After much thought, we came into conclusion that our old mini set was too light, so we decide to change the menu becoming more like our medium onigiri set with smaller portion. So now our mini onigiri set consists of a white rice onigiri, 3 (three) pieces of chicken nugget, corn, broccoli chunks, beef sausage, and a quail egg without konyaku jelly. But if customers still want to have jelly for the mini boxes (since kids love jelly so much) I think there’s still room for a jelly in these tiny boxes but we have to remove the quail egg to make room for it

So we’ve got a request for Sanrio theme kyaraben. Normally last year I would post this one kyaraben a time, but I don’t think I have lots of time to do this one by one so I took pictures of them all in one frame.
The only Sanrio characters I knew before were Hello Kitty, Keroppi, and some others that I knew but didn’t know their names. So this project was kinda of giving me a moment to know them better. There’s My Melody and Little Twin Stars that I knew since long time ago but didn’t know their names. And then there’re some new characters like Cinamoroll and Kuromi. There’re lots of other Sanrio characters out there but we’ve only need to make these characters for this particular project.

We need to make 60 (sixty) bento boxes so it’s 10 (ten) each for each character but I split Little Twin Stars into two separate kyaraben, so we made 7 (seven) different characters.
For the bento filling, we used fried noodles instead of the usual white rice, two pieces of chicken nuggets, broccoli chunk, a quail egg, and a strawberry jelly. After we finished up putting all foods then we put those Sanrio characters on top of the noodles.

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.

This one was made using the puzzle method that have one single base outline shape using chocolate pasta and the other parts (the puzzle pieces) were placed on top of the base using white, pink, and red pasta sheets. The yellow nose was put after all the other parts were in place.

The bento filling was usual our specialty chicken nuggets with vegetables and lychee jelly.

That’s all for today, I will post again some of our projects in coming days since I really want to post most of our works from this year before end of the year and start fresh next year ^_^