Rainy Day Monday Rainbow Bento

It's a rainy Monday, but the sun is trying to shine! I packed a little rainbow in Bella's EasyLunchbox. A grey day needs a colorful lunch :)

That rainbow condiment cup is one of my favourites :) I filled it with Chef Kidd's Honey Berry Funagrette. Her colourful lunch also contains:

• baby carrots, one skewered in a heart shape (here's how)
• Girl Scout cookies! Do-si-dos,  the peanut butter sandwich ones
• celery sticks to dip in the rainbow cup
• English cucumber slices planted with flower picks
• Babybel cheese with a flower cut out of the wax
• & turkey & cheddar on wheat, cut in hearts with Sweet Bytes

I also packed a sunny yellow cloth napkin from Beneficial Bento.

Some of the tools & accessories I used:

Throwback Thursday - Bynto Bentos

It's Throwback Thursday,  (the internet says), so I'm throwing back (is that right?) to a Thursday last February, almost a year ago! My bento blogger buddy Beau - aka The Lunchbox Dad - had just begun hosting a weekly Throwback Thursday lunch link-up :) That week I had linked up this heart-filled Goodbyn Bynto from the previous Spring.

Sydney Bean still loves her Bynto lunchbox, in fact she took lunch in it yesterday. No pics of that lunch though - it wasn't anything creative. I'm still trying to find my groove again - life just seems a whole lot more hectic now than it was 3 years ago when I began this blog. I thought this parenting thing would get easier as the sproutlets got older and more independent, but it seems like the more independent they are, the more involved I find myself having to be! Gone are the days when I could gate them safely in the playroom to amuse each other while I accomplished something. Lately I'm just not finding the time I used to have for my blog :( Oh well, at least I'm making them lunch, right? And it was a bunch of her favourite fruits & a granola bar in a colourful container she likes, so she was happy with it ;)

Here are some more throwbacks to Bynto lunches she's loved:

That rainbow bento was one of my favorites too.

 ♥

I don't think I ever blogged this one!

 

 I love how happy she is with her lunch :)

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We both liked this one because it goes with a book!

How Did That Get In My Lunchbox tells about the journey foods make from where they begin until they get to us. Read more about it in this post :)

 ♥

And I love this one because my little Bean Sprout made it herself!

Awesomely Easy Rainbow Cake!

Today one of my friends shared a post featuring some perfectly adorable teeny tiny rainbow cakes. Which reminded me of this post about making Sprout's birthday cake, that I had forgotten all about and left languishing in draft for over 2 years! My rainbow cake was neither perfect nor teeny tiny, but it was bright!

This rainbow cake was made by layering batter ...  6 different colours of batter.

I divided one plain white batter into 6 bowls and added a whole lot of food colouring!  The batter layering method I used doesn't produce evenly striped layers, rather, each colour, poured into the center of the pan, pushes some of the last colour out a little, making sort of arched layers. I alternated the order of the colours for the 2nd layer of the cake, just because :)

Note the tube of cherry cola lip smacker on the counter - totally needed for all the lip licking I was doing in anticipation of tasting my delicious creation!

Once the cakes had baked & cooled, I flipped one upside down on to a foil-covered cake plate, spread a layer of white frosting on it's flat bottom-become-top, and placed the other cake right side up atop it:

Oops, some of the top of the cake stayed stuck to the plate I'd flipped it out of the pan on to - no worries, frosting would cover that ... and it turned out to be a good thing that happened anyways! (Read on to find out why.) 

The plan was to cover the whole cake in fluffy white frosting, so when we cut into it, the colourful rainbow cake would be a surprise - a rainbow in a cloud! But oops again, I hadn't made enough frosting:

That turned out not to matter though, because before I made more, Sailor Boy & I tasted the bit of cake that had stuck to the plate, and YUCK! It did not taste good at all, it tasted BAD! Something had gone off :(

It was a rainbow cake wreck.

So sad. All that cherry cola flavoured lip licking for naught :(

I sniffed both the oil and the food colouring and neither smelled very good to me, so who knows... And since we couldn't serve it to the sproutlets and party guests, there was no sense in continuing with the frosting - but before we tossed it, I did cut into it to see how the rainbow layers came out...

And ooooh, it looked awesome! 

Fortunately, since the party was not until the next day, I had time to get more ingredients and bake another cake. The 2nd attempt, made with a fresh bottle of oil and new gel food colouring, was delicious. I was in a hurry by then since it was late at night, so didn't bother with pics, but a small sample taken before it was frosted did taste good, and the birthday partiers loved it! It looked pretty much just like the inedible attempt anyways, so here's that pic again :)

Awesomely Easy Rainbow Cake:

1. Make up a batch of light coloured cake batter.
2. Evenly divide the batter into 6 (or 7) bowls.
3. Colour the batters red, orange, yellow, green, blue & purple (or indigo & violet if you do all 7). Liquid gels works best for vivid colours.
4. If you want your stripes to be in correct rainbow order, begin with the red batter. Pour all the batter into the center of a round cake pan.
5. Repeat with each colour in order, pouring directly on top of the the last colour, in the center of the pan. 
6. Bake as directed for your batter of choice, cool, invert, & frost! 

