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.

Have another Nutter Butter peanut butter sandwich penguin!

Nutter Butter peanut butter sandwich cookies. They look like penguins with a marshmallow belly, Tootsie roll arms, carnival peanut nose and feat. Nutter butters change shape to round cookie instead now.

Can you tell what each of the toppings used is? I couldn’t figure out what the white was to begin with, but after seeing the tutorial over at Hungry Happenings, I felt silly for not recognizing it.

I couldn’t even make this right now if I wanted to unfortunately. Did you know that they changed the shape to just being round cookies? Yeah, it’s pretty lame. :(

And I’m pretty sure if I used round cookies for these, they would turn out to be the most deformed little penguins ever.

Actually, this penguin plush toy might take the cake on that one:

 Round penguin ball. Deformed fat penguin.

But they’d be rough regardless, so I’ll just drool over the penguins above instead. It’s not like I really like Nutter Butters anyway…. I only want to play with them. :P

White chili smiley faces – Is it winter comfort food time already?

Many years ago, I had a white chili at someone else’s house and fell in love with it.
 
As with most first loves, any attempt at love after that is never the same again. It doesn’t make it bad by any means and often times it can be so much better even, but you’ll never recreate the feeling of that first one.
 
That’s how my relationship with white chili is. I have tried making it myself several times. I have ordered it at restaurants. And it’s “okay” but it’s not the same.
 
I actually really enjoyed this particular chili (sorry, don’t know which recipe I used, though!), but it still didn’t have the heat of that first white chili I tried. That’s even with me having the second bowl down there with all that added pepper, in addition to it already having plenty of spice in it, plus onions.
 
Ah well.
 
At least they were all smiling, right?

 
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