So I think I’ll take this chance to share one of the tutorials that I promised to do a long while ago. If you can still remembered this baby crab bento I made, today I’m going to share the steps to make the cute sausage crab.

Firstly, these are the tools and ingredients required:

1. Small size sausages (one sausage to make one crab)

2. A slice of cheese

3. Seaweed

4. Uncooked spaghetti

5. Small round shape cutter (the smallest size that can fit as the eyes of the crab)

6. Kitchen knife

7. Scissors

8. A facial seaweed puncher (I used one of the facial expression mini punchers from Carla craft)

So here are the steps, follow the pictures clockwise.

1. Cut off the two ends of the sausage.

2. Slice the sausage into ¼ and ¾ size as show in the picture. Now you will get one slice that is thicker than the other.

3. Use the thinner slice, cut into 4 equal size stripes, the cut the stripes horizontally. Now you get a total of 8 small pieces of the sausage with one thick end and one slender end which you will use for the legs of the baby crab. Leave these aside.

4. Now take the two cut off ends (from step 1) of the sausage, cut them into half and use the one of the flat end, cut as per the photo for the for the claw of the baby crab.

5. Repeat the same for the other circle to get a pair of claws.

6. Now arrange all the small pieces you’ve cut to form a crab.

7. Secured all the pieces to the main body part with tiny uncooked spaghetti stripes.

8. Now let us work on the facial detail of the crab. Use the small circle cutter to cut off two tiny circles from the cheese.

9. Use the seaweed puncher to punch the eye balls and the mouth for the crab.

10. For the seaweed punched out with this particular Carla Craft puncher, I wouldn’t want to nose to be there so I cut it off with scissors. I only need the eyes and the mouth parts.

11. Now assembled everything onto the crab – cheese for the eyes and seaweed for the eye balls, and the mouth looks like a number 3 (if you have a number 3 punchers you can use that too!). Stick all these to the crab with a little amount of mayonnaise.

Now you have you cute little baby crab to decorate your bento. Hope you have a fun time making this cute crabby!

This is the basic cake pop recipe from Bakerella which makes 45-50 cake pops, but I made just half of the amount so basically everything goes half in the recipe.

I thought I shall gave it a try first before I really make them in bulk so that just in case I failed, the wastage of ingredients is minimized.

Ingredients:
1 13”x9” cake
1 can frosting (16 oz.) – I used cream cheese frosting
White & Chocolate candy melts  (1 lb. pkg.)
Various type of sugar sprinkles
Wax paper
Lollipop sticks
Spatula

Step-By-Step:

1.    Crumble the cake into large bowl.
2.    Mix thoroughly with 1 can frosting firstly with spatula then with your hands. Also, you may not need the entire can of frosting, so start out by using almost the entire can and add more if you need to.
3.    Roll mixture into 1 1/2 inch size balls and place on wax paper covered cookie sheet.
4.    Melt chocolate in the microwave per directions on package. (30 sec intervals, stirring in between.)
5.    Dip the tip of your lollipop stick in a little of the melted candy coating and insert into the cake balls. (Insert a little less than halfway.)
6.    Place them in the freezer for a little while to firm up (no more than 5 minutes as your cake might crack if it is too frozen and you dip it into the warm candy melt).
7.    Once firm (check the candy melt around the lollipop sticks and it should looks just started to set), carefully dip the cake ball into the candy coating by holding the lollipop stick and rotating until covered. Once covered remove and softly tap and rotate until the excess chocolate falls off. Don’t tap too hard or the cake ball will fall off, too.
8.    Sprinkle the sugar sprinkles onto the cake pop before the chocolate coating set.
9.    Place in standing upright on styrofoam block to dry.
10.    When completely dry, cover the lollipops with small plastic treat bags and tie with a ribbon.

To answer Elaine’s question on the chocolate pops, these are the tools that I used. A round shape candy mold and lollipop sticks.

These are the edible sugar images of Hello Kitty. They are so cute aren’t they?