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Pack Lunches, Not Punches!

Today the Bento Bloggers & Friends are having an anti-bullying blog hop, and I have the honour of hosting a guest post by my friend Lauri of Welcome to the Bensanity.

"This lunch was inspired by two brave young elementary school aged boys who were bullied because they like My Little Pony. One boy was prohibited from bringing his MLP backpack to school by the administration, the other was bullied to the point of attempting suicide.

My own son, at that age, was tormented because of his love of ballet, and more specifically, because of his Rainbow shoelaces. When asked what his favorite color was he would reply "All Colors!"

I would love to see the day when children aren't corralled or taught that they are supposed to like certain colors or activities. People are people and we all have our own individual tastes and we should be honored for our spirit and our kindness. Not the color of our shoelaces or the cartoon on our backpacks."

Directions: 

• Prepare pasta to package specifications. 
• While cooking, prepare 5 Ziploc bags with 20 drops of food coloring and 2 TB of water each. 
• Separate pasta into 5 equal portions and seal in individual bags. Let soak for 1 minute each. 
• Rinse each portion of colored pasta in colander & mix. 

Include a thermos of your favorite topping or sauce to add to your lunch! This lunch has a nice Alfredo Sauce waiting to be added (& a little EasyLunchboxes mini dipper of shredded parmesan cheese)!"

Thank you Lauri, that looks amazing! For more of Lauri's lunches, follow her on Facebook: Welcome to the Bensanity. And follow our blog hop to see more anti-bullying bentos , starting with Licious Lunches :) 

 

EasyLunchboxes Brights + Classics = A Rainbow of Lunch Possibilities!

You may already be aware that one of my favourite lunch containers, EasyLunchboxes, just came out with a new set called Brights... but if not... EasyLunchboxes just came out with a new set called Brights!

Now I have lids in red, pink, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, & purple. Aren't they pretty all stacked in that order? Like a rainbow :)

I usually take my pictures against colourful backgrounds but I wanted the bright colours of the lids to show true, so I took them against a piece of white posterboard, which did make them pop! Looking at all my EasyLunchboxes stacked together, something that struck me was how it is nearly impossible, without looking very closely, to tell which ELB containers are the new ones, and which ones I've been using for a year and half!

Really! I started using my EasyLunchboxes Classics, as the original colours are now known, at the end of Summer 2011. I even made a blog post about them. You'd think that after 18 months of regular use they'd be showing some wear, maybe sporting some stains, but nope! See for yourself:

Can you tell which container is new and which is old?

 If the lid colours weren't there to help, I doubt it!

I asked some fellow bloggers who use ELBs if they'd ever had any stains. The answer was a unanimous "No". Collectively we've packed & even reheated:

• tomato soups 
• chicken soup
• homemade ketchup
• spaghetti & marinara
• bright oily dressings
• sloppy joes
• ketchup & mustard

And all agree their EasyLunchboxes came clean. Awesome!

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Right, enough gushing about lunchboxes. Here's today's lunch :)

A 3-cheese sandwich on toasted bread, grapes, carrot sticks,  grapefruit wedges sprinkled with sugar, & strawberry hearts. This lunch is actually for me! I've decided to try packing myself a lunch when I pack for the sproutlets. Not likely to get fancy with my own though :)

All right, so the strawberries are cut in heart shapes ♥ I didn't do it on purpose though... I'm so used to cutting them like this I do it without even thinking when I trim the stems ;) Love my colourful lunch!

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Okay, I have to share just one more pretty picture. The rainbow assortment of colourful lids against the plain white background inspired me to arrange them like a rainbow, which then inspired the text.  I love it!

A Rainbow Bynto Bento

My 5 year old Sprout has beach day camp today!  I packed a rainbow lunch in her favorite lunchbox, her pink Goodbyn Bynto:

Sprout's rainbow is made of halved strawberries, carrot fingers, half a banana, some broccoli florets (aka baby trees), and blueberries. She'll be so pleased to earn every colour on her Today I Ate A Rainbow chart in one meal :)

In the smallest section she has a mozzarella string cheese cut in thirds, and a little rainbow container of peanut butter & pretzel sticks to dip in it. Her matching water bottle is filled with ice water. I also packed a pink fork in the berries section.

Birdie wanted a Bynto lunch as well but we only have the one (Bella's is the larger Goodbyn Original). I guess I need to get her one of her own - can't have my Baby Bird feeling like the odd one out!  :)

Stuff used in this lunch:

Rainbow Connection: Edible Art!

