Bakin' pancakes, bakin' bakin' pancakes...

Sprout asked if she could have a muffin in her lunch & I said yes, I'd bake some, but while they were baking I got sidetracked & burned them! And of course I didn't have enough ingredients for another batch. But I did have some pancake mix... so I baked some pancake muffins... & they turned out all right! Imagine a dense, pancake flavoured muffin. Next time I'll mix together a little maple syrup & icing sugar to drizzle over them... 

I baked the pancake muffins in a pumpkin shaped Wilton silicone baking mold. I don't know if it's available in this size anymore, but I found a mini-muffin version!  I spritzed the cups with coconut oil so the shaped muffins would pop out easily, poured in pancake mix 2/3 full, & baked them at 350 until they looked ready - about 15 minutes. Side note: Baking pancakes got the bacon pancakes song from Adventure Time in my head :)

I packed Sprout's lunch in her PlanetBox Shuttle. The pumpkin shape got me thinking about a fall theme so I used orange & pumpkin shaped silicone cups, & chose squirrel, acorn, & mushroom picks to embellish her strawberries & carrots, cutting the latter in bite size pieces since she has a loose front tooth, & a mushroom treat box filled with dark chocolate covered raisins. I also gave her some spiced pistachios - she loves those - & some orange Yami yogurt in the PlanetBox's Little Dipper. 

I added some more fun touches with a colourful woodland print cloth napkin, a happy little stainless steel spoon, & a Lunchbox Love note. This one is from Volume 92 & has a joke on the flip side.

I just love that little spoon. I have several - they're my favourite coffee stirring spoons - they make me smile :)

Edited To Add: I forgot to add a pic of Sprout's after school snack. Her loose tooth was really wiggly when she got home from school, too wiggly to bite into anything - but she wanted apples & a peanut butter sandwich - so I used my FunBites cube cutter to make them bite size:

Scrapbook paper background is Perfect Day from Thankful Collection by Bella Blvd from Scrapbook.com

Launching into the Hallowe'en Season

Happy October! I packed Bella a boo-tiful lunch in her PlanetBox Launch: 

Turkey, cheese & cucumber wraps, as she requested, secured with pumpkin & bat picks, carrot fingers with a spider pick, a couple of Oreos in a pumpkin-shaped cup, and a handful of ghostly marshmallows. I love the Hallowe'en picks I used - they're long which is great for little snack kebabs, but easy to trim if I want them shorter,  & you get lots of all 4 in the set : 

I used some for this Hallowee'eny snack tray:

 

Happy Star Wars Day, & May the 4th Be With You! Enjoy Your Lunch, You Will!

This past weekend Mia Bella reminded me that Monday was May the 4th. For a moment I forgot the significance, until she said "You know, May the 4th be with you?" Right! I knew that! "So will you make me a Star Wars lunch?" I said I would, & this is it, packed in her PlanetBox Rover:

I think it turned out pretty awesome! Stamping cookie cutter are the best for making a fancy looking lunch, fast. The ones I used (below) are part of a set from Williams-Sonoma that includes Darth Vader, Yoda, a Stormtrooper, & Boba Fett. They don't carry it anymore but you can still sometimes find them & similar Star Wars Press & Stamp Cookie Cutters on Amazon, or eBay.

Bella's Darth Vader & Stormtrooper sandwiches are turkey & cheddar on whole wheat & white. She has two of each, on a bed of lettuce & flanked by sweet mini peppers. The trio of Yodas are slices of honeydew melon. Dueling lightsaber cupcake picks pierce one of a bunch of grape tomatoes.   

I also packed some green grapes, & carved Star Wars into the wax shell of a Babybel cheese, using a v-shaped cutter shown in the tool set below. Carving those words took me longer than it took to make the whole rest of the lunch! And for a treat, I added some "Galaxy Mix" Jelly Belly beans. Our packet had Darth Vader on it, & the beans themselves were iridescent!

