Alice in Wonderland - Paint the Roses Red

Last week at day care Miss M's class hosted a Mad Hatter's Tea Party. There was a lot of excited build up for the kids & I couldn't help but be inspired & send a week's worth of Wonderland in a Lunchbox. You can see a collection of Pinspiration here.

I've posted these last two lunches out of order to better match the continuity of the movie in case you've been keeping tabs. This lunch is Day 3 - Paint the Roses Red.

In the main compartment I sent:
Cheerio roses; rose sushi style cheese & ham sandwich; flamingo cheese sticks with flower pepperoni & yoghurt

On top I sent juice, checkerboard apple & rose cupcakes 'painted red'.

After a little experimentation I found using a flower biscuit cutter gave a nice finish to these rose 'octo-dogs'.

I normally don't worry about cooking these, but decided for the effect I would dry-fry these little beauties & I think it paid off. . . .

I like how some of the skin is peeling back like a blossoming rose. I discovered that I've lost my leaf picks :-( so I dug deep into the recesses of my goodies draw & found some bottoms from Lindt umbrellas that worked out just fine. I also threw in a few heart picks for the Queen.

Picks available from affiliates Neat2Eat & Bento USA.

My rose sushi sandwiches didn't work out quite as pretty as planned, but I've learned from my mistakes so next time they'll be much nicer :-). You can see the tutorial for egg flowers I followed here.

The real trick to sushi sandwiches is to roll your bread first. . .

And they do work better with spreads rather than fillings, but these still worked OK.

Loosely roll. . .

Then use a flower cutter to give a scalloped edge.

Unroll & admire your work

This time roll it up tighter.

I made these too tall, so lesson learned & these style of cheese doesn't like being manipulated.










I used raw spaghetti to hold the cheese sticks together & coloured them with FooDoodlers from affiliate Neat2Eat. I used a flower cutter to give the Pepperoni from Walkerston Country Meats a bit of rose-iness.

I cheated with decorating the yoghurt today & simply added some candy roses.

 I made some mini-muffin sized cakes & decorated with piping & writing gel. The writing gel I used to draw a line down one side of the piping bag & this was the result. As you can see, some are 'painted' better than others :-)

I then emptied the tube of gel into a little glass & gave Miss M a fresh paint brush. . .

I think she enjoyed herself :-)

I did find watering the gel down made it easier to 'paint the roses red'

And I did come along behind to add a little bit extra colour.

We made these on Sunday & stored in an air tight container at room temperature until the Thursday when they went to daycare. The vibrancy of the red had faded considerably by then, but I didn't hear any complaints :-)

I hope you've enjoyed this series as much as I have! Here's the shortcuts to other lunches from this week:
White Rabbit
Cheshire Cat
Mad Hatter

Don't forget to check out some of the fantastic lunches that inspired me at Bent On Better Lunches Linky Party below.

This Lunch is Linked:

~J

Disclosure: This is not a sponsored post. This post was written for Loving Lunches. No product was received for this post. All opinions expressed are my own, based on personal experience with the product.