All you need to do is to melt the chocolate as directed on the packaging (I did it using microwave), and pour it into the mold with the lollipop sticks inserted. Give the mold a little tap to make a smooth surface of the chocolate before it gets set. Once the chocolate set, apply a little amount of the melted chocolate on the surface and stick the edible image on top.

Pretty simple isn’t it? This is a good one if you need to make something in bulk in a short time.

Hope everyone have a fun time making your own cake pops & chocolate pops!

My boy told me the cake pops and the chocolate pops are so delicious and cute, and his classmates love them too! Guess what, he asked me to make both the cake pops and chocolate pops for his drama class party this coming Sunday too.

I hope I can make more fun designs this round, will share again if I managed to make some cute ones.

Of course I wanted to say a big thank you to all who has submitted your entries for your support. Wish you all good luck!

All right, back to the topic now. I received a few queries from friends and readers of the blog on how to make the candy sausages which I made for the bento demo session last weekend. Most of them would like to use the idea for upcoming parties.

Therefore I decided to do a quick step-by-step tutorial as I think this candy sausage snack is a good one for party. Most importantly it is quite easy to prepare and it doesn’t need special bento tools.

All you need was a small kitchen knife, toothpicks and mini sausages to make these cute candy sausages.

1. Use the kitchen knife to cut off the two pointed end of a mini sausage.

2. Made three or four slight diagonal cuts to the center part of the sausage. This will give the candy sausage some visible patterns after being cooked.

3. Boiled the sausage and set aside to let it cool down.

4. Turn the two ends of the sausage with the pointed part towards the inside, and join them up with a toothpick.

We are done with the candy sausage only in four steps!

This was the candy sausages plate that I made previously.

Hope you have a great time making this snack. To all who has sent me queries, I hope this tutorial is useful for you.

Happy bento-ing and Happy Monday to everyone! Wish everyone a great week ahead!

With the fresh supply I made my boy something new today – mini onigiri stuffed sweet bean curd (ajitsuke inari).

I seldom make onigiri for snack because my boy is a slow rice eater and can not finish them during the short morning break. But this time I made him the mini version hoping that he will finish them.

This is a close-up photo of the two-coloured mini onigiri bears.

I made the onigiri in two colors – white and purple. The white ones are stuffed with normal rice while the purple ones are rice mixed with pureed purple sweet potato. I love the outcome.

The onigiri is turned into mini teddy bears (without the ears though) with cheese and seaweed. Besides the two inari, I included two cherries and slices of Japanese cucumbers in the bento as well.

Everything fit into the small Winnie the Pooh bento box and I guess the amount of food in this bento box was just nice for JY.

I don’t have a round shape rice mold, so I made the onigiri using cling wrap as shown in the photos.

All I need to do is just to twist the cling wrap tightly to form the rice ball.

Hope this is helpful to those who have no rice mold just like me but would like to make a rice ball.

To make this flowery sealed sandwich, you don’t need any complicated tools other than a small round cutter and a fork!

Tips: If you don’t have any round cookies/sandwich cutter, you can also recycle any small mineral water bottle. Anything as long as they are round and can cut through the bread, and of course make sure that it is clean.

This round I managed to capture more detail step-by-step photos because I think photo explains better than words. So here they are.

1. Use the circle cookies/sandwich cutter and cut two circles out of a white bread.

2. Put the filling (I used meat floss here) in the middle of one of the round bread.

Tips:

(a) Make sure that the filling is not too much so that you can seal the sandwich nicely.

(b) Some suggestions of fillings besides meat floss: mayonnaise egg & lettuce, sausages, butter/jam, tuna spread etc.

3. Put the other piece of the bread on top and align them.

4. Use the small fork and press following the side of the circle. Hold and turn the bread gently while you press.

There you are, the flowery sealed sandwich is ready! Pretty easy isn’t it?

Hope everyone has a great time making the flowery sealed sandwich!