Wheel-y Yummy

Some of today's lunches have a car theme :) I made Pickle's "cars in traffic" sandwiches first, then decided to roll with it and give Birdie some cars too:

Birdie's Sassy box bento has an egg-shaped car, a sandwich ball car, a cheese car with turkey dog wheels, and some carrot spare tires. The cheddar car broke when I was cutting it out but she won't mind :)

Pickle has two "cars in traffic" peanut butter sandwiches. He really liked last week's Christmas Tree Farm tractor - he liked that it had a story to it, and it sparked a conversation. I like anything that gets him using his imagination and interacting! So today I used the car and truck shapes from our Lunch Punch Vrrrm! set,  cut extra boxes for the back of the truck, and made a story to go with them. The story is that the truck is all loaded up with a delivery, and driving very slowly, and the car behind it is in a hurry, and annoyed at how slowly the truck is going, and worried that the pile of boxes will fall down on his hood! I asked Pickle to think up what might be in the boxes, and why the driver of the car is in such a hurry - and told him that if he likes he can make the boxes tumble on the car before he eats them :)

No cars in Bella's lunch. She got a Thermos of spaghetti and a salad. I like this little container for packing something that needs to be kept cold when the rest of the lunch doesn't - it has it's own ice pack that fits inside. 

Some stuff I used: Lunch Punch Vrrrm! - Sassy box - silicone muffin cups - Light My Fire spork - Thermos Foogo

Ice Cream Sandwich Balls

Heheh, okay so the title is a bit misleading :) I didn't really make ice cream sandwich balls - I made sandwich balls, to look like ice cream!

I'd never made sandwich balls before, had never heard of them until a couple of weeks ago when they were posted as an upcoming tutorial on Bento Blog Network. They are exactly what they sound like: bread balls with sandwich filling rolled into the middle. I wanted to try making some to take part in this week's Bento of the Week meme, but wasn't sure any of my picky sproutlets would want to eat them... so I made them for an after-school snack instead of a packed lunch. And since this snack wasn't going anywhere, I decided to have a little fun with it, and made a peanut butter sandwich ball banana split :

I made 3 peanut butter filled sandwich balls - 2 with white bread, 1 with wheat - meant to look like chocolate and vanilla ice cream, but I don't think the bread colour differences show much. I lined a dish with a sliced banana, nestled the sandwich balls between the slices, topped them with little dollops of strawberry jam, grape jelly, more peanut butter, and of course, a bright red cherry on top, held in place with a little green plastic food pick. Love it!

I made a little ice cream cone one for Pickle too:

How To Make Sandwich Balls aka Bread Onigiri
Cut a piece of bread into a circle. Place it on a piece of plastic wrap.  Put a dollop of your desired filling in the center. Squash it into a ball!

 Twist the plastic wrap at the base of the ball to tighten and compress it.  

Unwrap the plastic. Never mind how how messy the bottom looks :)

 Flip the ball over so the messy side doesn't show. 

Admire your lovely round sandwich ball!

That's basically it. Now you can make something with it. 

Or just eat it like a filled donut hole :)