I had already closed her PlanetBox & packed it in her Rover carry bag,  & was busy making the younger sproutlets' lunches, when I remembered that I had forgotten to include a Lunchbox Love note!  Caught it in time though,  & opened up her lunch to add the note. So now you get to see what her lunch looks like after the lid's been closed & it's been turned sideways :) See... nothing squashed or out of place, only the jelly beans have moved a little ;)

I also added a Star Wars print cloth napkin made by one of the biggest Star Wars nerds in the bento world as I know it, Kristie of Beneficial Bento. You can get custom cloth napkins & more in her Beneficial Bento etsy shop.

A PlanetBox Launch, With Love

Sailor Boy has another trip & will be away for Valentine's Day, so I made sure the last lunch I made him before he left was full of love ♥ 

I packed his PlanetBox Launch with:

• fresh strawberries, some notched & sliced to look like hearts
• grape tomatoes on a skewer
• turkey & cheddar wraps secured with forked heart picks
• a bunch of green grapes
• a Babybel cheese with little linked hearts cut out of the wax wrapper with a tiny bento decoration cutter

He had a lunch meeting too,  I hope his lovely lunch made everyone smile :)

All the heart accessories & tools I used came from BentoUSA.

Lunch for the Man: Wrap Up Some Leftovers

Sailor Boy's working extra long days this week so he's getting supper much later than the rest of the family. Yesterday I made spaghetti for the sproutlets' supper, then later used the leftover spaghetti sauce to make Sailor Boy a smallish lasagna in a loaf pan. Since I didn't make a full size pan, I ended up with some chopped spinach & ricotta cheese leftovers, but not enough to make another lasagna, so today I wrapped them up for his lunch:

The wraps are tortillas spread with the leftover ricotta & layered with the spinach, some smoked turkey & sharp cheddar, rolled up. I put a Mackintosh's toffee in the centre section of the PlanetBox Rover & it's red & green wrapper seems to have influenced what I chose to pack for his fruit & veggie sides - he has kiwi chunks & raspberries with a red heart fork pick, & cucumber chunks & grape tomatoes with a red pick that says "bite me" :)

Even the Lunchbox Love note I chose is red on one side & green on the other, heheh. When I noticed how festive his lunch was looking I wrapped his fork in a Star Wars print cloth napkin to make it a little less Christmassy :)

Sailor Boy has never beaten me at Scrabble so I had a giggle over the fun fact on the Lunchbox Love note - maybe it will come in handy some day :

Blurry Flurry PlanetBox

If Bella's snowflake bento looks a little dark & blurry, it's because I took the photo out on our front porch before sunrise this morning, by the glow of the Christmas lights :) You can see them reflected here & there in the shiny stainless steel of the PlanetBox:

Mia Bella's blurry flurry of snowflakes PlanetBox Rover contains:

• turkey & asiago cheese roll-ups
• cucumber snowflakes
• white cheddar popcorn
• a frosted gingerbread snowflake
• flaky Ritz crackers
• a foil-wrapped Dove Promises Snowflake chocolate treat
• & a Lunchbox Love note to remind her that she's awesome :)

The cucumbers were cut with a mini snowflake cookie cutter, the roll-ups are secured with a Happy Holidays cupcake pick and red & white snowflake picks made of trimmed drink stirrers, and the gingerbread was a gift from a neighbour (that I frosted with cookie icing to show the detail).

This post is part of the Bento Bloggers & Friends holiday blog hop! 
Click the button to hop over & see What's In Our Lunch Bags? I know, some of you just came from there...  but surprise, there's moooore!

Leafy Fall PlanetBoxes with Lunchbox Love

How I love a fall morning in the Pacific Northwest! I love it being cool enough to make a fire in the wood stove, and how much more enjoyable my coffee is when there's still a bit of a chill in the air and it's not quite light out yet.  I love the fog that makes the world outside my window look soft and dreamy as it grows lighter. And I love the bright colours of the autumn leaves in contrast! 