Thank you to all who linked to the Rainbow Connection last week! I loved seeing all your colourful rainbow creations!  ♥ The post with the most views was Rainbow Pain de Mie by Astrid of Lunches Fit For A Kid. It's pretty amazing :) Thank you for sharing your recipe post Astrid!

The Lunchbox Love rainbow goes to Kat of Obento Momma! Thanks for sharing your rainbow bento Kat! I hope you'll link up again sometime soon - maybe this week? :)

  

My sproutlets enjoyed doing the Cereal Rainbow Project shared by Praises of a Wife and Mommy. I liked it because it was simple, inexpensive, and not too messy. Some days I just don't feel like giving everybody a bath after a craft :) The little ones had fun sorting cereal colours, counting how many they could fit, and of course they all loved glueing. The older ones were home sick from school too so it gave them something quiet to do. Some of them even snacked on the cereal while they created :)

Bella added a sunshine above and a flower below her rainbow. Birdie did her own thing, no sticking to rainbow order for her - although she did do a bit of an arch :) Sprout added lots of embellishments to the golden sky above her rainbow. And Pickle made his very precisely :)

I was inspired by JDaniel4's Mom's Spinach Hummus Under a Rainbow of Colored Peppers to make a pepper rainbow in Bella's EasyLunchbox:

Under the pepper rainbow, she has a sun-shaped cheese quesadilla. On the side, popcorn clouds and an apple umbrella over some mystic grapes. I didn't plan it, but it turned into a weather themed lunch :)

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Rainbow Butterfly Pasta EasyLunchbox

♪  ♫ It's Raining Sunshine ♪ ♫ That's what Mia Bella named her lunch for today, and the song she sang on the way to school too :)

She has some of the leftover rainbow butterfly pasta I made for her little sisters the other day. In her Thermos (not pictured) she has marinara sauce to pour over it at lunch time. On the side she has carrots in a little yellow cup, peeking out from behind white cheddar clouds, and an apple quarter umbrella.

Beanstalk has a pretty basic Lock & Lock bento today. He had to be at school early, there was no time for me to embellish with fruit leather this morning! He has a clementine, ham swords, grapes, and a mix of several kinds of Goldfish crackers - the last of each bag. His class is having a birthday celebration for their teacher this afternoon so he'll get more to eat then - I contributed strawberry applesauce oatmeal muffins :)

Pickle has a dozen donuts... mini-donut shaped peanut butter sandwiches, that is ;) Made with the "O" from my Wilton 101 Cookie Cutter Set. This sandwich made a lot of excess  bread pieces - all the little "donut holes"... I've saved them in an airtight container, I'll think of a way to use them :)

Oh, happy happy, joy joy!

Kia from Today I Ate A Rainbow! has generously added a 2nd Rainbow Kit to my Giveaway! So if you've already entered, your chances just doubled, woo! It's still open until tomorrow morning, so if you haven't entered yet there's still time!

And if you've blogged any rainbow-themed lunches, crafts, activities, or experiences, I'd love it if you'd link up to my Rainbow Connection linky party!

Rainbow Connection: Link Your Rainbows!

Oooh, Rainbows! 
I love colourful rainbows  ♥ As do my 3 girls,  Pickle, and judging by the bazillion rainbow boards on Pinterest, so many others :)  So I thought it would be fantastic fun to have a rainbow linky party! I invite you to link your rainbow posts and share your family-friendly rainbow-themed food, crafts, activities, and experiences. 
Allons-y!

Guess what I made Sprout & Birdie for lunch? Rainbow butterfly pasta! They love plain pasta with just parmesan cheese on it, but it's not very much fun to look at in my opinion...  It will be today!

This was a bit of an experiment :) I didn't have 6 little pots (or burners for that matter) to cook 6 different colours of pasta in, but I did have some empty mason jars... I wondered if I could cook all the colours at once in the microwave... I've never microwaved pasta... but why not?

Yep, I could :) I filled each jar with 2 cups of water, mixed a couple of drops of food colouring in each, and added about 1 cup of uncooked mini farfalle (butterflies). I cooked them in the microwave for 8 minutes on high, stirred, then another 8 minutes, at which point they were al dente, and since I'll be reheating them later today, done.

The purple didn't come put very purply, but I'm happy with the other colours! And I probably could have used less water - it would have heated faster - next time :) I can hardly wait until the girls see their rainbowlicious lunch!

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Update - Sprout loved making it rain grated parmesan cheese on her rainbow noodles, while Birdie smiled at hers, giggling and saying "so beautiful" ♥

 

And here's a school lunch I made for Bella, using the rainbow pasta:

Rainbow Pasta EasyLunchbox, also linked to The Weather Blog Hop

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Link to the Rainbow Connection!

Link your family-friendly rainbow food, craft, activity or experience posts below! 

Just for fun: Every linked post gets you a chance to win this little rainbow assortment of Lunchbox Love Notes! I have about a dozen sets, so I just picked some random cards in the right colours to make up a rainbow dozen to share with one of you :)

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