a sweet, fruit sushi today. For sweet sushi, I use 3 Tbsp of lime juice heated with 1 Tbsp sugar (to make it dissolve) instead of sushi vinegar. I also use mamenori soy wrappers instead of nori. I have to say though, it's much tougher to get this sushi to stick together than regular sushi. It's so pretty and yummy though, that I don't mind making it once in a while.

This time I used mango and avocado as fillings. I know that seems like a bit of a strange combination, but trust me, it's delicious and the texture is amazingly smooth.

First I removed the rind from the mango and the avocado, and cut very thin, flexible slices from the top of the fruit. I cut the remain fruit into strips. I rolled the fruit strips into a regular inside out maki roll and then placed the slices over the seam and rolled it again to make everything stay together. I'm really happy with how these turned out, there is so much fruit in them! I mixed up the pieces and turned them on their sides because it looks more fun than when they're all orderly.

For protein today, I made teriyaki chicken. This is really simple to do from scratch. I used two chicken thighs for BF's bento (I would only use one for mine). Here's what you do:

The night before

Slice chicken thighs in half
Place in a small ziplock bag with 1 Tbsp each of mirin, soy sauce and sugar
Refrigerate overnight

In the morning

Remove chicken from the bag and fry in a bit of oil on medium heat until browned
Mix 3Tbsp water with the remaining marinade and pour it into the frying pan with the chicken.
Cover until the chicken is cooked
Cook uncovered until the liquid has evaporated and the chicken has a nice glazed finish

The morning part takes less than ten minutes which is a pretty short time to cook meat in my opinion. I put the chicken in a foil tart container that I flipped up the rim on.

For veggies there is some sesame fried bok choy all around the foil cup and some asparagus that I parboiled for 90 seconds and then added to the pan with teriyaki chicken while it was cooking for another 90 seconds (teriyaki asparagus I guess?). There are also steamed green and yellow zucchini, sugar snaps and broccoli.

There was already all kinds of mango in the sushi, so for fruit I just included a few blueberries and three thin watermelon wedges.

On Fridays I try to use up all my leftover produce before the weekend, can you tell?

August 27th Bento Lunch

2008-08-27T16:44:00.004-03:00

I know that the majority of my readers are not Canadian, so I'll start with a bit of background. One of our largest suppliers of luncheon meat, called Maple Leaf, had a recent contamination in their products causing an outbreak of listeria. I don't really know anything about listeria other than the facts that this recent outbreak has killed six Canadians, and that it can take up to 70 days for the symptoms of the illness to show itself.

So I know people who have eaten these products within the past two months and they don't know yet whether they're going to get sick, so I guess there's some phone number they're supposed to call and then I don't know what happens after that. So there's an acute feeling of 'awareness' around here. I wouldn't call it worry, we just have it on our minds and see it in the news all the time.

When we heard about it, BF and I sat down and tried to remember any times in the last 70 days that we had eaten processed meat, and to my surprise we couldn't think of a single one. So as you can imagine, it's reaffirmed our decision to eat natural foods whenever we can (of course, had it been a contamination of say, broccoli, we'd be in trouble).

So why am I bringing this up in a blog about bento? As a result of this incident, there was an article in the newspaper that made me pause. It was entitled Panic in the Lunchbox and it talks about the fact that school starts next week and all kinds of parents across the country have no idea what to pack for lunch since sandwiches are out for the next little while. So, I guess I just wanted to say that it makes me sad that a lack of luncheon meat can inspire the use of the word 'panic' in this country. And that I'm tempted to make a list of 100 delicious lunch foods that don't involve sandwiches and anonymously mail it to everyone in the country who packs lunches.

Thanks for listening to (reading?) my rant. Okay, here was today's bento.

The center piece of today's bento lunch was the zucchini dumpling I made (the tutorial is below). I think it's so pretty! On either side there are triangle onigiri, stuffed with the same bison soboro that is in the zucchini.

For meat there are bites of marinated lamb steak that I pan fried. The veggies include steamed asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps, and julienned carrot fried in sesame oil. For fruit there are some really juicy raspberries, blueberries, something called a damson plum, mango pieces and apple tulips.

BF sent me a message from work that said "This is an amazing tasting and looking bento!" so I think that means it was a success!

Tutorial - Zucchini Dumpling

2008-08-27T15:27:00.013-03:00

I got the inspiration for this dumpling from the Iron Chef 2000th dish special. The amazing Hiroyuki Sakai made adorable zucchini dumplings as a part of a larger dish, and ever since I saw them I've been wanting to give my own version it a try.

It turned out pretty and yummy (which is always my goal!) so I wanted to share how I made it.

A friendly warning though: This is pretty time consuming and detailed. I definitely don't recommend trying to put one of these together in the morning before work. I suggest making it the night before and doing the final steaming in the morning.

You will need

- 1 Green zucchini
- 2 Tbsp filling (I used a mixture of rice and bison soboro. The recipe for the soboro is below)
- A big, sharp knife
- Plastic wrap
- A 6" piece of string/twine
- A vegetable steamer

First, cut a slice of zucchini about 3" long and 3/8" thick.
Slice the zucchini in strips as thin as you can. They should be opaque, but flexible. You will need 14 strips.

Cover your workspace with a piece of plastic wrap about 1 foot square. You will be cooking the zucchini in this plastic, so make sure you use a high end brand that won't leach toxins into food (I use Glad).

Select the 7 thinnest zucchini strips and place them horizontally to form a square as shown in the picture. By keeping the peel on the same side of each strip, the end result will have a subtle zigzag pattern.

The next step is to weave in the remaining 7 strips.

First slide in the first vertical strip from the left, alternating between putting it over and under the horizontal strips.

To place the next vertical strip, gently fold back every other horizontal strip and place the vertical strip on top of the remaining strips as shown. Fold the horizontal strips back to their original position and gently push the second vertical strip so that it is flush with the first.

Repeat with the remaining vertical strips until you have a woven square. The last vertical strip might look a bit messy because of differences in the lengths of the horizontal strips, but don't worry, it will look fine in the end.

Roll filling into a ball and place in the middle of the square.

Gently wrap the sides of the square around the filling. Start by picking up opposite corners of the plastic wrap and pulling them together, then do the same with the remaining two corners. The four corners of the zucchini should just barely touch at the top of the filling. If they don't quite touch, try removing some filling. If they overlap, add a little more filling.

Once all four corners are touching, gently press in the sides, trying to flatten as much possible.

Tightly twist the plastic wrap to seal the package and secure with string as shown.

Place in steamer for 7 minutes.

Remove from steamer and allow to cool enough so that you can remove the plastic wrap without burning yourself. To remove the wrap, cut off the knot and gently pull back the plastic wrap. If you pull too hard, it may displace parts of the zucchini.

Here's a picture of the underside of the dumpling after it's been cooked.

Flip it over and here is the top of this gorgeous dumpling!

The bento lunch that I used this in can be seen here.

Here is the recipe for the bison that I mixed with rice for the filling.

Recipe: Bison Soboro

Ingredients

1/2 lb ground bison (May substitute beef or pork)
2 Tbsp sake
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp mirin
1/2 tsp grated ginger

Place ground bison in a frying pan on medium heat and separate into small pieces. When pan is hot, add remaining ingredients. Cook until the bison is fully browned and most of the liquid has evaporated. Drain off any remaining liquid.

Can be used as a filling for dumplings or onigiri, or as a topping for a donburi.

August 26th Bento & Rice Cooker Chicken Curry Rice Recipe

2008-08-26T12:27:00.006-03:00

My computer caught a trojan virus last week. The trojan was then kind enough to download a bunch of other viruses to the point that my computer was unusable for about a week. But, now here we are about twenty virus scans and two hard drive reformats later and I am back up and running! So all's well that ends well. Mostly anyway. I lost all of my iTunes purchased songs, so I emailed Apple to see if they can let me download them again. *crosses fingers*

In other news, I am in love. Now I know that's a pretty strong word to use in reference to a rice cooker, but I mean it for realsies, no exaggeration. I picked up this rice cooker from The Shopping Channel (since Amazon.com won't ship appliances to Canada), and it finally arrived on Sunday. I used it for the first time last night and it's amazingly better than my four year old $30 Wal-Mart rice cooker I had been using up to this point.

To break it in, I made chicken curry rice (recipe below) for last night's supper (and there was enough left over for today's bento lunch). I used the keep warm function for three hours last night and put the rice back in the cooker to reheat this morning and even after all that, it didn't burn a single grain of rice. My old rice cooker always had a layer of burnt rice at the bottom, and I always felt wasteful throwing it out. Problem solved!

It has all kinds of features, like different settings for all different kinds of rice (brown rice, sweet rice, sushi rice, etc.) and delayed start so that you can set it the night before and have fresh rice in the morning when you get up to make bento. I shopped around a lot before picking this one up, and it seems to me that this particular model (Sanyo ECJ-D55S) is the best value out there if you don't want to fork out the price of a Zojirushi.

Also, just to explain something I found confusing. It's advertised as a 5.5 cup rice cooker. I thought that meant it had a 5.5 cup capacity, but its actually much larger. The 5.5 cup measurement is how much uncooked rice you can put in it, not how much cooked rice it can hold.

I definitely recommend this rice cooker to anyone in the market for a higher end computerized rice cooker. It's fabulous! (I'm not affiliated, by the way)

Ok! On to today's bento! It was slim pickin's in the fridge today because I was away all weekend and didn't get a chance to get groceries (I played outside a ton this weekend. If you ever have a chance to do Tree-Go, do it!!!).
On the left is chicken curry rice with onions, dates and tomato and an apple heart on top (I love apple with curry). On the right there are four pork shumai that have been steamed and then pan fried, pressing down with a spatula after every flip. There's a little cup of Asian cucumber pickles (flavoured with shiso and sesame rather than dill) on the bottom, and a boiled quail egg at the top. For veggies there is some steamed cauliflower sitting on top of carrot slices, broccoli, sugar snaps and green zucchini. For fruit there are tomato wedges, blueberries and watermelon slices. I prefer personal sized watermelons for bento because the rind is much thinner.

Here is the recipe for the curry rice. Note that this recipe makes a lot (around 4 to 5 cups), so you may want to scale it back if you're just making it for bento.

Recipe: Chicken Curry Rice made in a rice cooker

Ingredients

2 cups short grain white rice

2.5 cups water

1 large chicken breast or two small chicken breasts, cut into very small pieces (uncooked)

2 cloves garlic

1/4 inch section of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

1 shallot, peeled and roughly chopped

Red chili flakes to taste (two pinches is medium spicy)

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1 Tbsp curry powder

1 tsp salt

1 white onion, sliced

1 tomato, cut into wedges

1/4 cup dates, chopped

1 small can coconut milk (5.6oz/165ml)

2 Tbsp honey

Combine yogurt, honey, curry powder, shallot, garlic, ginger, chili flakes and salt in a blender and blend until smooth.

Place curry mixture along with all of the other ingredients into the rice cooker and stir well. Let the rice cooker do its thing (Use 'mixed rice' setting if available on your rice cooker). Stir before serving.

Easy!!

August 20th Bento Lunch

2008-08-20T19:40:00.003-03:00

Ugh. My computer has been on the fritz for the last two days. I didn't think I'd get this entry posted today. I gave up on my computer for now and am using BF's instead.

A couple of critters made it into today's bento...

The onigiris are filled with sweet red bean paste. The fish has a nori face and the other two have sesame seed eyes. The chick's nose is made from carrot and his wing is a small spinach stem.

For protein I made ground chicken dumplings wrapped in nori this morning. BF told me when he got home tonight that he would have liked more meat, so next time I will make a couple more.

Lots of veggies today. I made some sesame and miso steamed spinach as well as steamed broccoli, asparagus, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini with a bit of pepper. I julienned some raw carrot as well to make a little nest for the chick.

For fruit there are a couple of orange wedges, blueberries and strawberry slices.

There were some leftover fruit and veggies that didn't fit in the bento box so I made myself a little snack. I thought the colours were really pretty so I took a picture.

Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

2008-08-19T14:37:00.004-03:00

Would you believe I don't actually post all the cupcakes I make on my blog? I made some peaches and cream ones on the weekend, and they only lasted for a couple of hours, so I made a new batch last night. I decided on a classic theme of cookies and cream.

The cupcakes are a plain vanila cake with about ten crushed oreos mixed into the batter at the end, just before putting it into the muffin cups. The frosting is a plain vanilla buttercream (since oreo cookie filling is vanilla) and there is half an oreo cookie tucked into the frosting on each one.

Chopping the cookies in half was a bit tricky. The best way I found was to use a sharp, heavy knife, lay it across the cookie and cut it very swiftly. I found that using a diagonal cut made the cookie break into three or four pieces, but holding the knife horizontally only broke a couple out of the dozen that I cut. And cutting too slowly flattens the cookie and makes the filling come out the sides.

I wanted to top them with big dollops of frosting, but I didn't have an icing tip large enough, so I just cut the end off of an icing bag and didn't use a tip at all. I like the way the shape came out, but it left little tiny stripes on the frosting where the seam in the bag was. Looks like I'll have to try and find some seamless bags for next time.

Simple! Delicious!

August 18th Bento Lunch

2008-08-18T08:24:00.005-03:00

BF was on vacation for most of last week which is why I haven't posted much. Everything is back to normal today though, so I got up bright and early this morning and decided to make a donburi bento. I think this is the first time I've actually made rice in the morning. Usually I make it the night before and refrigerate or freeze it. It didn't actually take too much extra time though because by the time I had the donburi topping finished, the rice was ready.
Here's a picture of what is in the donburi. The recipe is a variation on one that appears in the book 'Bento Boxes - Japanese Meals on the Go'. There is a sliced inari pouch that I boiled for a few minutes in a mixture of 1/3 cup chicken broth, 1 Tbsp each of mirin, soy sauce and sake and 1 tsp sugar. Next I added some canned mushrooms I had leftover from the weekend (mushrooms are the one vegetable that I don't eat fresh. I've never liked fresh mushrooms but I love the canned ones), and let it boil about two more minutes before adding the parsley. Once the parsley had wilted, I added a beaten egg and stirred the mixture until the egg had set. The last step was to transfer it onto the rice in the bento box. I used the bento box divider in order to be able to compact as much rice into that area of the bento as possible.

It looked a little plain so I put a couple of red pepper butterflies on top. On the right hand side of the bottom tier are slices of steak left over from last night's barbecue. Between the steak, the egg and the inari, this bento is pretty heavy on the protein, which is fine for BF. If it was for me, I would have left out the steak altogether.

The veggies are simple. Just asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps. My grocery store has been out of asparagus for the past week so we were happy to be able to get some yesterday.

For fruit there are orange slices, half of a plum, strawberry slices, blueberries and two cherries. I learned a neat trick for orange slices, to make them easier to eat. You just slice the orange away from the rind for about two thirds of the way across the wedge. Then when you go to eat it, you can just hold it by the peel and tear the orange off the rest of the way. For dessert there is a chocolate mint square from my freezer stash.

Sadly, I think summer is nearing it's end. I saw the first sign of it this weekend: strawberries were $4.99 a box. Well, at least it's still hot out!

As an aside, this weekend I started reading "Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art" (previously I was just using it as a reference whenever I needed a recipe or ran into an ingredient I didn't know how to cook). Ordinarily I wouldn't read a cookbook cover to cover but this book is really exceptional in how much there is to learn from it. There are full chapters on knives, sashimi, sushi, soups, pickles, sweets and tea, as well as chapters on each of the fundamental cooking methods (grilling, pan frying, teaming, simmering, deep frying, etc), each with a discussion of the subject and accompanying recipes. I'm discovering all kinds of new cooking techniques and philosophies on food, it's really exciting. I made some awesome chicken udon soup this weekend, and I've been working on perfecting my own version of eggs and rice as a light breakfast. Next I think I'm going to tackle light appetizer-style soups. I definitely recommend this book, it's completely changed the way I approach cooking.

Mmmmm...Muffins

2008-08-13T23:59:00.003-03:00

Okay, I swear this isn't going to turn into a baking blog. I wasn't planning to post anything today but these turned out so gorgeous that I wanted to share them to hopefully inspire someone else to make delicious muffins.

At this time of year, berries are in season so they come in huge containers. It's wonderful of course, but I can't fit anymore into the bento lunches than I already do, so I ended up with some leftover berries that weren't fresh enough to eat straight, but perfect for baking. I decided on muffins.
I used this recipe from allrecipes.com and I can't rave about it enough! I'm actually not exaggerating when I say that I have never had a better muffin. And this is coming from someone who has eaten many, many muffins in my time.

I think the trick to this recipe is to whip the butter a whole lot. It makes them melt-in-your-mouth fluffy. I whipped the butter with an electric mixer for a solid minute before adding anything to it and then for a solid minute after every addition (i.e, after the sugar, after each egg and after the vanilla). Then I put the mixer away and gently folded everything else in very slowly.

I used a mixture of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries. I used jumbo sized muffin cups (finally a use for these! They're way too big for cupcakes) filled almost to the top and they raised up to a great height. The recipe made 15.

The only change I made to the recipe was to substitute brown sugar for white in the streusal topping. I had never heard of a white sugar streusal before and it made me a bit nervous so I decided to stick with what I know.

It's a great weekend to make muffins. If you've got any fruit in your fridge that needs to be used up, this is a yummy way to do it!

August 12th Bento Lunches

2008-08-12T08:38:00.006-03:00

This was one of those mornings where you lie in bed for ten minutes trying to decide whether or not to bother getting up to make bento, choosing between luxurious sleep or a delicious lunch.

Lunch won out today. I put together a couple of bentos for BF and his dive instructor for their dive this morning. All that swimming works up an appetite! I used a nice, big (1320ml) two tier bento box for this (you can see a picture of it here) that BF can just throw in his bag. As an aside, when I've been out shopping this summer and see the big picnic kits that carry all of your plates and cutlery and stuff, I think of this bento box and how little space it actually takes me to pack a portable lunch and I just want to stand in those stores all day and explain to people that they don't need all that. I mean figuratively of course, I would never actually do that. But they do seem excessive to me. Simplify!

Anyway, back to bento. I didn't do anything complex this morning because I was pretty rushed. Usually BF is sleeping when I make bento, but this morning he was up getting ready for his dive. I think it scared him a bit to see me reaching for the biggest knife we own while my eyes were still half shut, and then start hacking away at whatever I could find.

I figured that since both bentos were for grown men, I would load them up with meat. I had a huge piece of pork schnitzel in the freezer. These are great because they are so thin and fast to cook. I just defrost it in the microwave, throw it in a pan with some canola oil for a minute or two, add a little water and cover to steam for a minute or two more (so that I can be sure it's cooked through) and then fry uncovered for a few more minutes until crispy on the outside. I sliced it up after it was cooked. There are a couple of pork dumplings and a small bottle of sauce in there as well.

I used up the rest of the batch of forbidden (black) rice onigiri that I made last week. The heart shaped ones are stuffed with bonito flakes and soy sauce and the star shaped ones have a red bean (adzuki) filling.

For veggies, I steamed up some yellow swiss chard. I had never seen this before, but it's pretty cool. The stems are bright yellow (they didn't show up well in this picture, they look kind of greenish here) and they taste like regular swiss chard, but maybe a little more bitter. There are also some carrot rounds, broccoli, sugar snaps and cauliflower. I haven't been able to find thick carrots for a few weeks, so sadly the carrot I used today wasn't big enough to punch out shapes.

For fruit there are strawberries and blueberries. That's all there was room for. I also packed up half a dozen cupcakes for BF to take with him to share with the dive shop people, so I decided a dessert was unnecessary for the bentos.

There actually was a theme to these bento lunches, although I'm not sure it's obvious. I decided I wanted to use every colour of the rainbow and I actually managed to do it. To recap:

red strawberries
orange carrot
yellow swiss chard
green broccoli
blueberries
purple onigiri

I love when things work out the way I want them to!

August 11th Cupcakes

2008-08-11T21:24:00.005-03:00

I never get tired of making cupcakes! Today the theme was pina colada.

For the cupcakes, I used this recipe for pineapple cake, filling the cups about halfway and baking for 22 minutes instead of the longer time listed for a sheet cake. I also omitted the sauce that the recipe recommends because I prefer frosting and I thought having both would be overkill.

The cakes turned out wonderfully. My only wish is that the pineapple flavour was a bit stronger. I'm not sure how I could adapt the recipe to do that though since the pineapple is the only liquid in the recipe and I'm not aware of the existance of pineapple extract. I would love any suggestions.

The frosting is a coconut buttercream. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (salted, room temperature)
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 large bag of icing sugar (500g)
1 1/2 tsp coconut extract
3 Tbsp milk
1/2 cup shredded coconut

Beat butter and shortening on low until light and fluffy (about a minute). Add coconut extract and beat until combined. Add icing sugar about 3/4 cup at a time, beating until combined after each addition. Add milk, 1 Tbsp at a time, mixing until combined after each addition. You may need more or less milk to get a nice consistency. Add coconut and mix until combined.

I also toasted some more shredded coconut which I sprinkled on top of the frosted cupcakes. I did this by placing it in a frying pan and sauteeing over medium heat for a few minutes.

Both the cupcakes and the frosting turned out light and fluffy. The cupcakes are moist and the flavor of the frosting is amazing. They just keep getting better and better!

August 11th Bento Lunch

2008-08-11T16:54:00.004-03:00

I've been watching a lot of Iron Chef on YouTube. Omg what a fun show! It's kind of renewed my zest for trying new Japanese recipes and cooking techniques so I've been incorporating a lot more Japanese food in my non-bento meals. I'm discovering all kinds of wonderful food combinations. Loving it! Since I'm not working at the moment, it's a lot more important to me to make sure that I'm preparing lots of healthy, well balanced meals so that BF and I are well fed. I figured it's the least I can do.

I took today's picture in natural light instead of with flash in the kitchen and I think it washed out the colours a bit. Everything didn't look so white in real life! Well at least I know for next time.
BF had some disappointing seafood udon at a restaurant yesterday, so I had planned to make some delicious yakiudon (fried noodles) for bento today to make up for it. To my dismay however, I realized this morning that I'm completely out of udon noodles. So I used somen noodles instead (yakisomen?). They're a smaller, flat noodle, so I fried them for a much shorter time and it still turned out pretty yummy.

To make them, I fried up some chunks of chicken breast in a little canola with salt and pepper while boiling the noodles for three minutes. Then I added another tablespoon or so of canola oil to the chicken (to keep the noodles from sticking together) and threw in chives, red pepper pieces and the somen noodles. Once it had fried for about a minute I added about 1 Tbsp each of sake and soy sauce (my favorite seasonings for fried noodles) and fried for about a minute more.

At the very top of the bento is some sauteed gobo (burdock root) and carrot julienne. For gobo, you want to first peel it and soak it in cold water for a bit, and then drain before you use it. I sauteed the gobo and carrot in a bit of sesame oil and then added some mirin and soy sauce. It turned out a bit too salty for my taste (the gobo really sucks up the flavor!) so next time I will use less soy sauce.

