Wagashi and Mashed Potato Duck

Thank you very much to all those of you who emailed to ask about my upcoming book. Sorry for not talking about the book earlier, I started working on it in June, as I'm working on it slowly, I was hoping to wait until I submit the manuscript before talking about it online. However, due to the interviews, the news came out earlier. Just to share a bit about it for now. The book is a bento cookbook, with lots of bentos and food recipes, and all bentos come with step-by-step photos. It is estimated to be out in US in fall next year, I'll update more in due course. :)

I started making Halloween bentos this week, but I'll only be updating them next week. Meanwhile, if you need ideas for Halloween bentos, you can click HERE to check out those I made previously, I've plenty of old Halloween bentos.


The duck sitting on top of the mini pancakes stack is a type of wagashi ( traditional Japanese sweets), I made it using white bean paste and shiratama flour.


I won't be sharing the recipe for this, as you can't get white bean paste here. I've not seen it being sold here, if you know where to get it in Singapore, please let me know.


However, you can easily create these ducks using mashed potatoes, and I'll be sharing how to make them in this post.


The mashed potatoes ducks are sitting on ham and egg mayo sandwiches, and there's also prawn salad packed in the bento.

Please continue on for the detailed tutorial on how to make these.


Finally, the mashed potato tutorial I promised. Sorry for taking so long to get it done. First, peel potato, chop into small pieces and steam for around 10 to 15 minutes or till soft.


Mash them up with a fork or potato masher. I usually add a pinch of salt and half a teaspoon of butter so that it taste better. Please do not add too much butter, and please do not add milk.


You can colour the mixture using gel colours. To make the duck, I divided the mashed potato and coloured them yellow and orange.


To make the duck, roll yellow mashed potato into 2 balls, one slightly bigger than the other, using the palms of your hands.


Take the bigger ball, flatten the front a little and mould out the duck's tail at the back.


Place the small ball on top.


Take a bit of orange mashed potato, mould out the duck's bill and mould it onto the duck.


Punch out a circle from nori, using a hole puncher. You can stop at this step.


Or you can get some yellow mashed potato and mould on the duck's wings.


I chose this duck to demonstrate the step-by-step as it's very easy to make, but you can use this same method to mould into other things you fancy. You can also use sweet potatoes and purple potatoes. You can even fill it in a pipping bag with a pipping tip and use it to pipe on designs for sushi cake. :)

Totoro Curry and Pancake

I've not been making any new food art that I can share since the school holidays started, only made two bento which I will be using for a bento project which I've been working on since June. I'm terribly slow at completing the project though, hopefully I'll wrap up everything end of this year, and I will have good news to share with all of you next year. :)


For today, I'm sharing this Totoro curry rice I made way back in May. Oops, I'm terribly slow at updating these days. -_-


The grey portion of Totoro was rice mixed with grinded black sesame seeds. I shaped Totoro first, scoop in the curry and added on his teeth. :)


Totoro pancakes, which I made for my boys' breakfast during the last school holiday in June.


This was rather fast to make, I used whipped cream and chocolate to draw on the details.


This Totoro post reminds me of the Totoro terrariums we made for Teachers' Day. I wanted to share this earlier but I forgot. It was fun to make these terrariums with my boys, we all love them so much. In fact, this is the first time my boys can't bear to part with the gifts they made. I told them we'll make some for ourselves this week. They made the cards as well, I came up with the design and just demonstrated to them how to make one. I did help them to trim the outlines of the animals a little, as their cutting was a little uneven.

Where to get same item used in today's post:

Frozen Olaf Soup & Pancake

This has been a crazy week for me, I'm so glad it's the weekends. I've a new tool to share next week and there will be a giveaway as well, will update details next week. You can also follow me on Instagram (@bentomonsters), as I'll likely update there a little earlier.