I put some leaves and warm fall colours in the girls' lunches :)

In the PlanetBox Shuttle, I packed Birdie some yogurt with sprinkles (and a happy little spoon to eat it with), strawberries, and mini peanut butter & cheddar sandwich leaves. Her cloth napkin's print is Peanuts characters playing in the leaves. In the little green Woodstock box she has one of her Hallowe'en candies for a treat.  We love Snoopy & the Peanuts gang :)

Bella's PlanetBox Rover contains leaf-shaped turkey & cheddar quesadillas, Craisins dried cranberries,  cranberry & sage Triscuit crackers, apple wedges, a tube of almonds, babble cheese, and a Hershey's Kiss treat.

It's nearly Thanksgiving, so I got out our Lunchbox Love for Thanksgiving, we had a few notes left from last year. They've added a 4th volume this year! Each volume of 12 notes features thoughtful quotes about gratitude on the front and fun interesting facts about Thanksgiving on the back. 

There's still time to get some Lunchbox Love for Thanksgiving! Besides putting them in lunches,  you could include one (or a set!) with hostess gifts, or even use them as place cards at Thanksgiving dinner :)  And you can use my coupon code, BENTON, to save 15% :)

The note I added to Birdie's PlanetBox reminded me that it's about time to bring out my Little House books for Sprout!

Since it's Movember,  I chose a moustache print napkin for Bella, which I packed atop her quesadillas  & set her Lunchbox Love note on  - I like to save & re-use the notes if they don't get food on them :)

The trivia on the flip side of Bella's note was fitting for her cranberry-filled lunch - it inspired me to add a leaf bento pick to her Babybel cheese :)

That orange tubular container the almonds are in is a repurposed mini M&M's tube! Fits perfectly in that section of the PlanetBox Rover.

Below are the spring-loaded pastry stamps I used to make the leaf mini sandwiches in Birdie's lunch. They make a great impression on the bread! 

Do the colourful sprinkles on the yogurt look like autumn leaves to you?

I think they do... but they are actually turtles! They came in this Sea Accents sugar sprinkles assortment of marine creatures :)

Happy Fall, y'all!

First Day of Fall Lunch in PlanetBox

Happy Fall! I have been feeding the sproutlets, just been too busy to blog :) Here's Bella's First Day of Fall lunch from Tuesday last week!

She has pepperoni bites with a maple leaf pick, apple wedges, caramel dip in a Snoopy cup, cucumber slices with an oak leaf pick, a Babybel cheese with Fall carved into the wax, a few Fig newtons, & a Dark Chocolate Caramel Macchiato Balance Bar, packed in her PlanetBox Rover.  Her cloth napkin has a Snoopy & Woodtstock playing in the Fall leaves print :)

A Winning PlanetBox Lunch for the Man

Here's a recent lunch for the man :) When I pack pistachios, if I have a few spare minutes I love drawing something on them, ever since I first saw the idea on my friend Eclectic Lamb's blog - she also drew hearts on hers ♥ 

In case you're wondering... spaghetti with sauce, in a PlanetBox? Won't that be messy? And will he be eating it cold? ... The PlanetBox Launch Plus & Complete sets include a tempered glass Satellite dish for easy reheating, with a food grade silicone lid that both cushions the glass container & keeps it's contents from spilling. And there's just enough room on either side to pack utensils. So I was able to pack hubby's Lunchbox Love note on top of his saucy entrée without getting it messy :) I also included a Batman cloth napkin - which I'm told was a hit with the guys at work :)  

Besides the leftover pasta, lunch was grapes, apple wedges, pistachios, an itty bitty container of grated parmesan, & a dark chocolate caramel macchiato Balance Bar - his new favourite flavour. Sailor Boy loved this lunch so much he even texted me to say thanks ♥ 

Oh! Funny bit about the pistachios! I delivered Sailor Boy's lunch to him on base after taking the sproutlets to school.  After he went through the security gate & back towards the hangar with it,  it occurred to me that he sometimes like to crack open a tight pistachio with his teeth. So I called out across the tarmac to tell him I'd used food markers, so he could put the nuts in his mouth. There was a lot of jet noise though, so I had to repeat myself, a couple of times, then finally just shouted "You can put the nuts in your mouth!"  Yeah, his shipmates found that hilarious. Silly boys :)

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Some stuff I used to pack this lunch:

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Oh, I almost forgot!