Keeping with the soy theme, I also made some soy quail eggs. To make them, I first hard boiled the eggs (three and a half minutes) and then put them in a ziplock bag along with a mixture of two parts soy sauce, one part rice vinegar and one part sugar for about an hour (BF is working the night shift this week so I don't have to have the bentos ready until late in the morning). I made four eggs, but I only used one in this bento lunch, sliced in half with a small dot of cream cheese on the yolk. They are sharp and salty and really yummy!

There are three home made gyoza as well from a batch I made last week.

I balanced all of these sharp flavours with lots of fresh fruit and lightly steamed veggies. The vegetables are broccoli, cauliflower and sugar snaps. The fruit are strawberries, blueberries, honey tangerine segments and yellow kiwi flowers. There is a chocolate seashell for dessert.

August 6th Bento Lunch

2008-08-06T08:41:00.005-03:00

I decided to keep it simple today.

Sometimes when I get up in the morning I can't figure out what to put in the bento (like when you feel like you have nothing to wear. It's the same feeling). Other times I'll think I have it all planned out only to realize I've still got space left in the bento box after I'm done. Today, I had all kinds of great foods for the bentos, I probably could have filled another tier. It's nice when that happens.
In the left tier is coconut mango rice. The recipe is from Cooking Cute. I made the rice last night and then this morning I cut up the mango and mixed it in. I cut the recipe in half and omitted the sauce topping because I felt like it was sweet enough as is. This is yummy stuff!!

There are also some slices of chorizo sausage (BF's favorite. Too spicy for me) and some sesame fried bok choy with beet flowers on top. This was the last of the pretty beets and they don't have them at the store anymore *sigh*

On the right there is the standard broccoli, asparagus and snow peas along with raspberries and blueberries (broccoli and berries are two of the top ten healthiest foods, so it's good that we eat them every day!). I also made poached quince yesterday by following these instructions. Lastly, there is a small container of pomegranate seeds. I never got around to removing the seeds from the pomegranate last night and did I ever regret it this morning. Getting the pomgranate ready this morning actually took longer than preparing the entire rest of the bento!

I decided that between the sweet rice and the quince, this bento had enough sweet foods so I didn't include a dessert.

I think that if it weren't for my bento habit, I would never have found out so much about my tastes. For example, that I love quince and bison and that I don't like longans. Because I'm on this constant quest to make exciting lunches every day, I find I'm a lot more open to trying new foods. I'm more alert when I'm grocery shopping, rather than just picking up the same old stuff. This is a good thing!

August 4th Bento Lunch

2008-08-04T13:53:00.007-03:00

Messy bento!
I tried a couple of new things today. The first was an attempt to duplicate the gorgeous onigiri that Lyvvie from Obento Baby made back in May. To make the onigiri I first soaked 2 Tbsp of forbidden rice (black rice) for about an hour in order to pull out some of the colour so that it didn't completely overpower the white rice. I put it in the rice cooker with enough white rice to make 1 cup and then formed the onigiri as usual, using bonito flakes and soy sauce as a filling and sprinkling with white sesame seeds. I do like the way they turned out, but the colours didn't turn out as bright as Lyvvies!

The second new thing I tried was the rolled omelette in the top left corner. Instead of doing a rolled omelette in layers, this time I made one thick layer and then laid a sheet of nori on top (I need to get a tamagoyaki pan!!!). I then rolled the omelette using a sushi mat and sliced it to get the spiral pieces in the bento. I'm really pleased with how this turned out. Next time I might try using a larger pan and a thinner omelette to see how that looks. For some reason I absolutely love rolled foods in bento lunches. I always get really excited when I find or think of a new roll I can make.

For protein there are some leftover pork bites from last night's supper, covered with a few parsley leaves. For veggies there are asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps, zuchinni slices and raw red pepper strips.

For fruit there are a couple of slices of yellow tomato, a few chunks of a fruit called a cactus pear (it actually comes from a cactus! The peel is spiny and can irritate your skin), a lychee and some berries. I included the last of the chocolate banana cupcakes for dessert.

Chocolate & Banana Cream Cupcakes

2008-08-02T19:44:00.005-03:00

I made cupcakes last night. I listed off some choices for BF "Okay, so choice number one is matcha cupcakes with pomegranate frosting. Choice number 2 is vanilla cupcakes with banana cream filling and chocolate frosting,.."

He interrupted me "I don't need to hear anymore."

"But there are more choices"

"Nothing could be better than chocolate and banana."

Here they are:

I used the recipe for white cupcakes from Crazy About Cupcakes. This is the third time I've used it. I love the recipe, but these came out a little dry. I think I baked them about four minutes too long.

For the banana cream I used the recipe from this site, but I cut it in half (I still used two bananas though, effectively doubling the amount of banana in the recipe) and mashed the banana instead of cutting it so that it could be piped into the cupcakes (I use a Wilton's bismark tip #230 to do this). This is an excellent recipe, I highly recommend it.

The frosting is my regular buttercream with some cocoa and an additional tablespoon of milk added.

I decided to use yellow cupcake cups in keeping with the banana theme, and put slices of fresh banana on top (Do this immediately before serving because they turn brown and get soggy if you let them sit for more than a couple of hours).

These are some of the best cupcakes I've made yet!

Recipe: Cake Balls

2008-07-31T10:09:00.007-03:00

I felt like doing something a little different this week, so I made cake balls instead of cupcakes. This is the first time I've made them, and they are so delicious but extremely sweet.

You can use whatever cake and frosting flavors you like, so be creative! You could flavor the candy melts as well. I kept it simple, using a plain vanilla cake mix, vanilla buttercream frosting and milk chocolate melts. They didn't last long!!

Recipe: Cake Balls

Ingredients:

1 13x9 in cake
2 cups frosting
1 package of candy melts (14oz)

Once the cake has completely cooled, crumble it into a large bowl. The smaller the crumbs, the more consistent the inside of the cake balls will look.

Mix in half of the frosting. Continue to add frosting until the mixture has a smooth consistency.

Line a cookie sheet with wax paper. Roll the cake mixture into 1 1/4" balls and place on the cookie sheet. Place cookie sheet in the fridge for two hours or in the freezer for 30 - 40 minutes to firm up the cake balls.

In a small bowl, melt some of the candy melts by microwaving for 30 seconds and stirring. Repeat until all of the wafers are melted and the consistency is smooth. Line another cookie sheet with wax paper.

One at a time, dip the cake balls in the melted chocolate. Pass back and forth between two spoons to let any additional coating to run off and place on the new cookie sheet. When the melted chocolate starts to get low, add more melts and microwave an additional 30 seconds. Once all of the cake balls are coated, refrigerate until the coating has completely hardened.

Makes 45 to 50 cake balls.

Decorations: Cake balls can be decorated by adding sprinkles (candy sprinkles, toasted shredded coconut, nonpareils, cookie crumbs, etc.) after coating each one but before they have completely hardened, or by drizzling a contrasting colour of candy melt on the tops of the cake balls.

Enjoy!!

July 30th Bento Lunch

2008-07-30T09:59:00.005-03:00

I accidently drained the battery on BF's fancy camera, so the picture quality today isn't great since I used my little point & shoot.

Today deliciousness won out over pretty.
The main component of today's bento is rice paper rolls. They started out from a recipe in my Vietnamese cookbook, but by the end of it I had made so many substutions and changes that I think it is now an original recipe.

The rolls are filled with a layer of lettuce, followed by a few dots of hoisin sauce, strips of sausage, two egg sheet strips and topped with a layer of sweet potato matchsticks fried with canola oil and garlic. Yum! So this covered off a lot of the carbs and most of the protein for the bento.

I find it really tough to make rice paper rolls look pretty. Does anyone have any suggestions? This time I just put a few parsley leaves on them.

For added carbs, I cooked up some lotus root slices with red pepper. They're propped up against some lentil snacks that you can't see. The rest of the veggies are the standard asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini. For fruit there is half of a clementine, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and some tiny choke cherries. I think these are super cute and they are crazy sour.

No dessert today because I sent BF into work with a batch of chocolate and vanilla cake balls. I will try to post pics/recipe later today.

July 29th Bento Lunch

2008-07-29T08:05:00.005-03:00

100th post!!

Now that I'm not working, I can post earlier in the day, which is nice.

I found some great foods last week during a trip to the asian grocery store. My best find was frozen banana leaves! I'm too excited to have these back again because I haven't been able to find them since that one time my local grocery store carried them. They were dirt cheap too. I got 1 lb (about 20 sheets, 1 square foot each) for $1.65. Love it!

We made coconut banana rice (Chuoi Nuong) again last night - check out this blog post for how it's made. BF said "Remind me again why we don't eat this every day?" Well, now we can! I made two extra stuffed leaves for the bentos this morning. The meat in the bento lunches today is leftover from last night as well. It's a premade cut from the butcher, a pork loin stuffed with herbs, veggies and cheese with a strip of bacon wrapped around it that we barbecued.

I included a few lentil bites as well for extra carbs. For veggies, there are some strips of green pepper sauteed in a bit of oil and salted, a couple of pieces of yellow zucchini, some asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps (all steamed), and some awesome beet hearts.

Now I can hear my seven-year old self cringing as I call beets awesome, but oh man, these are gorgeous. The inside of the beet is alternating red and white rings and each beet is tiny, the perfect size for bento. I was able to get six heart slices from one beet which is exactly enough for two bento lunches in my opinion.

For fruit there are a couple of fresh lychees, some pluot bites (BF tells me that a pluot is a cross between a plum and an apricot), raspberries, blueberries and strawberry slices.

New Herb Garden!

2008-07-26T20:18:00.003-03:00

Ok, another non-bento related post. I was really excited about this though, so I wanted to share.

This morning, BF and I got up at the crack of dawn (7am on a Saturday!!) and meandered down to the farmer's market. We don't often go because we like to sleep in, but when we do it's great because we can get fresh farm eggs and organic meats and veggies.

One of the vendors was selling herbs 10 for $20, and that is how I ended up with my wonderful new herb garden.
We picked up some parsley, oregano, sage, dill, coriander, basil, chives, spearmint and arnica (if only I could find somewhere that sells Japanese herbs!).

I don't know a thing about gardening, but BF seems to know everything about everything so he hooked me up. We picked up a planter that fits perfectly over the rail of our balcony so that the plants can get lots of sunlight. Hopefully they will thrive and be wonderful!

I'm really excited about growing some edible plants. I think I'm going to pick up this book to read up on what other types of foods we can grow in an apartment. Right now we pay $1.99 each when we buy fresh herbs from the grocery store, so if this works out, it might save us a buck or two as well.

Stash Pic

2008-07-24T17:58:00.004-03:00

I want to apologize for the lack of posts. I was sick all last week and half of this week so sleep was winning out over bento. I'm off work for a few months, which means a lot of my time is freeing up so I decided to organize my bento 'equipment' today.

Previously I was just keeping everything in a wicker basket because my kitchen cupboards are filled to capacity. That was fine at first but it's gotten to the point that I would spend half of the morning digging around for stuff and as a result, I haven't been using most of my bento tools.

I found these plastic boxes as Michaels. They're made for scrapbooking but I find them great for organizing my bento stuff as well as my cake decorating tools (one of these days I'll post up a pic of those too) because of how wide and shallow they are. There's room for lots of little items, and since they're all in one layer, you can see everything at a glance (which is very helpful when you are half asleep.

As always, click on the picture to see the big version.

Believe it or not, there is some method to the madness.

The right hand box is filled almost entirely with onigiri molds so that I only have to take out one box when I'm making onigiri and one box for when I'm making bento in the morning. It also has some egg molds. Generally I put eggs in the molds the night before, so I shouldn't need them in the morning. There is a baggy on the bottom with my extra sauce bottles (I keep some prefilled on my kitchen counter to save time in the mornings), as well as a pack of longer skewers and some sushi grass.

In the left hand box are all of my punches, cutters and cups. My nori punches are all along the bottom. There are foil cups, paper cups, silicone muffin cups and plastic cups in all different shapes. To the right are my cutter wheels. Its a set of three and each wheel has several cutters on it, they're great. Above those are a couple of Hello Kitty veggie cutters that I've had for over a month and not used yet.

On the top, from left to right are my plastic cutters, my metal cutters, some fabulous tiny bamboo sporks I got at P'lovers, an eco-friendly sort of store, more egg molds (and quail egg molds) and my cute little animal skewers.

So now I have no excuse not to make cuter bento lunches. I'll be back to bento making on Monday.

July 19th Bento Lunches

2008-07-19T21:39:00.004-03:00

I've been pretty sick all week, so I haven't spent too much time in the kitchen. That's why I haven't been posting. Today I've completely lost my voice so I guess I'll be sick for a while yet :P

All I've really done this week was to make a couple of snack bentos, and I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter buttercream that disappeared faster than I could take a picture of them.

BF and my sister's bf scuba dive together mostly every week, and this week my sister and I went with them (to hang out and watch, not to dive). I wasn't going to make bentos because I still wasn't feeling well, but then at the last minute I changed my mind.

So I rushed together four bento lunches with zero prep work or planning. They're messy and the picture isn't great because everything was so rushed. I'm more posting it because I'm just impressed with myself that I pulled this off. Making four bento lunches is a tonne of work as it turns out.
They're mainly veggie because we also had a barbecue so we cooked meat on that, plus my sister is a vegetarian so her bento didn't have any meat at all (bottom right).

In each bento there are four bites of inside out chicken teriyaki sushi and four pieces of avocado maki made with soy wrapper instead of nori. BF gave me a lot of help making the sushi to save time. There are two pork shu mai 'burgers' (leek dumplings for my sister. Thank goodness for my well stocked freezer!). For added protein there is a quail egg and two bites of cheese in each.

For veggies there are sesame fried carrots, steamed miso spinach, boiled edamame and sweet potato flowers, steamed asparagus, broccoli and snow peas, and some homemade daikon pickles.

For fruit there are nectarine bites, cherries, blueberries and strawberries.

I thought it would be really challenging to fill so much space but I actually ended up with more food than I could fit in them. I only wish I had more time to pretty them up.

July 14th Bento Lunch

2008-07-14T19:32:00.006-03:00

Hmmm....the pics didnt really turn out today. But you get the idea.

We didn't manage to get out for groceries until tonight, so it was slim pickin's for produce for today's bento. We had avocado maki and bacon wrapped chicken thigh for the main components of the bento.

In the top right corner you can see the lentil snacks I made last night. I got the recipe from a site that justbento links to. I forgot to put them in my bento, but BF said they were really yummy. It's a good thing too, because the recipe made about fifty of them.

For veggies, I used everything we had in the fridge. Steamed gai lon, broccoli, sugar snaps, carrot flowers and fried plantain tulips.

There are a few bites of cheddar in the top of the bento. For fruit I used apple slices to add more carbs since there isn't really all that much rice in the sushi. There are some butterflies cut from yellow kiwi (I actually liked this better than regular green kiwi. Its sweeter and has a smoother texture), a lychee, blueberries and some rhubarb that I cooked up with some strawberries.

I made the sushi, chicken, lentil snacks and rhubarb the night before, so this was actually really quick to throw together this morning. And considering how late I slept in this morning, that was a good thing!

Bento Boxes in Halifax!

2008-07-13T22:39:00.004-03:00

I got a gorgeous new bento box this weekend.

And most amazingly and wonderful of all, I bought it at a local store!

I got this at Drala and they had about five left. So to all of my Haligonian readers who don't make bento lunches yet, now you have no excuse! It's next to pizza corner in the same building where the bead pod used to be, in case you don't know where it is. They have them with silver butterflies too! (Disclaimer: I'm not in any way affiliated)

This bento box is huge, so I will probably only use the top tier most of the time. Each tier is about the size of my blue dragonfly bento box. Maybe I should start packing bento breakfasts so that I can use both :P

My only complaint is that the box doesn't have a rubber seal like my other bento boxes, but I never actually let them flip upside down anyway, so it should be fine. I plan to just put my red bento belt around it. It matches perfectly.

So now we will both have single tier bentos. Nice!

July 11th Cupcakes

2008-07-12T11:11:00.004-03:00

I have a lot of cutters.

I have heart cutters, star cutters, triangle cutters, clover cutters, pumpkin cutters, ladybug cutters, about 15 different flower cutters, leaf cutters, moon cutters, bowtie cutters, body part cutters, frog cutters, car cutters, hot pepper cutters, crown cutters, dinosaur cutters, plane cutters, alphabet cutters, and that's just the tip of the iceburg.

So it was with utter disbelief when I realized last night that I don't have a single fish cutter.

BF is taking his advanced diving class this weekend, so he's doing five dives and pretty much only coming home to sleep. He called me from the dive site last night and said it he would love a cupcake when he came home.

And for me, any excuse is a good excuse to make cupcakes.

So I was going to make them aqua blue with little fishes in all different colours in keeping with the whole ocean theme of his weekend.

But it was not to be. I could have molded them by hand of course, but I was working on another set of cupcake decorations earlier in the evening, so I didn't feel like doing that much work for this set. So he got hearts instead :P

Since these were especially for BF, I made beer & chocolate flavoured cupcakes. I used the recipe from Crazy About Cupcakes (have I mentioned how much I love this book?). The batter was so liquidy that I thought for sure that they were not going to turn out, it was like soup. But omg, these are the moistest, softest cupcakes I've ever made. The texture is incredible, and for once I managed to fill the muffin cups so that the cupcakes all rose to the perfect height.

I don't care for beer, so I found the taste of these so-so, but BF really liked them. I'm thinking about making these again but using soda instead. Maybe orange or cream soda. Does anyone know if this will work?

I went to make frosting and realized I was missing some ingredients, so I ended up using cream cheese frosting instead since I had some in the freezer. I used Wilton Teal icing gel colouring to get the blueish shade.

For decorations, I made some fondant hearts for the teal cupcakes, and sprinkled Skor bits on the white ones. They're pictured here all packed up in foil trays for BF to take to his diving class.

July 10th Bento

2008-07-10T17:48:00.005-03:00

This has been a pretty busy week so far. It was snack bentos mostly and they were nothing special, so I didn't bother posting them.

This morning I actually managed to get up and make a proper bento. Nothing new today, just all foods that I love!
I made two rolls of chicken teriyaki sushi (one for BF and one for me). I made a two egg and spinach omelette, which makes exactly enough to put to hearts in each bento. I fried up some gyoza and some plantain hearts together to save time. For veggies there is asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and sesame fried baby bok choy.

I used all kinds of different fruits today. There is half an apricot, cut into slices, two lychees, some satsuma wedges, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

Simple but yummy, with lots of variety!

July 7th Bento

2008-07-07T19:40:00.006-03:00

We went to the grocery store yesterday as usual. BF went to the meat counter and ordered some stuff. As we walked away, I asked "What do you plan to do with that ground bison?"

He replied "Give it to you to put in a bento!"

Of course.

Seeing as how this was the first I'd heard that people even eat bison, I didn't know what to do with it. Luckily I know how to use Google.

And that is how we ended up having buffaloaf for lunch.
I followed the recipe at the link above. The only changes I made were to divide it in four and use a quail egg instead of a regular egg (because it's easier than measuring a quarter of an egg). This is the first time in my life I've ever made meatloaf. I don't think I've even eaten meatloaf since I was a kid. It turned out much better than I expected. I actually prefer bison to beef as it turns out.

The other interesting component to this bento is a Vietnamese dumpling called bahn khuc. The recipe is from my Vietnamese cookbook (listed in the carousel in the left column of my blog). The basic idea is that the dumpling dough is made of spinach puree and glutinous rice flour. The filling is ground pork, mung bean paste and shallots. It's then rolled in uncooked rice and steamed for about 20 minutes until the rice is cooked (I did all of this the night before and then put it straight in the bento from the fridge in the morning).

These were a whole lot of work, although I suspect it would have been faster if I had the mung bean paste already prepared, waiting in the freezer (it takes two hours to soak the beans). And for how much work they were, the taste was only so-so, so I don't think I'll make them again. The consistency was similar to a daifuku, which didn't carry over well to a dumpling in my opinion. BF wasn't so keen on them either. I really wanted to like this recipe because I thought it was a cool idea with lots of healthy ingredients, but alas, it was not to be.

For additional carbs, I included two heart shaped red bean onigiri.

For veggies there is some steamed red swiss chard (I really liked this last time so I bought another bunch this weekend), broccoli, asparagus, sugar snaps, raw carrot and daikon flowers and yellow zucchini.

For fruit there is half a fig, a strawberry that I thought was adorable, some fresh pineapple chunks, blueberries, raspberries and a cherry.

Sometimes my lunches take even me by surprise. I never would have guessed bison and mung!

July 3rd Snack Bento + Cupcakes

2008-07-03T19:01:00.003-03:00

Someone actually ordered cupcakes from me. I had a few leftover from a potluck last weekend so I ended up bringing them to a party afterwards. One of the guys there said he really liked my cupcakes and asked me to make him a dozen for his Friday morning meeting at work.

He didn't give me any instruction as to what he wanted "Oh, just whatever you're making would be great" so I made them the same as the ones last weekend, just with different decorations.

The cupcakes themselves are the "White Cupcakes" from book Crazy About Cupcakes. I substituted 1 3/4 cups of cake flour for the 1 1/2 cups white flour called for by the recipe and addded 1 1/2 cups of chopped mango. This is the second time I've used this recipe, and it's excellent.

They're filled with a pomegranate cream filling. I used the "Irish Cream Filling" recipe from the same book, and substituted pomegranate molasses (who knew this even existed?) for the Irish cream. I love this filling, it's amazingly creamy and tart.

The frosting is a plain buttercream and the stars are made from fondant. I was really pleased that I was able to match the frosting colours to the fondant so closely. This is the first time I was able to do that. It's actually quite a bit more purple than it looks in the picture.

I was so busy making cupcakes, I didn't really have time to make bento lunches, so it was a quick snack bento this morning.

There are three pork shu mai (I need to make another batch this weekend - almost out!), two little onigiris (buried), fried plantain hearts, asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps, and the last of the black bean salad. The fruit is just strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and lychees.

July 2nd Bento

2008-07-02T17:38:00.004-03:00

BF seems to have misplaced his single tier bento box. We've looked for it everywhere but it hasn't shown up yet. It's been two days and at this point I'm not sure whether I want to find it or not. I'm a bit scared of what might be growing in it by now.

So we might be back to two tier bentos for the next little bit.

I decided I wanted to make sushi last night and BF requested inarizushi, so that's what I made. We both really enjoyed the fruit sushi I made last week, so I decided to see how it would carry over to the inari version. I made them smaller than last time by folding in the edge. I think it looks much better this way. I filled the tofu pouches with a little sushi rice and topped them with strawberry and kiwi pieces. The rice was premade and frozen, and the assembly was done this morning. Took about 5 minutes including the time it took to cut up the fruit.

They were really yummy. Because the inari skin itself is a bit sweet, I actually preferred the sweet fruit toppings rather than a savory meat topping for example.

I stabilized the sushi in the bento box with some steamed broccoli. Also in the bottom tier are slices of breaded pork cutlet, asparagus pieces and three gyoza.

On the top, there is more of the black bean salad (so delicious!), broccoli and sugar snaps, persimmon pieces, fresh lychees, blueberries, blackberries, cherries and a chocolate truffle.

July 1st Bento

2008-07-01T19:41:00.003-03:00

I felt like everything about today's bento was overshadowed by the fact that I overcooked the veggies. I missed the beep of the microwave timer and ended up steaming them about five minutes too long. They turned out soggy and a sickly green instead of a bright, delicious green.

Oh well, I won't make that mistake twice.

In the bottom tier there is some delicious yaki udon. I boiled one pack of noodles for three minutes and then fried with 1 Tbsp each of canola oil, soy sauce and sake. On top of that are some carrot flowers with snow pea leaves. On the other side there are some delicious seasoned lamb bites and some chinese broccoli (gai lon).

On top we have asparagus pieces, sugar snaps, a mini banana and a delicious mix of black beans, sweet onion, cilantro, red pepper, lime juice and olive oil that I picked up at the deli on the weekend. It was called a salsa, but it seems more like a salad to me, so that's how we ate it.

For fruit there are fresh lychees (yum!), cherries, the last few satsuma wedges, strawberries, blueberries and raspberries.

Happy Canada Day Everyone!

We're going to fireworks tonight - yay!

June 20th Snack Bento

2008-06-30T17:40:00.003-03:00

This weekend was crazy busy and this morning I needed the extra sleep, so today I just made snack bentos.

We have the usual suspects: onigiri, tamagoyaki, pork shumai, fruit and veggies. I threw this together in just a few minutes.

The one stand-out item in this bento was the satsuma tangerine. I never had one of these before, and the smell when you peel it is unbelievable. This was by far the best orange/tangerine I've ever tasted.

Casino Birthday Cupcakes

2008-06-29T19:32:00.004-03:00

Today is my mother's birthday. Happy Birthday Mom!

So of course, cupcakes were in order. Mom loves casino card games, so I went with a combination of winning blackjack hands and casino chips for decorations.

Here they are in my cupcake carrier earlier today, all ready for the trip to Mom's.
The cupcakes themselves are about as simple as it gets. I just made a marble fudge cake mix. I used enough of the batter to make a dozen cupcakes, and the rest I poured into a large loaf pan to make the center cake. I baked them separately since the cake took longer (about 4o minutes) and I didn't want to have to open the oven halfway through baking it to take the cupcakes out. In my experience, if you open the oven too soon when baking a cake, it doesn't raise properly.

The frosting is a plain buttercream. I used Wilton's delphinium blue to colour half of it. I love this colour! The poker chips are actually made of chocolate (purchased at a local candy store).

By far the most time consuming part were the fondant decorations. The letters in "Happy Birthday Mom" were quick enough to punch out of rolled fondant. I used a heart punch for both the hearts and spades. The cards were made by cutting rectangles out of white fondant and then rounding out the corners. The A's and K's took forever! My sister helped out though, so it went a bit faster.

All in all, I'm happy with the way that everything turned out. Mom really like it, and everything got eaten.

I have to say though that I found that I don't particularly enjoy cake decorating as much as cupcakes. I spent way too much time trying to get the icing smooth and doing the borders. So for my mom, I would go to the trouble of making a cake, but I think I will stick to wonderful, fabulous cupcakes for everything else.

Umeboshi Onigiri???

2008-06-27T17:58:00.003-03:00

So far I haven't been able to develop a taste for umeboshi.

Umeboshi is a Japanese form of pickled plum. It's a traditional onigiri filling and it's super sour. So sour that I can't even stand a tiny piece of one. I will keep trying to develop a taste for it though, I haven't given up.

But in the meantime, I had a silly notion last night that I would make some umeboshi onigiri out of rice krispy squares. This wasn't an original idea, I was inspired by this website.

Once they were made, I put them in some nice white boxes so that BF could bring some to a friend's place where he was having lunch today. I think they turned out pretty cute.
I just used the basic rice krispy square recipe printed inside the box. While it was still hot (and working very quickly so it didn't cool down before I was done) I pressed a layer of rice in the bottom of my small triangle onigiri mold (about 1 1/2" on each side) and placed a sour cherry candy in the middle. I like these candies because they are sour like an umeboshi and look sort of like one (okay, not really, but they look more like an umeboshi than say a gummi worm does ) and they're really yummy! Then I placed another layer of rice krispies around the candy to hold it in place.

After that I closed the mold just like you would with an onigiri. It's important not to fill it too full because cereal doesn't have a lot of give to it, and the candies get dented and scratched.

I melted some semi-sweet chocolate squares in the microwave (30 seconds and stir, repeat until melted) and used a butter knife to spread it around the outer edge of half of the 'onigiri'. I placed the chocolate coated ones on wax paper and put them in the fridge to harden the chocolate.

I had some Wilton candy boxes from Michael's (I think they're the half pound size. I threw out the tag, so I can't be sure) that I lined with wax paper. I used sushi grass paper to separate the 'onigiri'. For decorations I made some 'pickled ginger' by rolling a piece of cherry ribbon candy and filled a fish shaped soy sauce bottle with chocolate syrup.

I had intended to make 'wasabi' with a mound of green fondant, but I ran out of time.

On the top of the box I wrote "Mmm....onigiri umeboshi" with a black Sharpie.

So it was kind of silly. But it was fun :)

June 26th Bento

2008-06-26T19:23:00.003-03:00

I have not been this excited about bento rice since I found those banana leaves and made lemper. Omg, it was so delicious today.

Last night BF was helping a friend move, so I suggested we go for some late night sushi after he got home. So I was making onigiri, thinking about the restaurant, and I started thinking about this dessert sushi I had there one time. It was made with mamenori soy paper, and it didn't stick together very well. I remember thinking that if a sushi chef can't get it to stick together, what chance did I have?

Then I had an epiphany. I would made dessert sushi for today's bento and to get it to stick together, I would brush the last couple of inches of mamenori with warmed up honey.

Worked like a charm!

The sushi is made with short grain white rice seasoned with a syrup I made by microwaving 2 Tbsp of lime juice and then mixing in 3/4 Tbsp sugar. It's filled with strawberry and kiwi slices, wrapped in sesame seed mamenori and sprinkled with a little ginger. When I cut it up this morning and saw how pretty it was, I wished I had made two rolls. At least I'll know for next time.

The meat is chicken cordon bleu (premade from the butcher, I just cooked it last night). I baked a couple of slices of acorn squash with it, and then mashed them with a little butter. It's in the little cup, sprinkled with a smidge of allspice and topped with a tiny tomato. I had never cooked squash before, but it was yummy, I'll make it again.

I steamed some more of the beet greens, some asparagus and snow peas. The edamame and sweet potato butterflies were boiled for 5 minutes.

For fruit, there are some apple hearts, cherries, raspberries and blueberries.

I thought this bento was especially delcious.

I have an interesting plan for some baking tonight. If it turns out the way I'm hoping, I'll post pics later!

June 25th Bento

2008-06-25T17:51:00.005-03:00

I swear I had a plan for today's bento. No, for real!

It was so gorgeous out last night, and I spent most of the evening on a patio downtown sipping pineapple and vanilla flavoured martinis with BF. I got home at 11:30pm and realized I had nothing to put in the morning's bento.

So I threw a chicken breast (cordon bleu style) and some veggies in the oven for 45 minutes, thinking that would cover off enough of it that I could just throw in some onigiris and fruit in the morning.

I was falling asleep towards the end of it, but I knew it would be worth it in the morning when the bentos were already half planned. After the 45 minutes were up, I pulled the pan out of the oven, removed the foil, and to my utter disbelief, everything was still completely raw, and the pan was only a little bit warm.

I glanced up at the temperature gauge and the oven was turned on to 350 degrees, although the light was on indicated that it was warming up. For the life of me, I can't figure out what happened. My best guess is that I didn't close the oven door all the way, but I can't even imagine that happening. I've been baking since I was like 12 and I don't ever recall not shutting the oven properly.

So it was 12:30 and I was exhausted, so I just went to bed.

And to top it off, when I got up in the morning, and went to grab some onigiri out of the freezer, I realized I was down to the very dregs of my onigiri bucket (I lost track of what I had stocked while I was on vacation), so I used everything that was there, but it meant I was a bit limited in what I could do creatively.

So I think the moral here is to plan better and don't stay out so late on weeknights. But given that the hot weather is finally here and I love summer nights, I'm not sure that's a realistic goal for me :P

Anyway, enough rambling. Here is what I came up with:

On the left, there are two sets of three onigiri (one tumeric and vinegar, one plain). For meat I fried up some pork schnitzel in a little canola oil. These cuts of meat are very thin, so they cook really fast - perfect for bento!

I picked up some Shang Hai bok choy on the weekend which I sauteed in sesame oil. This was the first time I had tried it, and I have to say I can't tell the difference between this and regular baby bok choy at all. I think regular bok choy is prettier with the darker green and the white, so I don't think I'll buy the Shang Hai version again.

There are some sugar snaps and asparagus pieces. I divided the broccoli florets into really small pieces because there were tiny gaps everywhere. I tucked in one of the tiny tomatos.

On the right tier, there is another onigiri (heart shaped, filled with lotus seed and white bean paste), some rolled omelette (tamagoyaki) slices, more sugar snaps and broccoli.

For fruit there are some apricot pieces, strawberries, blueberries, cherries. Dessert is a truffle.

So it was nothing fancy, but we didn't starve!

Tonight I'll be cooking up and freezing lots of rice!

June 24th Bento + Last Night's Cupcakes

2008-06-24T17:45:00.006-03:00

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.

June 23rd Snack Bentos

2008-06-23T20:56:00.005-03:00

My apologies for the lack of posts. I was on vacation last week and I didn't make a single bento. I truly meant to make bento lunches for BF all week but somehow I managed to sleep in every single day. And I ended up not having time to go for groceries over the weekend, so this morning when I got up to make bento I was pretty short on options and ingredients. Which is how we ended up with snack bentos instead of bento lunches.
I grabbed some onigiris from the fridge and put some faces on them. There are gyoza from a batch I made this weekend and a boiled quail egg for some added protein. For veggies there are edamame (frozen), sweet potato sakuras (I love sweet potatos, they last forever), the last two stalks of asparagus and some sugar snaps. I used a few black sesame seeds to decorate the sakuras and I think they turned out really cute. For fruit there are just two cherries in each and a few blueberries.
I used my Cinnamoroll snack bento box and BF used his blue polka dot snack bento box. From the picture it looks like mine is much larger, but they're actually about the same size, BF's is just deeper. I kind of enjoy the fact that they are different shapes because I like the mental exercise of figuring out two different layouts. It's a good little puzzle to help me wake up in the morning.

We managed to get out for groceries tonight, so it should be back to business as usual. My favorite thing that we picked up was the tiniest bunch of vine tomatoes that I have ever seen in my life. They are so small!! And so pretty still on the vine. I put a quarter next to them so you can get a feel for the size. In the back of the bunch there is the tiniest one of all, it's my favorite.

June 16th Bento

2008-06-16T20:33:00.005-03:00

I was in a bit of a rush this morning (I just couldn't will myself out of bed!) so today's bento was pretty simple, but I think it still looks nice.

The onigiri was frozen from a batch I made a few weeks ago (remember this bento?). I used a mold that makes three tiny rounded triangles at a time, similar to my cube mold. The slices of meat are from a premade stuffed turkey breast from the butcher that I baked up last night and sliced this morning.

For veggies there are asparagus stalks, broccoli florets, steamed carrot flowers (I liked how they had the little circle in the middle), fried plantain hearts, and yellow zucchini slices.

There are a couple of tomatos, and for fruit there are grapes, white and red raspberries, a couple blueberries, strawberry slices, and green apple hearts. There's a truffle for dessert but I forget what flavor it was. It was yummy though!

Purple Lemon Cupcakes?

2008-06-14T15:28:00.004-03:00

The idea this week was to make lemon meringue pie style cupcakes. The cupcakes themselves are lemon flavoured (I was lazy this week and used a mix), and then filled them with lemon curd to replicate pie filling.

I baked individual meringues using this recipe (minus the peppermint candy). They turned out like hard, melt in your mouth meringue cookies. They're really delicious, but next time I think I might try using soft meringues and a kitchen torch to brown them to make meringue more like what you find on an actual pie.

The frosting is a plain buttercream. I hadn't intended to colour it, but the meringues are so white that it didn't contrast enough. So purple was kind of a random choice but I think they turned out pretty and it matches the wrappers I used (Wilton makes them).

Definitely yummy cupcakes, but I think these ones are almost too sweet. Is that possible for a cupcake?

June 12th Bento Lunches

2008-06-12T23:03:00.004-03:00

His and hers bento lunches...

BF's been on vacation all week, but I've been making him bento lunches anyway. Its just as easy to make one bento as to make two, and in some ways it's actually easier. For example, I wanted a few bites of plum in mine today. If I was only making one, then I can either include the whole plum or else the rest of the plum winds up in the fridge, needing to be used up quickly. This way I can use the whole thing but we still get lots of variety in our bentos.

Today we have (on the bottom tiers) strips of beef, leftover chicken curry from the Vietnamese restaurant we went to last night (it's a sweet, curry made with coconut milk - so delcious!), gyoza, steamed broccoli, sugar snaps and asparagus.

On the top tier are a few bites of plum, a container of pomegranate seeds and the usual assortment of berries. BF's bento is a little bit bigger than mine so I also included a chunk of cheddar (hiding under the strawberries) and a couple of daifuku.

June 10th Bento

2008-06-10T17:42:00.010-03:00

Have I mentioned that I love banana leaves? BF used them last night on the barbecue and it was phenomenal. For supper he made some sort of coconut milk-curry-ginger-cayenne rice in banana leaf packets with bites of seasoned lamb. We made a couple of little ones for the bentos as well of course (it's in the top center). You can't really tell from the picture but the rice was crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside and all stuck together sort of like rice loaf. I wasn't sure I would like crunchy rice because I thought it would just taste like uncooked rice, but it wasn't like that at all. The texture was actually really nice.

I also got to try out a recipe from a Vietnamese cookbook I ordered from Amazon a couple weeks ago, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen (Highly recommend!! I added it to the carousel in the left panel of the blog). It's called Chuoi Nuong and the basic idea is you take a chunk of banana and wrap it in some coconut rice mixed with shredded coconut. Wrap the whole thing in a banana leaf and fire up the grill. As you can see, the banana leaf gets kind of brittle on the barbecue, so I removed it before putting this and the curry rice in the bento.

No joke, Chuoi Nuong is quite possibly my new favorite food now (if only I knew how to say it). It was unbelievably delicious and I will be very sad when I can no longer get banana leaves because I want to eat this every day.

Both of the rice dishes were made the night before and kept overnight in the refrigerator, covered with plastic wrap. In the morning I removed the banana leaf and put them straight into the bento and the texture of the rice was still perfect by lunch time.

For a little bit more meat, there are three homemade pork shu mai, and just the standard veggies (I was running out of room!), although I did manage to sneak some steamed gai lon under the curry rice.

For fruit there are raspberries (red and white), cherries, strawberries (buried in there somewhere), some apricot bites, a couple of slices of kumquat along the bottom wall and a container of pomegranate seeds. I was just going to use a few of the pomegranate seeds to decorate the bento, but then I ate one and remembered just how much I love them, so it ended up being a whole dish full. Dessert is a (store bought) daifuku filled with red bean paste.

As far as lunches go, this was definitely one of the yummiest yet!!

June 9th Bento

2008-06-09T19:01:00.004-03:00

I found all kinds of new things at the grocery store this week, so I got to try some new foods in today's bento. And I learned a new way to cook - with banana leaves! They only had about six at the store. They're about two and a half feet long and about a foot wide, dark green and shiny. So today we had lemper!
Lemper is an Indonesian food that consists of coconut rice in banana leaves. Here's how I made it:

The night before, cook up some short grain white rice using two thirds coconut milk and one third water. Fried up some ground chicken with a pinch or two of curry powder and some chives, and when it's cooked, splash on a little lemon juice. Cut 5 inch squares of banana leaf and put 1 Tbsp rice in a rough sort of rectangle in the middle of the banana leaf and 1 Tbsp of the chicken mixture on top of that. Fold up the sides and tie with a small strip of banana leaf, and they're ready to go in the fridge. In the morning when making the bento, steam the lemper packets for 15 minutes (this is the longest time I've ever spent cooking anything for a bento by a long shot, but it was so worth it), remove from the steamer and let them cool for a bit before placing them in the bento. I stacked up two in mine.

This was without a doubt the best rice I've ever had in a bento. It was so moist and flavorful, just heavenly. And making them was fun. There's something about wrapping rice in leaves that feels really simple and wholesome. I have more banana leaf cooked foods planned for this week (we went back today and bought two more), so stay tuned!

Because of the small amount of rice, I packed in a whole bunch of sweet potato flowers (boiled with a little butter and cinnamon on them) for additional carbs. And because of the small amount of chicken, I packed two of the mini quiches BF made yesterday, and a couple of bites of cheddar for additional protein. There was some empty space so I threw in a couple leek dumplings.

For vegetables we have the usual broccoli, asparagus, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini. I found some new fruits though! In the bottom corner there is a fresh lychee. I had never tried these before. They have delicious flavour with a bizarre juicy-membrane like consistency. Sorry, that's best way I can think to describe it. Appetizing, right?

There are a couple of cherries next to that (they're down to $4.99 a pound so I've been eating a lot of these), and above that there red and white raspberries. I didn't even know white raspberries existed. Turns out they taste just like red ones, but I like the colour that they add to the bento. There are some blueberries and strawberries, and to finish it off, a cupcake from the batch this weekend.

Here's a diagonal shot too because I liked how the banana leaf looked in this one:

What We Do With All The Leftovers

2008-06-08T11:52:00.005-03:00

BF and I think it's really important to eat a healthy varied diet with all kinds of different fruits and veggies. Every Sunday we stock up on produce for our bento lunches and every week we use most of it up.

But, come the next Sunday before the grocery trip, there's always at least a few leftover fruit and vegetables kicking around, and they're not really fresh enough at this point to use in the following week's bentos.

So we cook them all up for Sunday breakfast!

BF puts on the kettle for green tea and coffee and briefly sautes all of the leftover vegetables. He mixes them with five beaten eggs, a little milk and some spices (salt, pepper and basil today) and bakes the mixture at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

While that's baking, I make a batch of crepes (I use the recipe from the Company's Coming series brunch cookbook, it's really easy) and I cook up any leftover fruits in a pot on the stove with about 1/4 cup of water and a couple tablespoons of sugar. Once they're cooked a bit, I remove the pot from the heat and stir in a mixture of cornstarch and water to thicken it up.

Once everything's ready, we take our crustless quiche, berry crepes and hot drinks out in to the living room, turn on a movie and have a lazy morning.

BF found my mini muffin pan this morning, so he made some mini quiches at the same time for bento. Yay!

In the four months that I've been making bento lunches for BF and I, everything about the way we eat has changed in a really positive way. We eat almost entirely fresh, homemade foods and have all but eliminated processed foods from our diet.

Our attitudes and tastes have changed as well. Our standards have gone up as far as what we are willing to put in our bodies. Where as before I used to love a big bowl of pasta with a heavy cream sauce and maybe some cheese or meat, now I'm shocked at the portion sizes of complex carbs (pasta, bread, white potatoes, etc) that are considered typical and find myself looking at these types of meals and wanting to fill up on vegetables instead. Rather than feeling like I'm missing out by not eating heavy foods, I feel like I'm missing out when I don't get enough fresh fruits and vegetables.

I still enjoy a bite or two of fried or fatty foods, but my tolerance for eating large quantities of them has gone way down. For example, I might eat a breaded and fried chicken strip, but I can't imagine eating six, which is a 'normal' portion size. I would want a side of veggies instead. For a lot of processed foods, I find them so salty now that I can barely eat a bite. I didn't mean to cut so much salt out of my diet as an intentional choice, it was just a result of eating more fresh foods, so now I'm much more sensitive to it.

It actually surprises me the extent to which my tastes have changed because of how heavy my diet used to be in fried/fatty/carb heavy/processed foods. I think if someone had told me I would actually prefer vegetables to french fries six months ago, I wouldn't have believed it.

So, add that to the list of reasons why I love bento! And why you should start eating bento lunches if you don't already.

Lilypad Cupcakes

2008-06-07T09:55:00.005-03:00

Sorry about the lack of bento yesterday. I realized when I was halfway to work yesterday that I forgot to take a picture of it

Another Saturday, another batch of cupcakes...
I made chocolate cupcakes filled with a pomegranate vanilla cream (very tart!). The purple ones have a plain buttercream frosting and the green ones have matcha green tea buttercream frosting (I looooove matcha frosting).

My sister helped me make the decorations. There are lilypads, water lilies and hearts made from green and purple fondant, and some gummy frogs on the lilypads.

The water lilies didn't turn out quite the way I wanted, but I'm still pretty new at fondant decorations, so this was one of the most complex things I've tried yet. I think they turned out to be pretty flowers, but they don't exactly look like water lilies. I'll keep trying!!

As always, you can click on the picture to get a closer look.

June 5th Bento

2008-06-05T19:47:00.006-03:00

This was another unplanned what-do-we-have-in-the-freezer-this-morning bento. I used the six element formula that never lets me down: rice/meat/veggies/fruit/dumplings/dessert. Aside from the fruit and veggies, everything in the bento started its morning in the freezer.

For rice we have a few plain rice cubes and a ground chicken filled triangle onigiri. The meat is marinated lamb pieces (these were so wonderfully spicy and peppery!). There are three gyoza and a hidden bottle of rice vinegar/soy sauce dipping sauce, as well as broccoli, asparagus, sugar snaps, carrot hearts and snow peas for vegetables.

I put some slices of star fruit in the bentos, but BF had never had them before and ended up not liking them. Lots of berries as usual (blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries and strawberries) and a "midnight mint" square. I made a batch of them on the weekend. They're similar to a nanaimo bar but with a green mint filling. The trickiest part was cutting them into tiny bites without cracking the chocolate layer on top. I managed to cut about 15 before I gave up!

Although I didn't plan anything ahead of time, this bento was still really yummy and satisfying. The downside is that the ingredients aren't as creative and it's not the cutest, that's for sure. But when I'm feeling a little lazy in the morning and want a couple of extra minutes of sleep, it's nice to know I have a freezer with lots of great options for lunch!

June 3rd Bento

2008-06-03T17:58:00.003-03:00

About a month ago, I tried to make a symmetric bento with little success. Today I pulled it off and I didn't even plan to!

Today's theme was Bunnies in Love
We have two bunny onigiri with a ground chicken/hoisin sauce filling and sesame seed eyes. The heart is made of rolled omelette (tamagoyaki) and steamed spinach. There are three pork shu mai (I had to cut one in half and stack it to make it fit) and some silly pasta pieces (tossed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil). The veggies are broccoli, edamame skewers, snow peas and asparagus. The fruit was mostly berries (blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries and can you spot the blackberries?) with a couple slices of kumquat.

For dessert, I tried something new and exciting - dessert sushi! Basically, I made it like regular sushi, but with a lot of substitutions. Instead of normal rice, I used coconut rice. I used lime juice and sugar instead of sushi vinegar and soy paper (mamenori) instead of nori. The filling is peach slices sprinkled with ginger.

