Bollywood Bento

Last week Roushini came to visit Kindy and treated us to a Bollywood Disco Friday night too. I decided to attempt a Bollywood inspired lunch for Miss M to take on Monday. I have to thank Cristi at BentOnBetterLunches for inspiring the cookies and pointing me in the direction of coconut ladoo - I think I may have found my new favourite treat ;-)

Miss M & I had a great time decorating some sugar cookies/biscuits on Sunday in preparation for the lunch. A mix of gel colouring, writing icing and spray icing was used to decorate hearts, hands and elephants. The recipe I used came from Sweet Artichoke, although I didn't ice like her gorgeous Bollywood designs.

I must admit I'm kind of chuffed with how they turned out

There's a lot of recipes around for all different versions of ladoo, but when I found this video for instant coconut ladoo I stopped looking! I modified the recipe as I didn't want to make too many (then I'd have to eat them all ^-^) and our Kindy is nut free. So I toasted a good handful of desiccated coconut, mixed in enough condensed milk to form a dough, added some very finely chopped dried apricots and rolled into three balls. I topped this one with some flowers cut from the apricot. I love how the colours of the different silicon liners come together.

This is my very poor attempt at a frozen yoghurt lotus flower. I used a silicon mould to freeze plain vanilla yoghurt and then painted with food colouring. I left it in this container in the freezer overnight

And popped it on top of the yoghurt in the morning (and to take some photos)

I made some mango lassi too - my favourite from any food festival I've been to. This version was simply vanilla yogurt blended with mango that had been frozen in sugar syrup. After tasting I decided it was sweet enough without adding any extra honey, and I don't tend to have many Indian spices in my pantry, so plain it was.

Add to that a ham & cheese 'lotus' flower. . .

And a 'decorated' Indian elephant, some juice in the sleeved bottle at the back. . .

And there you have a rather full lunch box! The juice, lassi, ladoo and some of the ham & cheese flower came home uneaten. Miss M did try the ladoo & lassi for afternoon tea, but I got to finish them - not that I'm complaining!

This is what her extra special section looked like packed. I also used a lunchbox band from Daiso to secure the centre section. The drink bottle & Tupperware container don't quite fit in together and I wasn't sure how the sandwich would travel loose in the box.

 I mustn't have done too bad a job, because  on Tuesday Miss M asked for a 'special Indian elephant' sandwich again :-). This time I sent a simple pepperoni, cheese & cracker snack; a yoghurt; and her juice (under the sandwich)

There was only some juice left of this lunch.

Details of my tools & toys can be found on this page.
~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.