As you can see I made one Easter friendly for the upcoming occasion and also a geeky one as this blog is about nerding out on stuff, so I made a fun little dinosaur one for those paleontologists out there.
So I'm gonna break down the food decorations into parts here:
The Background:
Unfortunately I didn't have a blue plate for the background so this was the closest thing I had for a sky. Looks like tornado weather. LOL! I would have chosen a blue plate for a sky if I had one, so perhaps you have one or can come up with another idea for a sky...or perhaps you'd like to do an underwater scene or really you could make a scene anywhere, depending on the background you use. Try to get creative!
The Animals:
I started off with placing the animals in the middle of the plate and building the scene around it. You can make as many animals as you want and it doesn't have to be these ones I chose. Perhaps you have other cookie cutter shapes of animals like bears or cats or whatever that you'd prefer to use. Again, I was trying to stick to a theme, for my site and the upcoming occasion. Go nuts and get creative! You don't have to just use mashed potatoes either. I'm sure you could use other things that you could mash into a creamy consistency. You could use sweet potatoes, squash, yams, mashed carrots, etc. if you want more of an orange color, say for making a fox or clown fish (for an underwater scene) or something along that line. If you want you could also use the recipe below for the glassy terrain to make a green amphibian of some kind. The possibilities are really endless. It's up to your cookie cutter collection.
So for the bunny I used a cookie cutter I happened to have and placed it in the middle of the plate, then I took a small spoon and tried to carefully put the creamy mashed potatoes in the cookie cutter shape and packed it down and tried to make it as smooth as possible with the backside of the spoon. When I had filled all the gaps and made it look smooth enough I carefully lifted up the cookie cutter and the shape was retained. I then added a few chives for the eyes.
The dinosaur was made in a similar way, but I added more chives to it for spots on it's body. You could also decorate with grated cheese, spices or other things, depending on your preference. The dinosaur was actually used from a dinosaur shaped sandwich cutter I picked up at the grocery store recently. You can also find them online here. If you wanted to you could also use these for healthy sandwiches too or grilled cheese, though, because I didn't have any gluten-free bread on hand for this post and because I wanted to make a more naturally gluten-free post I chose to use mashed potatoes.
The Clouds:
Also made with potatoes. Just plop them on the plate messily...the messy part is fun and kinda therapuetic. Oh, for the record I cheated a bit here and made instant mashed potatoes with water and margarine. I just found them way quicker to make at the time and they're super creamy without having to get the kitchen tools too messy, so if you're pressed for time and don't mind packaged potatoes, you may try that, but if you want everything to be all natural I highly recommend that route more. It may take longer, but there are lots of recipes online I'm sure you can try.
The Trees:
Broccoli has always looked like little trees to me. I love broccoli and because my mom told me that as a kid, my imagination took over and it could be the reason why I always loved them. Could also be the reason why I'm a vegetarian too. I steam mine with a special steamer (sorry, I don't know the technical term for it if it has one) and it looks like this, if you need one:
The Terrain:
As I said above I used the Quinoa avacado recipe I love so much. The link for it should be above, but here it is again if you need it. You can also make a green salad if you want to make something quicker, but I find that quinoa avacado salad I recommend can be full of all sorts of good nutrients to help you and/or your kids stay healthy. Plus, it tastes amazing! You can make it mild or spicy too depending on your taste. Some lettuce may have barely any nutritional value. If you can, choose kale or baby spinach if you want more healthy salads.
So again, you can make whatever animals you want or whatever scene you want. You're only limited by your imagination, and there are so many colourful veggies out there to make cool food art so play around with ideas if you want to. Here are my fun plates though:
Anyway, hope you enjoyed this post! It was fun to make and fun to eat too...totally tasty!