Other than IT's competition that has been keeping us busy this week, we've been dog sitting, lol. This is the adorable schnauzer that I looked after for the past few days. She belongs to my sis. My parents and sis were out of town at the same time, so she stayed over at our place.

I'll be sharing more Olaf food creations in this post, the very cute snowman from the Disney movie, Frozen. My boys simply adore Olaf, they asked for more Olaf food art, since he's rather easy to make, I have no reason to say no to them.


Olaf swimming in a bowl of carrot soup. He's finally enjoying himself, swimming in summer, lol.


Olaf is made from a toasted wrap, more details on the rest of the ingredients later. I often get questions on how I did my soup art, so I decided to take some step-by-step photos for this time, hope they are useful. :)


This Olaf pancake was for my boys' breakfast during the school holidays last June. I used whipped cream and melted chocolate to draw the details, added on an orange slice for his nose.


This pancake idea is actually inspired by the Olaf pancake made by Kitchen Fun With My 3 sons. Click HERE to check out her very cute pancake.


I made Olaf using a piece of wrap.


Cut out Olaf head, body and feet from the wrap. I simply used a pair of scissors to trim out the shapes. However, you can also print/draw out Olaf on a piece of paper, place that on your wrap and use it as a guide to cut out the parts. Place these on a baking trap, toast in the oven at 180 degrees celcius for around 5 minutes till crisp. Don't throw away the leftover cut outs, you can cut them into small pieces, toast them in the same way and use as soup or salad toppings.


Cut out 2 circles from wrap for Olaf eye. I used the puncher above to punch out his eyes from nori. His eyebrows were cut out with a pair of scissors. Use some mayo to "stick" the parts together.


Cut out mouth from nori and teeth from wrap, and again, "stick" them on with some mayo.


Cut out Olaf's nose from carrot.


Punch out nori for the buttons using the above puncher.


Cut out Olaf's hand and hair from a piece of boiled kombu.


Alternatively, you can also try using herbs like dill for Olaf's hand instead.


Assemble the parts on your soup, and there, you have your very own bowl of Olaf soup. If you need a recipe for carrot soup, click HERE to check out one that I shared previously.

Where to get same or similar items used in today's post:

Swimming Rilakkuma & Pancake

Finally back to clearing my backlog of foodart, lol. My memory these days is quite bad, the problem with blogging about my food art so late is that I sometimes have problem recalling the details of what I made. -_-


This Rilakkuma by the beach lunch was made quite sometime back. I remembered we were still experiencing a dry spell back then and I wished I could be taking a dip in the pool while walking under the blazing hot sun.


Rilakkuma and friends were made from rice (brown coloured with dark soya sauce, yellow coloured with deco furi), nori, cheese, egg sheet and carrots.


They were swimming in Japanese beef curry. I made some ships out of sausages and cut out some fish from carrots. Did you notice Korilakkuma's duckie float?


I think I made this Rilakkuma breakfast during the first day of our one week break in March. Instead of a waffles recipe, I simply used the Japanese pancake mix in my Rilakkuma waffle pan. Lol, so I guess they should be called pancakes, not waffles.


This breakfast set was actually mine.  I took a little too long to cook everything. My boys could not wait any longer and were already eating their breakfast as I was taking these photos.


Served the pancakes with maple syrup. :)

Where to get same or similar items used in today's post:

Rilakkuma Pancake

LT is going off to his first day of Primary 1 later, time flies so fast! After IT left for school in the morning, I managed to complete all my housework for today while LT was still in bed. :) I just finished packing his bento for school later and also made him a charaben for lunch. He's having his lunch now while I'm typing out this post on the Ipad, lol.


A lazing Rilakkuma breakfast I made for my boys last month.


Not complicated at all and definitely easy to make. I used whipped cream and chocolate to draw in Rilakkuma's face.


This is another version of Rilakkuma, even simpler than the lazing Rilakkuma.


I'm using the Japanese Morinaga pancake mix for these pancakes. :)

Where to get same or similar item used in today's post: