Bento box: the Easter rice bunny and a hatching chick

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you are all prepared for the next week or so of bank holiday breaks, ice cream eating, and the inevitable sunburn.

Unless... you are like me and go to an Oxbridge university which does not recognise such a thing as a 'bank holiday', but you can still do number 2 and 3 :)

(in the library.)

I was originally going to make an Easter basket cake, as it would be quite interesting to try and weave a basket out of icing and see how that went, but then I saw Cooking-Gallery's blog, fell in love with the cutest bento boxes, and forgot all about cake.

So after a bit of poking around this amazing blog, a little bit of googling around, and the purchase of lots of rice (yes! More rice!), I set off to make my own. I also bought the 'Yum-Yum Bento Box' book (so good that you have to say 'yum' twice), which has some amazing tutorials, including the hatching egg that I made.

In case you didn't know, bento boxes are Japanese packed lunches, that can range from simple dishes to elaborate 'kyaraben' (character bentos). Usually Hello Kitty, or anime, or pandas, it seems. I've seen some powerpuff girls ones too, actually.

I think there's a recurring theme here.

When I made this bento, I really wanted to take it somewhere and eat it. Just so I could poke it into someone else's face and be all 'Look! This is what I painstakingly made!' but because I'm not back to uni yet, I thought it would be a bit weird if I sat on a random park bench yelling at that guy walking his dog about my ball of rice, no matter how cute it was.

So I tried giving it to parents for work (I thought packing lunches were the other way round?), but my dad would probably be mocked for bringing a rabbit rice ball with ketchup eyes and a seaweed mouth, and my mum... actually, I can't remember why she didn't want to bring it. One of those flowers is made from cheese (the other from carrot), and she doesn't like cheese. Therefore my bento was rejected.

And I thought kids were meant to be the picky ones? (It would probably be a good time to say that I don't have any siblings, younger or older, otherwise they would have been first choice!)

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There are actually loads of bento making tools out there that you can buy. Egg moulds to shape eggs into fish, sausage cutters to shape them into crabs, and nori seaweed cutters to cut faces out of them. If you want to try making bento, check out J Box for some ideas. I'm still looking for somewhere UK based, so if you know one, please let me know!

But for now, I'll just stick to my good old scissors and knife.

I hope to make lots more bento into the future, and each time I'll try and post some tips or a tutorial. Because this is my first bento post, I shall go all out and do both!

Tip: Chopsticks are good to dab on ketchup blush.

Tutorial: hatching chicks

You will need:
- Ideally, a nori seaweed hole punch, i.e. a teeny tiny one (but a regular sized one and scissors will do)
- Salami
- A hard boiled egg (non of that gooey soldiers stuff, you want it boiled for about 10 mins)
- Nori seaweed
- Tweezers (don't forget to CLEAN THEM, there's nothing more gross than using eyebrow tweezers and finding hair on your yolk)
- A very sharp pointy knife

I think these pictures are pretty self explanatory. I hope you enjoy making them, and the bento box, as much as I have!

Have a good Easter weekend and don't forget to eat lots of eggs, whether it's the chocolate variety, the variety that's baked into cakes, or the variety that has eyes and a salami beak :)

Lesson learned today: that bento boxes exist. Very important life lesson I think.