This is a rendition of a middle eastern egg dish – it’s made with eggs and crumbled feta cheese. Yum!

And here are some fantastically fluffy, delicious buckwheat pancakes. Strawberries and syrup are optional – these are tasty on their own.

Here, my cupcake army prepares to attack the box of confectioner’s sugar.

In case anyone’s wondering, this is my kickass new cupcake transporter! It’s from Crate and Barrel, and my cupcakes have never felt safer.

How very dependable! Oh, and you can flip over the bottom row to hold two dozen treats.

I used a cream cheese frosting, and once it had time in the fridge, it came out wonderfully thick. The white looks so gorgeous on the red cupcakes…

And of course, no Halloween is complete without some scary pumpkins! D:

What’s extra nice is that the candles inside were cookie-scented, making it a real treat to walk past these guys.

Anyway, the final product:

Why didn’t I place the faces the right way up? Well, I had the mini compartments that fit into the bento out separately as I arranged the food (also for better cooling) and completely forgot that the big compartment for the onigiri would be portrait-style, not landscape. Eh heh. Here it is in the direction I placed it in:

For the first side dish, I made seasoned potatoes – or, gamja jorim in Korean. It’s sweet and a little spicy. Not quite as good as my grandmother makes it, but…

Side dish number two is tempura shrimp. I purposely left out a few of these guys from the time I made the shrimp cocktail for this ^^. On top is the usual Sriracha sauce.

In case those weren’t enough, I brought out the mini-bento container for the rest of the tempura. These I covered in a mayo-ketchup sauce.

I skipped the muffin tin liners and just baked them “nude” ^^

As charming as the uniform brown color is on the Just Bento version, I really like how mine have two different color tones.

Most of all, the flecks of Earl Grey tea make the muffins so appetizing.

As a finishing touch, I sprinkled some powdered sugar on top.

Yum!

The charm point of today’s bento is the “mushrooms.”

Quail eggs, topped off with a halved cherry tomato! They remind me of the… er, “Chinese” mushrooms from Disney’s Fantasia:

Mmm, fatty American-style breakfast :9

In an attempt to quickly use up the mayonnaise (I have a paranoia about mayo and expiration dates thanks to a childhood memory of my mother buying a HUGE jar of the stuff at Costco. We never got through even half, but having an issue with being “wasteful,” she just kept the jar in the fridge. Suffice it to say, the looming, gross presence of that giant, expired mayo jar haunts me to this day), I whipped up some spinach and horseradish to make a simple sauce for the seared chicken.

Lastly, the tamagoyaki is a much simpler one than last time.  This attempt is seasoned with only salt and pepper. For the sake of color, I squeezed a bit of yummy Sriracha sauce (a Thai hot sauce I can’t imagine life without). Hopefully, this version will go over better.

Lately, I haven’t been able to visit the Magnolia Bakery for their over-hyped cupcakes. I know it’s tacky, but darn it, I do stand on those ridiculous lines to get to the decadent, pastel-colored treats. So when I saw the recipe online, I decided to give it a go.

The cakes themselves came out perfect and tasty… but the frosting… yikes.

The recipe for the famed Magnolia frosting called for more milk than I’m used to, and I was mildly suspicious, but being a gullible sort, I trusted the order for a 1/2 cup of milk. Disaster soon followed. A frosting soup soon formed in my mixing bowl. In my panic, I added more and more sugar, but nothing would help it! I resigned myself to chilling the soup frosting in the fridge for a while. It helped, but it was nowhere near the texture I was going for. Boo.

The final product:

Here’s a close up, with some awfully precious sprinkles on top:

Now, all that’s left is to ride out my sugar-rush as I distribute these babies!

The most satisfying part of making this was boiling the vegetable stock to cook the shrimp in – all the week-old produce (like the wilted carrots, mushy onions…) in the fridge can disappear in one go! Tossing in some bay leaves and peppercorns added a nice dimension to the smell too.