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 :)

Starring : Lunch!

I got the cute idea for writing on a plastic lid from a tip and photo shared by fan on the Easy Lunchboxes Facebook page,  and made a mental note of it; too bad I didn't remember that she used dry-erase markers! I used a Sharpie... oops! We'll see if it comes off after school, if not, oh well, I'll just keep adding to the doodles every time I use this particular  lid :)

Bella had a bunch of stars in one compartment of her lunch today; star-shaped carrot slices and mozzarella cheese bits. She also had a dinner roll, and some chicken and tomato kebabs on a bed of lettuce.  No dressing for my Bella, she likes her lettuce plain!

Pickle's sandwich was made of the two ends of the loaf turned crust side in. I made star imprints with a Play-Doh stamp on one side.

Mister Picky Beanstalk packed his own lunch as he is doing more often than not these days. He took a Clif KidZ Bar, a vanilla Boost, and a Jazz Apple.

Lemony Snickety Lunch

Fridays both girls are home, no preschool, so I decided that we'd run some errands then snuggle on the couch and watch a movie - Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which we own but haven't watched since Birdie was a baby - and I made a muffin tin lunch to go with it:

Their tins contained lemonade, a lemon wafer cookie (cut in half, because 2 cookies are better than 1), lemon yogurt,  tomatoes and spaghetti noodles for "pasta puttanesca", and ham "shrieking eels". I made the lunch before we watched the movie, and it wasn't until we reached the scene with Aunt Josephine and the deadly leeches that I realized I had gotten mixed up, that shrieking eels were from another movie, The Princess Bride! Oops!  The girls didn't notice, being only 2½ and 5, but I felt a bit silly anyways, heheh.

This picture of Birdie at about age 1½ has always made me think of the baby Sunny from the movie  - if you've seen it you'll know what I mean :)

As for the school aged sproutlets' lunches, today is pizza day at the elementary schools, so I only had to make a sandwich for Pickle. I decided to make him "pizza" too ;) The bottom slice of bread is wheat, spread with peanut butter, then topped with the end piece from a loaf of white, crust side down, as the cheese. I cut some circles out of it and flipped them crust side up to look like pepperoni. I also used some of the end piece of crust as the pizza crust. Pickle laughed when he saw it. I gave him extra yogurt since I trimmed the sandwich to a triangle.

Happy Friday!

Déjà Vu

Yep, you've seen these penguins before...
The girls asked me to make them again today :)

Birdie's bento has a penguin cheddar cheese sandwich today, a few mozzarella snowballs, half a frozen peach puck, and yogurt. The fruit puck is pureed peaches, frozen into a puck shape in a silicone muffin tin. It will thaw to a slushy consistency by lunch, yum! This great fruity treat idea came from Becka of Just a Bunch of Momsense :) I put a note across the lids of the fruit puree and yogurt containers so whoever helps her open her lunch knows not to turn them sideways.

Bella has a penguin peanut butter sandwich embellished with Hershey's syrup by request (she got the idea for using syrup to paint details on sandwiches from looking at What's In John's Lunch Bag? with me), celery, some mozzarella snowballs, a frozen peach puck cut in 2 halves to fit, and fish-shaped ham "penguin food". The celery is really just there to keep the breadcrumbs off the cheese, but she'll probably eat that too :)

Hey, today is National Sandwich Day! Every day is sandwich day for my Pickle :) Today he has a Christmas tree farm tractor peanut butter sandwich, ho ho ho :) The tractor and trailer sandwich cutter I used is a very special Lunch Punch, it's from a limited edition set only available in Australia, so I'm afraid I can't post a link to purchase this one. But there IS a new Lunch Punch set coming out very soon that WILL be available all around, wheee!

Sprout was home with Sailor Boy today while I was out getting my hair done and going to the dentist... he made her scrambled "eggies" for lunch. He doesn't do cute or take pictures though :)

March of the Penguins

No fruit or veg today! I cut up the last of our apples but it looked kind of gross, all bruised and mealy.  If I'm not keen on how something looks, I can be pretty certain the sproutlets won't eat it. Time to restock the crisper!

Peanut butter sandwich penguins all around today. The girls also got some goldfish cracker "salmon" (penguin food!) and mozzarella "snowballs", plus their penguins had chocoladehagel eyes :) I found the penguin sandwich cutter with the baby things at the Walmart - it's Munchkin brand, and only $2! It makes 2 penguins.

No chocoladehagel eyes for Pickle's penguins! Nor will I be decorating with chocolate syrup either. I speculated that he might not eat the one little sandwich bite I decorated in his Hallowe'en lunch, and sadly, I was right. Plain PB cut-outs only for Pickle! For now anyways :)