Watermelons and Cupcakes!

Friday is a good day for a little fun!

Yesterday I stopped by the World Market store. That is where I bought the Sistema Klip It boxes for only $5, and where I found the cute flower shaped silicone baking cups for only $2.50 for a pack of 6. I love walking into World Market. It's so clean and everyone there is polite and friendly, and it always smells good, and every direction you turn is something interesting to look at. And this time I found something new - a cute little cupcake shaped cookie cutter!

See... doesn't it leave the most adorable trimmings behind?

So, of course I knew that I would need to use it to make a cupcake themed lunch, and soon! Who can resist that level of cuteness for long? Especially after I found vanilla cupcake flavored Goldfish grahams at the grocery store. Yep, a cupcake lunch was inevitable. But I also found little watermelon gummies and had half a watermelon which needed to be eaten before it went all gooey-soggy. Oh! The decisions one must make. It was like Sophie's Choice all up in my kitchen, y'all.

So I did both. Now, logic and common sense would say that one of the girls could have had a watermelon themed lunch and the other could have had a cupcake themed lunch. But logic and common sense are not my best friends first thing in the morning. And really, if I had done that then they would have been fighting about who got what and why. So, I did the only sane and reasonable thing possible. I made both lunches with both a watermelon and a cupcake theme!

Expect to see a lot of that cupcake cookie cutter. Hello adorable! The sandwich is just two slices of whole grain white bread with a slice of cheese in between. Fast and easy! I used glitter icing tubes to draw a few basic cupcake-y outlines on the top.

Bean and Princess both loved the mini sausage links from yesterday and I still had most of the pack in the fridge, so they made another appearance today, with another little tub of barbecue sauce for dipping. They also have a flower shaped cup of cherry Jello with a pitted cherry floating inside. I tucked fresh ripe raspberries in the gaps to keep the little sandwich from shifting around. They also have watermelon balls, pretzel sticks, vanilla cupcake flavored Goldfish grahams, and two little watermelon gummies. It's a very red-pink lunch today! They both came downstairs as I was finishing up and got a good look at their lunches before I packed them into the lunch bags. There was much hearty approval and both were counting the minutes until lunch time even as they ate their breakfast.

So, somebody asked what I do with the trimmings. The bits left over after using the cookie cutters to cut out cute shapes. Well, usually there aren't a lot of trimmings. The cookie cutters fit pretty closely with the bread and I'm careful about layout, to make sure as much is used as possible. When a lot is left over, but not enough to cut with a cookie cutter, I often cut the rest into bite sized pieces and tuck in under the main shaped piece. Most of the time all that is left is the crusts, and either Beaker snacks on them while I am putting together the rest of the lunch or I give them to the ducks and chickens. However, today there was quite a bit of cheese sandwich left after cutting out the main piece. And a really adorable sandwich, too. Who can resist a good cupcake?

Beaker was just waking up as I finished things and didn't want a cheesy sandwich for breakfast. He wanted eggs. And I was happy to oblige!

I took an egg and scrambled it lightly with some milk. Then I melted some butter in a small frying pan. I dropped the negative-cupcake sandwich into the butter, being careful not to move the layers too much. Then I poured the scrambled egg into the center and put a lid on top. I fried them together until the center was less gooey and then flipped it over to fry the other side. Voila! Cupcake shaped Bullseyes* + grilled cheese, all in one! No picture of the final product, as Beaker wanted to eat it all up. Plus, the egg leaked out the sides and it didn't look very pretty or cupcake shaped by the time it was done. But it did taste good! Beaker said, "It's makes my mouf happy!" A pretty good compliment!

* I have heard these called many different things. Dude calls them Bullseyes. I've also heard/seen them called toad-in-the-hole (which I always thought had to do with sausage, but apparently there are different versions), as well as Eggs in a Nest. To make a 'regular' version, you just use a round cookie or biscuit cutter to cut a circle hole in a slice of bread and crack an egg in the center, frying them together. Next time I will stick to the usual method instead of scrambling the eggs ~ much less messy that way.

So, I'm curious. What do you call that dish?