I had a hard time getting it to stick together (mamenori is not very sticky to begin with and the coconut rice made it even harder to work with). BF had the brilliant idea to tie it closed with strips peeled from a stalk of rhubarb and it worked perfectly. I tied six strings around it, one to hold together each piece once it was cut.
It held up perfectly in the bento and was absolutely delicious. There were so many different flavours going on in each bite, I will definitely make this again!

June 2nd Bento

2008-06-02T17:59:00.003-03:00

Last night, I ate the best steak of my life. BF cooked it on the barbecue and it was so juicy and perfect. And it was huge! Big enough to feed the two of us and still have more than enough left over for bento. I ended up making it into rice paper rolls.
To make the steak rolls, I cut the steak into strips, cut some lettuce strips, julienned some carrot and grated a little cheddar cheese and then followed the same method as in my turkey roll recipe. They were so delicious!

Below the steak rolls I managed to squeeze in a few pieces of asparagus. On the left there is broccoli, sugar snaps, some steamed miso spinach, yellow zucchini, red pepper strips, a red bean onigiri and a boiled quail egg.

On the right there is the last mini cupcake from the batch I made on the weekend, a whole lot of berries (they were really cheap this weekend so I bought a ton - strawberries, blueberries, cherries, raspberries and blackberries), a few bites of fresh pineapple and half of a sliced apricot.

One of the things I love most about bento is that if you want to have unhealthy food (like steak and cupcakes!), it's really easy to build a healthy lunch around that and still indulge yourself. The tiny, controlled portions mean that you can enjoy a few treats without the mindless eating and overindulgence that comes with large portion sizes.

Saturday Morning Cupcakes

2008-05-31T12:57:00.004-03:00

BF kept telling me that I should learn to make cakes from scratch rather than using cake mixes if I ever want to get good at baking, and of course he's right, so this morning I made my very first batch of cupcakes from scratch. It made like three dozen. Here's a few of them in a box (I give a lot of them away because there's no way BF and I can eat that many!)

They are zucchini cupcakes (I had two that didn't make it into bentos this week so I needed to use them up) with maple cream cheese frosting. The frosting is a little sloppy because I was a bit rushed to get them done before my swimming lesson. They're definitely yummy, but they're a little heavier than using a cake mix, so I still have some learning to do.

I decorated them with some maple leaves I made from fondant. I used pale green fondant, drew veins in them and painted with diluted red food colouring to give them a textured colour. On the pink ones (I'm still figuring out how to make dark icing without a wonky taste so that's why they're not red), I sprinkled Skor bits, and on the white ones I drizzled a little fresh maple syrup that my dad brought me from a maple syrup farm a couple weeks ago.

The 11 Minute Snack Bento

2008-05-30T18:04:00.003-03:00

A lot of times I sleep in or whatever and think I don't have time to make bento, but really, there's no excuse because bento making takes me as long as I have. If I have 5 minutes, it takes 5 minutes, and if I have 40 minutes, it takes 40. The trick is to multitask. Most mornings I have at least 3 out of 4 burners going on the stove, plus something in the microwave, and I'm chopping something up at the same time.

This morning I had 11 minutes. Here's a snack bento that I put together.
And here's how:

1. Boil some water in a kettle. While it's heating, cut out some flowers out of a slice or two of sweet potato. Heat some canola oil in another frying pan and a little water in another pot or steamer. Pour the water you just boiled into a small pot.

2. Add edamame and sweet potato to the boiling pot of water. Remove and strain after six minutes.

3. While that's going, throw some frozen pork shumai in the pan with oil. Periodically flip and smoosh with a spatula until cooked through.

4. Now you've got two things cooking. Slice up two stalks of asparagus, a couple of broccoli florets and two sugar snaps. Put the asparagus and broccoli in the steamer for 3 minutes. Add the sugar snaps and steam for two more.

5. Now you've got three things going. Heat a frozen onigiri in the microwave, about 20-25 seconds on each side.

6. Pour some tonkatsu sauce (or whatever your favorite dipping sauce is for pork) in a small container.

7. Slice up a strawberry.

8. Everything should be ready by now! Place onigiri in the bottom right of the left compartment. Place shumai above the onigiri and asparagus to fill in the gap on the left. Slice sugar snaps in half and tuck into the gaps. Cover the rice with edamame and position sweet potato flowers on top of it.

9. Place sauce container in the top left of the right hand compartment. Cover it with strawberry slices. Place any remaining edamame below the strawberryt. Place broccoli florets beneath the strawberry, and two cherries below that (on top of the edamame). Fill any gaps with blueberries.

10. Rush out the door!

So that's how I do it. And at 3:30 this afternoon when I was starving because lunch was hours ago, I had something delicious and healthy to snack on. It's a good thing too, because there was an open box of donuts in the office!

May 28th Snack Bento

2008-05-28T17:09:00.005-03:00

Work provided lunch today, so I thought it was a great day to test out a new snack bento. The challenge was to see how many different foods I could fit into this tiny thing. It's only about 2.5 inches square! (the picture is bigger than the actual bento was)

I managed to fit in two pieces of pork shumai (homemade), one heart shaped onigiri filled with red bean paste, a quail egg, three bites of asparagus, three broccoli florets, two sugar snaps, two fiddleheads, three fried plantain stars, two tangerine wedges, two bites of fresh pineapple, a strawberry cut into small pieces, four blueberries and two raspberries.

I think I did pretty well! And it was a perfect, delicious and well balanced snack. Here it is with the lid on.

May 27th Bento

2008-05-27T21:34:00.007-03:00

Today I started with a diamond in the center and then filled in the corners. I think it turned out pretty nice and it was definitely yummy.

I tested out my rice cuber for the first time. The yellow rice is coloured with tumeric, the purple rice is flavored with shiso furikake and the white rice is plain with salt. I purchased the cuber from this ebay seller along with some other rice molds a few weeks ago.

In the top right corner there are a couple of gyoza. Bottom right is breaded pork cutlet pieces and asparagus bites. The other corners are foods that are in season here, fiddleheads and rhubarb.

To make the rhubarb, I took 1 chopped stalk of rhubarb, and 1 chopped strawberry, chopped and simmered them in a pot with about 2 Tbsp water until everything was soft and mushy. Then I added 2 Tbsp sugar, stirred until dissolved, removed from heat, and finally added about 1/2 tsp cornstarch dissolved in a little water to thicken it up. Rhubarb to me is just one of those tastes that brings me home, I love it.

There are also some sugar snaps, carrot flowers and broccoli floating around in there.

For fruit, there are a few slices of fresh pineapple, raspberries, blueberries, a little more strawberry, and a couple of slices of kumquat. The kumquat was so tart and tangy, it's a great way to cleanse your palate between bites. Dessert was a date square.

A Disappointing Bento

2008-05-26T21:43:00.009-03:00

Today I had my very first restaurant bento.

Since it's memorial day, BF and I had the day off. On our way to the grocery store, BF commented that it since it was lunch time, all of the restaurants would have lunch specials.

So we popped into our favorite Japanese restaurant where instead of the usual menus, they had a one page "Bento box specials" menu. Obviously, I was quite excited. I ordered the chicken teriyaki bento, BF ordered an unagi bento

Although the food was good, I was struck by two things as soon as the bento boxes were set on the table.

There was less variety of food than I was expecting. My bento contained a garden salad, a chicken breast, vegetable tempura, white rice and an orange slice. Miso soup was served on the side.

The boxes were huge! About the size of an average placemat. And the portions were huge as well. I felt like I was eating salad for ages, and in the end I only finished half of it. Same thing with the rice.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera with me, because I wasn't expecting to go out to lunch.

Overall, I felt a bit disappointed because everything I've read about Japanese cuisine has emphasized the importance of portion control and the health benefits of eating a large variety of different foods. These bentos seemed 'North Americanized' by comparison. My frustration was compounded by the fact that I know this restaurant has dozens of delicious dishes. I ended up thinking of all kinds of different combinations of their food that would make amazing bento lunches as I crunched away at my salad.

Has anyone else had an experience like this? I found myself wondering if a restaurant could do good business serving properly portioned authentic bento lunches, or whether as a city we're all too used to supersized meals.

Cupcakes!

2008-05-24T18:22:00.020-03:00

Since I started making bento, I've amassed quite the collection of cookie cutters and ham & cheese cutters. I found another fun use for them...cupcake decorations!

On Saturday mornings I like to clean my kitchen from top to bottom, and since I'm there anyway it's a great time to bake something, so these are this morning's cupcakes.

The theme was (obviously) tigers.

The cupcakes are a basic vanilla that I filled with chocolate hazelnut fudge.

The icing is buttercream, and the tigers and stars were punched from rolled fondant. It actually didn't take much thought to put the tiger faces together, because I've made so many faces on onigiri.

It's a little hard to tell from the picture but I used orange for the face, yellow for the area around the mouth and pink triangles for the ears and nose.

Cute and delicious! My favorite kind of food!

May 22nd Bento

2008-05-22T18:09:00.008-03:00

Last night I felt like I'm starting to come down with something, so I decided that today's bentos would be made entirely with my favorite foods.
On the top we have some chicken sushi. This was my first attempt at making maki rolls with the soy paper (mamenori) and it was delicious and held up really well in the bento. I braised strips of chicken thigh with 1 Tbsp sake and 1 Tbsp ponzu sauce, and rolled them with a strip of green pepper and two chives and then sprinkled them with black sesame seeds after cutting the roll into pieces. They were juicy and crunchy, it was a great combination.

There are three gyoza and my favorite salad of chopped lettuce, mashed avocado and honey. For veggies there are edamame, a few sweet potato flowers, broccoli, sugar snaps, a couple of pieces of asparagus and a few fiddleheads.

For fruit there are apple slices, tangerine wedges, cherries, strawberry slices and blueberries. This is BF's bento so there's a truffle for dessert.

We have a bonus picture today! This is Macaroon, my hedgehog. He went in for surgery yesterday to have an infection removed from his ear and to have his legs examined. I guess they just put a little gas mask over his face to knock him out.

We bought him a few months ago from someone who didn't take good care of him, so he wasn't very healthy and he's never been able to walk properly. Since his surgery yesterday though, he's been the happiest and most active I've ever seen him. We have some antibiotics to give him, so I'm hoping that he will be even healthier in the next few weeks.

He was up this morning chilling with me in the kitchen while I made bento, so I thought I would share a picture of him. He's such a wonderful pet, I just love him to pieces.

May 21st Bento

2008-05-21T17:12:00.003-03:00

Every morning so far this week, I would get close to finishing the bentos, and then look at the clock only to find that I was twenty minutes behind schedule. I couldn't figure out why my bentos were taking so long.

Then this morning, I realized one of my alarms was turned off (I need two to wake up on time) and I actually was sleeping in every morning and not realizing it.

So, I really rushed through today's bento because I woke up so late. It was yummy but not pretty.
I had a sort of greek theme going today, with fried marinated lamb pieces, spanakopita (top left), a little tub of tabouli (premade), tomatoes and cucumbers, baklava for dessert.

But because I was up so late, I didn't really do the theme it justice. I just threw in a lot of random fruits and vegetables. There are fiddleheads (we bought a tonne of these, I'm not sure how I'm ever going to use them up), broccoli, sugar snaps, yellow zucchini and asparagus. If I had planned it better, I probably would have made falafel and some kind of rice dish.

There's a boiled quail egg, a couple of red bean filled onigiris, and then for fruit there are some tangerine slices, blackberries, gooseberries, strawberries and blueberries.

This was one of those mornings where I was really grateful to have a well stocked freezer. It took about five minutes to steam the veggies and fry the lamb, another two to cut the fruit and three and half minutes for the quail egg. The rest was already waiting for me in the freezer.

Where I'm trying to lose weight right now, skipping making bento is not an option. I can't get anything close to this healthy, fresh and filling in the restaurants near my work, so no matter how tired I am, I make sure that it gets done. And it's definitely worth it. Today I wore a pair of pants that I haven't fit into since last March, and they're great pants so I'm pretty stoked about it!

May 20th Bento

2008-05-20T17:39:00.005-03:00

BF said he thought today's bento was 'particularly tasty' so I consider that a success.

There was some leftover stuffed porkloin (it was a huge cut of meat) from yesterday's bento, so we had repeats today. To add a little more protein to the bento, I made a rolled omelette with three eggs, chives, chicken broth and a little soy sauce and sugar and included a few slices in each bento.

In the top right we have soba noodles. I was really surprised at how yummy these were, I thought they would be plain. Buried underneath them is a small container of dipping broth (a sharp, salty combination of chicken broth, soy sauce and mirin). I couldn't figure out how to twirl them around chopsticks to make a nest, so instead I just laid them in the silicone muffin cup by hand. It only took a couple of seconds.

For veggies there is a mixture of corn and red pepper (leftover from fajitas last night ), asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and fried plantain butterflies. I learned a new way to cut carrots yesterday, so I included a few of those to practice my cutting skills.

There are blueberries, strawberries and persimmon bites for fruit. Dessert is some homemade baklava. I made a batch last week and froze it.

BF was taking the pictures this morning and he's more creative than me when it comes to that stuff, so here's another shot of the bento. Ooh, angles! Fancy!

Oh yeah, and there's a coconut onigiri star and a few slices of gouda cheese hidden under some of the stuff in there. Secret bento foods :)

May 19th Bento

2008-05-19T18:06:00.004-03:00

I didn't intend for today's bento to turn out so cutesy...it just kind of happened!

I found some mini sweet potato pies in the freezer from a batch I made a few weeks ago, so I thought they would be nice in today's bento. I decorated this one with mozzarella and cheddar flowers.

The onigiris are from last week's frozen batch. The bunny is plain, the tiger was coloured with tumeric and rice vinegar, and the elephant was coloured with purple yam powder and rice vinegar. Accents are nori and ham. There's also a heart shaped onigiri made with coconut rice and a nori accent. It was nice to have so many different onigiris because it adds some different flavours to the bento.

Underneath the onigiris are slices of a stuffed pork loin. The onigiris are really short, so they need to sit on something to elevate them, and that allows me to fit even more types of food into the bento!

In the bottom left corner there is some steamed spinach with miso and ground sesame seeds. Other veggies include yellow and green zucchini, fiddleheads and broccoli space fillers (all steamed).

There wasn't much room left for fruit so we have some blueberries, strawberries and blackberries.

Yesterday I made cupcakes, and I ended up having some leftover batter, so I made a batch of mini cupcakes as well that turned out small enough for a bento box! It's a chocolate cupcake with red bean filling. The frosting is buttercream with some matcha green tea powder, and the cupcake is topped with a small ball of mochi. It was sooo decadent! I put the cupcake in a foil muffin cup in addition to the muffin cup it was baked in, so that none of the moisture from the fruit soaked into it.

May 16th Bento

2008-05-16T17:47:00.005-03:00

This morning was one of those mornings where I wished my bento boxes were just a little bit bigger. I wanted to fit so much more in here than there was room for.

We got take out sushi last night because I was feeling lazy and we wanted a sushi late night snack. So there is some avocado maki, sweet potato tempura maki and a couple of unagi (eel) maki. Generally I'm nervous about putting fish sushi in a bento, but but the eel in unagi sushi is actually cooked, so it's not quite as scary.

The main protein in the bento is a chicken 'tournedo' (basically bacon wrapped chicken thigh) that BF cooked up last night. There are two homemade gyoza sitting on top of some asparagus pieces. For veggies there is some sesame fried bok choy, sauteed red pepper slices, steamed snow peas, carrot flowers and broccoli, all tucked into the various nooks and crannies.

For fruit there are blueberries and strawberries, the last of the cherries and half of an apricot. Dessert is a small piece of homemade whole wheat and walnut baklava (I made a batch last night to use up the rest of the phyllo from when I made spanakopita last week or whenever it was).

May 14th Bento

2008-05-14T17:52:00.005-03:00

I feel like out of all the bentos I've made, today's was the most outstanding yet in terms of making the most delcious food while keeping it pretty. Oh man, it was so yummy!

I made tamagoyaki nigiri sushi. This was my first try making nigiri sushi and it was way easier than I thought it would be. I had no trouble at all making the rice balls uniform just using my hands. I made the rice last night and heated it in the microwave this morning, and it turned out nice and fluffy.

I made the omelette last night as well. For enough omelette for two bentos I used three eggs mixed with 1/4 cup chicken broth, 1/2 tsp mirin, 1/2 tsp sake, 1 1/2 tsp sugar and a pinch of salt, and rolled it into longer layers than usual to give it the right shape. I refrigerated it overnight and in the morning I just had to cut it into slices and attach it to the rice with strips of nori.

Under the sushi there is some sesame fried gai lon with dried cranberries. I never had gai lon before (or cooked it!) and I think next time I'll just steam it. The sesame oil was a little too sharp.

Beneath that there are three home made pork shumai, fried in a little canola and pressed with the spatula to flatten after every flip. That was the end of the batch, so I will probably make more this weekend.

At the bottom there is some broccoli hiding a soy sauce bottle, and this amazing little daikon salad. The taste of this salad is so incredibly sharp, so it has the same effect as pickled ginger with sushi. It's tiny but it packs a ton of flavor. To make it, the night before I sliced up some daikon and cut it into flowers with a punch. Sprinkle with salt, and then try to press/knead out the liquid in the daikon. Set the flowers on some paper towel and cover with plastic wrap in the fridge overnight. The paper towel will soak up even more of the liquid, so in the morning you'll have some really thirsty daikon. Also, the night before mix about 1 Tbsp white vinegar, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp lemon juice and a pinch of julienned orange peel and refrigerate overnight so the flavors mix. In the morning, add the daikon to the vinegar mixture and let it sit for ten minutes to soak it up. Drain the liquid and add to the bento.

There are some sugar snaps, sweet potato butterflies and the first fiddleheads of the season, all steamed. I added some lemon juice to the fiddleheads.

For fruit there is half of a honey tangerine and cherries! This was the first time I've seen cherries at the grocery store all year and they were $12 a pound if you can believe it. So I actually counted out ten cherries at the store (enough for bentos for two days). They were so delicious though, it was totally worth it. Then there are the usually strawberries and blueberrys, and a truffle.

BF's Second Bento!

2008-05-13T18:04:00.003-03:00

BF is so good to me. Last night he took me for sushi and on the way home we walked past a movie theatre. He suggested that we see a movie and I said I couldn't because I needed to get bento stuff ready. So he offered to get up early and make me a bento, even though it was his day off, and we went to a movie.
In the top tier we have pieces of chicken breast fried with balsamic vinegar, dill, oregano and thyme. There are two onigiri, a red bean filled flower onigiri and a cat shaped onigiri coloured with tumeric (He took the picture before he put the face on it, but it was cute). My favorite part was a flower he made in the bottom left from a yellow zucchini slice and some snow peas. There are sweet potato teddy bears, broccoli, asparagus and steamed fiddleheads.

On the bottom there is a gyoza, more broccoli, strawberries, blueberries and the last of the persimmon.

I didn't help at all!

May 12th Bento

2008-05-12T18:07:00.003-03:00

BF is taking a couple of days off work, so you get to see my bento instead of his today and tomorrow!

I tried out my new nori punches and mini onigiri molds today.

On the bottom there are three onigiri. The elephant is coloured with purple yam powder mixed with vinegar, the pink heart is a coconut onigiri from the batch in the freezer and the bunny is plain with salt. None of them are filled. There are a few lamb bites in there (from a skewer from this weekend's barbecue), asparagus, broccoli and edamame.

On the top there are three gyoza (I made another batch this weekend, we go through it like crazy!), a boiled quail egg, more edamame and broccoli, star shaped coconut onigiri, persimmon bites, a fried plantain flower, strawberries and blueberries.

May 8th Bento

2008-05-08T21:20:00.004-03:00

Last night I was all set to make exciting sushi. I bought a frozen eel filet and was going to make unagi sushi because it's BF's favorite. It was going to have the unagi wrapped on the outside (because I haven't tried to do that yet) and avocado on the inside and it was going to be really pretty.

I cooked the unagi according to the directions on the package and when it came out of the oven, I brought BF into the kitchen to try a bite (I don't like the taste of fish). According to him it was pretty bad. Unsalvageable even. So we had to toss it.

He assures me that it just tasted like a low grade of meat, and had nothing to do with my cooking skills (this was the first time I've ever tried to cook fish). He's so sweet.

Yeah, so we had plain old avocado sushi for bento today :)
As you can see, my lettuce wall building skills are improving a little. I tried using kale this time because it's firmer (although not as delicious as whatever lettuce I was using before).

There is some avocado sushi, some pork bites underneath that, three home made gyoza (there's a bottle of dipping sauce hiding under them), slices of lotus root cooked in vinegar and water (finally, I made a bento where you can see the pretty holes in it!), and asparagus. Fillers are the standard broccoli and sugar snaps.

For fruit there are a couple of cherry tomatoes, a hidden gooseberry, slices of apricot, strawberries and blueberries. Dessert is some kind of truffle (I bought a mixed box and now I can't remember what any of them are!)

May 7th Bento

2008-05-07T17:54:00.003-03:00

Last night BF made a yummy sauce with tomatoes, chicken thigh pieces, zucchini, asparagus and who knows what else, and there were leftovers! So today I did a donburi style bento lunch.

The bottom is the sauce BF made, some more miso steamed spinach and some egg scrambled with chives. I know I had spinach and egg with my last donburi bento so I should have tried something new, but it was so yummy that I couldn't help but do it again. Everything is over a bed of rice.

On the top we have a few spanikopitas, some cabbage/cranberry/walnut salad, plum pieces, a couple of snow peas, carrot sticks, berries and a pieces of lemonade flavoured fudge.

It was a good bento, but it turns out I'm not a huge fan of tomato sauce at room temperature, so I'm not sure if I would do it again.

May 6th Bento

2008-05-06T17:31:00.003-03:00

mmmm....sootball onigiri!

I guess sootballs are characters from the Japanese cartoon, My Neighbor Totoro, but I've never seen it myself. I just think they make cute onigiris! I molded the rice by hand (I didn't have a big circle mold) and wrapped with nori. The eyes are havarti and nori. I filled the onigiri with lotus seed bean paste, but BF said they would have been better with a big piece of fish inside so now I know for next time.

I made beef and asparagus rolls, using the same recipe as last time, but I used shorter pieces of beef this time (about 2") to make a tighter roll. They were a bit tricky to make this small. I generally hold them together with toothpicks as they cook, so that they keep their shape. There are three pieces of asparagus for filling. I let the florette part of the asparagus stick out of the end to make a couple of prettier bites (near the top of the bento).

There are three gyoza (I steamed them today instead of frying), and some sesame fried bok choy filler at the top. On the bottom there are a couple of pieces of broccoli and some sugar snaps. I fried some plantain stars and cut some flowers out of carrot. There was a little bit of space left, and I thought the bento could use more green, so I included some cucumber slices.

For fruit there is a freaky little thing called a mangostein (I usually try to pick up anything that I haven't tried at the grocery store). It's the white bit in the bottom right. It tasted like a mango but was gooeier (is that a word?). I don't think I would repurchase. Then of course there are strawberries and blueberries, and lastly, a bite of strawberry fudge.