We’ve got this project for Christmas celebration from one of church in North Jakarta area, so the theme must be Christmas related. The quantity was quite daunting at first because we never had so many order before this but I was sure that we could pull this off. So this is it, 120 (one hundred and twenty) assorted Christmas theme kyaraben boxes.

I made one sample before we went all out but the Mickey Claus design was scrapped and the four chosen characters were Winnie the Pooh, Pororo, Hello Kitty, and Doraemon, but we still using the same bento filling.

So it’s 30 (thirty) each for all characters. I decided to finish one character at one time rather than cut them all and then assembled all of them on the same time. The first to go was Pooh since I thought he’s the easiest one and we had done so many Pooh before, the only difference was this time he got a Santa hat.

After we finished Pooh then the next one was Hello Kitty. This was the 7th version Hello Kitty kyaraben that I’ve made so far and I think there will be more of her in the future. While this version looks simple but in reality there’s so many little details that we must put to make one complete character; 4 (four) yellow button, a pair of  collar, and of course those 6 (six) whiskers :S. But the final result was quite adorable and I think that no one ever did this version before.

The third character we cut was Pororo. I took the design from the basic Pororo I’ve made before and added the Santa suit for him. And the last but not least was Doraemon with a Santa hat like Pooh. So I made 2 (two) full body characters and 2 (two) head only characters. We finished cutting and assembling all those pasta characters on time, no late night assembling this time.

On the delivery day, with all the help we hired and some volunteers, the whole team consist of 7 (seven) people working all out to finish the job, it’s like in the real restaurant kitchen, we’ve got two cooks, two preparer, two finisher, and one dishwasher, so it’s quite a breeze since we usually didn’t have enough assistant. We finished all 120 of those boxes around 5 hours.

God, I wish that I can have six assistants all the time, we can make roughly 500 bento boxes each week then. I think that we’ve ready to face that kind of amount next year. There’s so many new things that I want to do also for next year, like giving kyaraben courses to others and maybe writing a book about kyaraben beside expanding mymealbox into a reputable caterer in town.

So I want to thank you all for your support all this year and we will meet again next year with a new hope and rejuvenate spirit to live our lives and face any challenges. God bless us all ^_^

Still in Christmas spirit, I made another Hello Kitty bento. This time as a santa little helper, she’s ready to give children presents during the Christmas eve.

The Hello Kitty character was made with usual pasta sheets, using brown, while, red, green, and yellow, with help of nori for her whiskers and also the eyes and nose of the reindeer costume.

As for the bento filling, I put slices of chicken katsu with sausage flower, broccoli chunk, and the special edition Ferrero Rocher chocolate with coconut filling.

For the post today I think it’s about time to start putting the Christmas theme bento since I’ve made some during the whole December.

I’ve got this request to put as many thing in a bento box and adding a Christmas theme character on top of the bento. This particular bento had chicken nuggets, chicken and shrimp meatballs, fried noodles, stir fried vegetables, corn, a quail egg, and a chocolate pudding for the dishes. I didn’t even know that all those stuffs can be put into one box but they can although it must be Christmas miracle that they could.

As for the character I made Mickey with Santa’s hat. I think that since I already made several Mickey bento I should make some kyaraben with Mickey’s friends for next year, it will be fun ^_^

The snowman was made with three onigiri. As for the facial details, I used shiitake mushroom and a heart foodpick for the hat; nori cut with hole puncher for the eyes and the buttons; black sesame seeds for the smiling mouth, a maize ear (corn) for the nose, and crab stick skin for the scarf.

As for the bento fillings, I made chicken karaage, ham and lettuce roll, and put a cherry tomato, cauliflower chunks (I didn’t use the usual broccoli chunks since I wanted more white like snowy Christmas day for the bento), and a half mandarin orange.

The other ornaments I made were a Christmas tree shape cucumber made with vegetable cutter and a pair of snowflake cheese. I cut those snowflake with the art knife, took a while to made them but I’m quite proud of the result.

So I think this is the last bento I made for 2009. I will post some more post from my cooking class before the end of the year. Merry Christmas to everyone and happy holiday, God bless us all ^_^

While we wait our pastry in the oven, we prepared the poach egg along with the albuferra sauce. There are several method to make poached egg (I googled while I’m writing this post) but I think the way we taught by our chef is one of the simplest. We only need to boil water in a sauce pan, add 2 tbs of vinegar and break the egg near the water edge and like magic, the egg white automatically swirl and approaching the egg yolk. We just wait around 3-5 minutes depending on how hard we want our egg, and then we need to soak the poached egg into water with some salt on it to remove the vinegar flavor. It’s done.

The baked puff pastry result was not that bad, they expanded higher than my expectation. After all the food were ready we prepared our plating (put our food and arrange them on a plate to make it looks good to eat) and present it to the chef for evaluation. I picture I post here was taken at home, I only made very simple decoration with carrots lettering and a pair of cherry tomatoes basket with parsley and the sauce inside.

While I have my share of experience making and arranging bento, I found that the art of plating is quite different, although the purpose is somewhat the same, making the food looked great. While there’s no set of rules for bento (other than food safety and other simple stuff) there are already lots of strict rules for plating. And while most of bento makers are easy to please and amuse, those professional chefs are very serious with their stuff. I will stick with my bento though but while I’m learning at the school I think I’ll learn and do more the art of plating and share some of them with everyone.