Costa Coffee challenged us to take their newest gingerbread offering, Perry the Penguin, on lots of adventures for the next three days. Feel free to follow all the fun we’re having with Perry on Twitter and Instagram, as well as the adventures he’s having with other bloggers (just search for #perryontour). We’ll do a round-up of all the fun we’ve had on Monday.
Inspired by our new penguin house guest, I made Nicholas a cute penguin lunch. It was the perfect opportunity to finally try making the adorable penguins I often see in the bento boxes on my Instagram feed.
To make the bigger penguin, I followed Ming’s from Bento, Monsters very easy instructions.
I used a normal boiled chicken egg, a sheet of nori and corn kernels. Ming suggests sticking the nori to the egg with a little mayonnaise; I just lightly wet the egg and it stuck well (using the nori was actually much easier than I’d anticipated). I used some mashed up egg (from the hard-boiled egg I didn’t manage to peel very well!) to stick the corn kernel feet on.
The smaller penguins are made from black grapes. There are lots of little penguins, especially on Pinterest, made from black olives, but I thought Nicholas would prefer grapes to olives.
I cut a thin slice off the fronts of the two larger grapes for the penguins’ tummies. I threaded the two smaller grapes on top for the heads using cut lollypop sticks. You could also use toothpicks, but be very careful of these with little ones. The feet and beaks are small triangles cut from a clementine/mandarine segment. Then I added some yogurt to make their tummies white and tiny dots of yogurt for their eyes.
Thank you to Eats Amazing for the tortilla snowflake inspiration. We actually had two more smaller filled snowflake tortillas on the side.
I’m linking up to Fun Food Friday, a weekly round-up of fun and creative food by the lovely Grace of Eats Amazing.
thegingerbreadmum 