Snowmen pancakes with bacon scarves – Quirky doesn’t mean time consuming

Snowman pancakes with bacon

Back when I was regularly making quirky food art, people would often ask me “how do you have time for that??”

I would love to say that I spent hours and hours on some of these projects, but realistically,  most of them were thrown together at the last minute. Or… even when I was pre-planning and knew I wanted to do something quirky, the end result was still only going to take a couple extra minutes to make.

For example, the snowman pancake above…. Without the quirky factor, I would’ve still been making bacon and pancakes, so the amount of time it takes to make those remain the same regardless.

The only real difference is that instead of making a single pancake in a pan or on a griddle, I put two small ones right next to each other (one slightly bigger than the other, of course). Instead of putting the bacon on the side of the plate, I laid it carefully on top to create a snowman scarf.

And do you know how long it took me to dig out chocolate chips and M&M’s from the cabinet to create the eyes, noses, and buttons? Probably 30 seconds…maybe a full minute if the box where I keep all those goodies got pushed to the back and required I climb on a cabinet to reach them. Whoop-de-do.

Snowman pancakes with bacon

I made several different snowmen that day because there were multiple people needing fed, but even so, that means with an assembly-line production, I maybe added an extra five minutes to how long it took for breakfast. Nobody starved in that amount of time and my daily schedule wasn’t drastically thrown off that day. That amount of time was less than it takes to find the missing shoe for any given morning, so if it means spending those few minutes to make everyone giggle when they get their plates… I’m good with that.

The ugliest bread I have ever made

Blue bread pudding with blue icing

Unfortunately, the picture above is the PRETTY version of it, after I tampered and tweaked it into something a person could actually tolerate looking at…and maybe consider eating it.

Let’s go back to the beginning to see how this “masterpiece” started, though. I believe this is from the time I tried recreating the adorable panda bread.

Adorable bread that looks like a panda when sliced

It totally looks like that, right? :P

Anyway, I started with all the appropriate proportions of colored bread dough:

Colored pieces of bread dough
 
I went with a lovely blue because I didn’t want it to be exactly like the panda above and I thought the blue would make a nice sky instead of grass behind it.

Fluffy bread

 
Unfortunately, the bread dough recipe I used decided that not only was it going to rise….but it was going to rise and rise and rise some more, so that it didn’t come out like a flat loaf at all.

Loaf of bread

 
It came out as a monster! And oversize, lumpy (albeit, fluffy and tasty) monster of a loaf!
 
There was no way it looked like a panda inside, of course, and didn’t even look like a pretty swirl. Even I didn’t want to eat it. So instead, I thought it would look cool as a bread pudding. Then it would be more swirled and cool, right?

Blue bread pudding

 
Wrong! Ew!
 
Okay, as a last resort, I figured I could slather it in icing. How about a lovely blue to bring out the blue flecks in the bread pudding?

Ugly green colored icing

 
Seriously?
 
What the heck happened?? That is the nastiest color ever and no where near blue! It’s just gross green stuff. Ew again!
 
Swirled blue icing - Earth in swirly motion
 
Thankfully, when I stirred it, you could tell that it was really blue underneath. I’m not sure what’s going on with that dark green.

Blue bread pudding

When sliced, the bread pudding *did* look kinda cool. It’s not a panda, but the girls thought it was neat…even if maybe a little bit weird.

Blue bread pudding with powdered sugar icing

 
And hey, with appropriately blue-colored icing, it was actually pretty edible, too!

Porcupine meatball raisin band

Porcupine meatballs with rice, cheese, ground beef shaped to look like real animal
 
Those little guys started off as porcupine meatballs. Go on, google what they’re supposed to look like. Or here, let me do that for you: LMGTFY
 
Mine obviously weren’t as spiky as they could’ve been, though, so then the toothpicks were added…
 
But porcupines need faces, too, right? Not just mohawks apparently.
 
So by the end, I had a band of California raisin guys instead.
 

California raisin guy dude band toys with saxophone, guitar, sunglasses

Porcupine meatballs with rice, cheese, ground beef with faces made of raisins and cranberries

 
Oh yeah, rock it you little rice, cheese, meatballs…. Ok, maybe not.
 
But you’ve gotta admit they look better than this did:

Rice and meat cheeseballs with toothpicks

 
And no, I can’t even tell you if that was the creation pre-face….or simply me taking pictures of the raisin dude butts. Does it really matter? No, of course not.
 
Also, this special closeup shot here is for the people who often ask how I get various faces to stick to random textures. Here’s an example of what happens when things don’t go as planned and I need a little extra duct tape toothpick help.
Stab your eyes out with toothpicks - Recipe for porcupine meatballs
In case you’re wondering, yes, they were quite delicious. But please, if you’re going to hide toothpicks in the eyes, at least warn the kids before they bite into them…