Elephant pancake

It's the last day of the zoo themed week of bentos. I had no idea how much I was going to enjoy having a theme to work with. It felt like my creativity skyrocketed! Not only was it fun, but it provided a great chance for A-chan and I to talk more about the animals in each of her lunches.

I wanted to do an elephant for today's bento. Since elephants are often portrayed in henna designs, it seemed like a fine idea to do one on a pancake with icing. For some reason elephants and mice are incredibly difficult to get proportionally correct in henna! I had intended to do more detail but got nervous and decided that I would mess it up if I kept going :) Elephants have a nostalgic feeling to me. My mother collects elephants and has them in every room of her house. I have lovely memories of elephants from our trips to Thailand and India. A-chan was too young during those trips to truly remember any details, but I'm hoping that they will have ingrained a deep love and respect for elephants somewhere inside her.

In the bento: Main tier: Miniature pancakes, Morningstar Farms bacon, carrot and raspberry flowers with cucumber leaves and a solitary elephant shaped rice pasta. Second tier: Lots of raspberries, black olives on elephant picks, carrot slices and heart shaped pan-fried potatoes.

The elephant design was done with vanilla icing. I drew the design out by hand the night before so that I could practice. I like it so much that I probably will keep it and use it as a henna design!

To get the veggie bacon into twists I cut the strips in half lengthwise as soon as they were out of the oven. Then I immediately wrapped them around chopsticks and let them cool. In a few minutes they were cool enough to slide the chopsticks out and voila!