Willow's Lunch

Finally January is over. What a long and busy month! Willow had her princess party and loved it! Here are a few pics ....


We had the party in a hotel banquet room due to a last minute change of plans (due to the room we'd originally chosen being booked and us finding out while decorating it a few hours before!). My friend Kelly did the decorating and she made this throne for Princess Willow although she didn't sit in it much, she was too busy running around all over the place.


All the food and drinks had a cute name which my mother in law made labels for such as Stepmother's Fruit Tea.


Princess Punch


Her Majesty's Cream Cheese and Blueberry Crackers


Pink Princess Popcorn


and Cinderella's Pumpkin Bread. There were also, Knights in Armor (pigs in a blanket), Princess Sceptors (marshmallows on a lollypop stick dipped in chocolate with sprinkles and a pink M&M on the top. An idea I found on another blog somewhere), Princess pops (brownies on sticks), Golden Goose Eggs (devilled eggs), Ariel's Shell Delight (chicken salad-stuffed phyllo shells), King Triton's kielbasa, Medieval meatballs etc. Wish I'd gotten a picture of it all but I was concentrating on getting pics of the kids having fun.


So this is the cake I finally went with after changing my mind a zillion times. An easy sheet cake with a 6" round cake on top. Decorated with some crushed Graham crackers for sand, chocolate shells and starfish which I made using molds, little fondant characters, flowers and coral, The Little Mermaid figurines and an Ariel candle. Willow loved it. I actually did all the decorating during one of her naps but I'd made everything fondant a couple days ahead of time. For the cake board, I covered it in foil that I'd scrunched and crinkled and then covered that in blue cellophane to look like water.


The sheet cake was just a boxed funfetti mix. These are the colorful cake trimmings which I had to resist nibbling on.The round cake on top was a yellow cake.


We hired a Cinderella princess for the kids and she was wonderful. She really made the party.


She did face-painting, singing, story-telling, crowning of the birthday girl, party bags, pictures and lots of fun games and prizes. Would definitely recommend Once Upon a Time Parties if you're anywhere near RI.

A thrilled Willow with Cinderella. 

The kids scrambling for the pinata loot.


Willow opening her presents. This went on forever.



My baby boy was exhausted. He slept the whole time on my other friend Kelli.

So I haven't had much time or desire to do bento lunches this month. At least not cute ones. But hopefully I'll get back on the ball this February.

I do have a couple of pictures. This was a quick lunch I made for Willow the other day. Peanut butter sandwiches I made using cutters with stamps, some bunny and chickie crackers, carrots and cucumber with ranch dip.

And this I made yesterday in the VERY cute Din Din Smart Stainless Bus Platter that was very kindly sent to me from MySweetMuffin.com. I had really wanted one for a while now so I was excited to receive it! Oh and so was Willow of course lol.

Egg salad, peas, goldfish crackers, vanilla yogurt with a few blueberries and some oranges slices.

Don't you just love this tin? How fun. It has five little compartments so not only does the food not touch each other (and we all know about that right?) but you can use it to teach about the food groups. It's non-toxic and BPA, Phthalate, PVC and Lead Free. So need to worry about that and best of all IMO; dishwasher safe! 
It's nice and small and dinky but, as you can see, holds more than enough food. You can get these on the mysweetmuffin.com site along with so many other cute things they have. Check out the bento boxes!


I hope they make one for grown ups too!

Willow's Lunch(es)

Here are some bento and other lunches I made for Willow during my sort-of time off from blogging ....

I couldn't say what she had when and how much she ate but I think I remember what was in them. This one contained kiwi, spaghetti sauce meatballs and some rice decorated with little ham kitties.

I packed this one in her new blue sucre bento box. I love it! It contained a chicken and cheese mayo sandwich decorated with a cucumber tree and little cheese star. Also, some grapes on snowman picks (which I find kinda skeletal looking eek) and Christmas-shaped pretzels.

A fun Curious George sammie. Inside the sandwich I think was turkey or chicken and George was made with bologna turkey/chicken and nori features. To make him, I simply printed a pic of Curious George, traced it onto parchment paper and then cut around the sandwich meat with a toothpick. Very easy. The nori is the tricky part I think. I gave up and just used stamped out features in the end. She also had some little cheddar duckies and a Clementine.

I don't remember what this sandwich was. Most likely turkey or chicken. I made a little glove out of bologna and American cheese. I used a decorator's tip for the dots. Took about 2 minutes to make. On the side, she had some festive pretzels again and a little pineapple fruit gel. Pretty sure she ate it all up.

This lunch Willow made herself, with a little help from Mommy, for one of the holiday-themed Muffin Tin Mondays. She hada peanut butter snowman sandwich decorated with sprinkles, fruit leather and a cucumber hat. Also in the little mini muffin cups are some holly-shaped cucumbers, Christmas dots and some Christmas pretzel snowflakes.

Another Christmas muffin tin. I was in a rush making this one. She had a snowflake sandwich, pretzel Christmas trees (just realizing how much pretzels she's been eating lately!), cheerio 'halos', yogurt raisin 'snow', broccoli 'trees' and some mandarin snowman mouths (haha I know it's a stretch).

A little blurry and hard to see but this was a ham teddy bear sandwich with strawberries and cheese triangle.

And finally, this last one was bologna and cheese roll-ups, with veggies: carrots and cucumber plus ranch and for fruit: grapes and apple slices. It was packed in the new Lunch Bots Trio box which they kindly sent to me for review. I haven't owned a lunch bots box before and was excited for this one to arrive. I've seen so many adorable bento lunches packed in them online. When this one came out recently, I was impressed to see more sections in the box than the others. Although I like the two also, for variation and think I will get both.

I love the shiny stainless steel , great if you don't want to use plastic for your lunches and it's sturdy also. The permanent dividers are awesome - no losing bits and pieces down the garbage disposal (or is that just me?) Love that it is dishwasher safe - that's a big plus in my book. And it packs a good size lunch. Sandwiches would have to be cookie-cutted out or made small but that's fine with me since it's what I always do. The only downside for me was that the bottom divider was a little crooked and since it's permanent I can't fix it. I don't know if you can tell in the picture. Not a big problem but if I had to pick one I would rather that be straight. Most likely just how this particular box was made though. The lid fits snugly, although it isn't water-tight and, unlike the other lunch bots boxes, it is stainless steel which is very cool looking.

The boxes are decently priced and can be found on the Lunch Bots website and on Amazon. Although the trio is currently only available on Amazon.

Willow's Lunch

Gobble gobble! First turkey bento!

Willow had a bologna sandwich with a turkey turkey on top! She also had a few grapes, carrots and a strawberry. This was fun to make! I think the sugar eyes make him look like he's a bit dizzy. And I must have been a bit dizzy when I added the little thing next to his beak because it looks awful (I dunno, what is it called, a Wattle??) But I was rushed and what can ya do when you have a crawling baby hanging on your ankles?!

The tail is made out of red, orange and yellow peppers and I simply used the long ear of a bunny cookie cutter to make the feathers.

Willow's lunch today was packed in my new super cute bento box from mysweetmuffin.com  

I was thrilled when they offered me one for review because they have so many wonderful bento boxes on their web site to choose from. This one is called Pretty Alice and it's one of Shinzi Katoh's designs. I notice his bento boxes are becoming all the rage right now, and rightly so. He does such beautiful artistic designs that tend to be of famous stories such as Alice in Wonderland, Little Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz etc . You can find all these bento boxes also on mysweetmuffin.com

As you can see; this box is actually a 2-tiered bento with a divider in the top box and a snug-fitting lid for the bottom. On the top of the lid the text reads: 'Pretty Alice Met Many Mad Characters in Wonderland'. It always makes me giggle to read any words written on bento boxes because they are usually translated from Japanese.

This really is such a cute box, both in design and in size. At first glance, I thought it would be too small but it is actually perfectly proportioned for my (almost) 4 year old. Dimensions are: 5.5"L x 4"W x 3.25"H. And it is also microwave-safe. I know Willow is going to love taking this to school!

After browsing their site too, I found so many other things to add to my wishlist. Such as the Din Din Smart Stainless Bus Platter. Isn't that neat??

Long time, no cake!

I was really excited to try out this checkerboard cake. I love Wilton cakes! Like I said before, I took the cake decorating classes a while back and ever since then I’ve been on a real cake kick heh. I browsed through their site the other day and found this one which looked fun … and easy! Especially if you use a boxed cake mix :) So because I was having family over for dinner I decided it was the perfect time to try out my cake set. Otherwise Stephen and I would be eating, not to mention; piling on, cake for a week!

The cake set comes with three 9x2 inch nonstick pans and one batter-dividing ring.  

Since I was only making a one layer cake, I used only one of the pans. You place the divider thingy in the pan and fill each of it's rings with different colors. If you were using the other pans to make a two or three layer cake, you simply take it out of the first (carefully), wash it and then place it in the other pans to fill up. Before baking, make sure the ring is out of all the pans.

My cake baked up nice, if a little lop-sided (a fault of mine, not the cake pan, I’m sure). Once I leveled it off, it was unnoticeable. When the kiddies were napping, I whipped up some buttercream (Wilton recipe of course!) and decorated the cake in little stars of yellow, orange and white, which did take a bit of time even using a bigger star tip than suggested having predicted that my hand might be aching.

I excitedly cut into the cake (before even asking if anyone wanted a piece) just so I could see the stripy colors. I thought it looked pretty cool. Not exactly straight and I’m guessing that is due to the dividing ring sliding on the non-stick pan a little, but the colors were pretty! Imagine how cool it would look with three layers! I have a feeling this pan is going to get a lot of use with me! The outside of the cake is decorated with little candy corns. How cute is that!