The winner of my Balance Bar giveaway has been drawn & announced on the giveaway widget in the giveaway post :) Somebody will be getting a big box of delicious & nutritious snacks delivered to their door soon!

Doctor Who Starry Night PlanetBoxes

One of my favourite episodes of Doctor Who is Series 5's Vincent and the Doctor, in which the Eleventh Doctor & Amy spend time with Vincent Van Gogh. I'll not give any spoilers about the episode in case you haven't seen it yet, I'll just tell you that every time I watch it I get a serious case of the feels. Bella loves it too, so she loved this Van Gogh-inspired PlanetBox:

Bella's PlanetBox Rover contains:

• Cucumber & cantaloupe stars
• Chocolate sprinkle-topped oatmeal muffin sunflower 
• Green grapes on the vine
• Cheddar tortilla swirls on swirly picks
• Babybel cheese carved with a really lame DW logo ;)
• Spiced sunflower seeds
• Starry Night cloth napkin from Beneficial-Bento
• Happy little fork - for the stars
• & a Lunchbox Love note

Before closing the lid, I folded the Van Gogh print napkin under the Little Dipper, turned the Babybel over, placed the Lunchbox Love note over the sunflower muffin, & challenged Bella to guess the theme of her lunch. 

Not only did she guess correctly, she also recognized my terrible logo carving :) Pickle, on the other hand, did not get his. I didn't really expect him to - he doesn't truly watch the show, he just watches it here & there when someone else is, because it's on. He did ask me for a Doctor Who lunch not long ago though so I didn't want to make Bella one and leave him out - and once I explained it to him he got it, and seemed to like it :

Pickle's PlanetBox Shuttle contains:

• Mozzarella cheese stick bites with a bow tie pick
• Yogurt with star sprinkles & blue sugar swirls
• Peanut butter sandwich sunflowers with chocolate sprinkles
• A Van Gogh's  Starry Night cloth napkin from Beneficial-Bento
• A happy little spoon for the yogurt
• & a Lunchbox Love note ♥

The sproutlets & I all loved the Eleventh Doctor, but that doesn't mean we aren't looking forward to getting to know the Twelfth! And we don't have to wait much longer, Series 8 begins tomorrow :)  A new season of Doctor Who is an excellent reason for the bento bloggers of Edible Geekery to do a blog hop, so we are! Click the TARDIS button to be taken to Loving Lunches!

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A Birdie Bento for my Baby Bird

We haven't called Birdie Baby Bird in a long time... at some point the nickname evolved, but that's how it began - when she was a toddler she liked to chirp, just like a baby bird. I packed her a Birdie-themed PlanetBox Shuttle for lunch:

My friend Venia (of the lovely Organized Bites blog) sent me a birdie sandwich cutter she found at Target. It makes 4 birds (or chicks) that can be arranged as you like. I spread Birdie's cheese sandwiches around her yogurt-filled Little Dipper. I remembered I had some chick-shaped sprinkles in an Easter mix so added a smattering, & glued some sugar eyes on the sandwiches with honey. On the side she has grapes, a clementine, & tomatoes.

Since we planned to take lunch to the lagoon at the park, I added a cloth napkin & a happy little spoon atop the sandwiches, which besides being useful for eating & wiping fingers, fills the empty space & helps keep things from tumbling in a heap when the PlanetBox is carried. 5 year old Birdie's just learning to read so I chose a simple Lunchbox Love note for her:

I love the little bird that's on every Lunchbox Love note ♥

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Some stuff I used to pack this lunch: