Amazingly Fun School Lunch Idea

My children LOVE hard boiled eggs.  Can you believe that is what these are?!
Aren’t they the cutest!?

What Mom doesn’t need help making foods more enticing to her kids?
To make those eggs I bought the above molds.  Just google Bento Egg Molds and you can find many places to order them online, they are super cheap.  It’s still shocking to me that you can mold hard boiled eggs.  There were a few other shapes to choose from as well!
  The Fantastic Fish
The Brilliant Bear
The Creative Car

The Bouncing Bunny

The instructions come with the molds…but they are in another language! HA!
Here’s how I make them:
1. Hard boil eggs.  While they are boiling, keep the eggs moving.  This will help the yolk to end up centered.  If it cooks up to one side, this will not work.
2. Take an egg out of the pan and break the egg shell.  For best results roll the egg lightly on your counter to break up the shell.  How is it that no one told me this tip before?  I had to lose a few eggs before I figured it out on my own! ;(
3. Quickly (because they need to be as hot as you can handle) and carefully peel the shell off.
4. Put hard boiled egg into your mold and close the clasp. I put mine in sideways. It’s pretty obvious which direction to put your egg in as the shapes tend to have a bigger and smaller end.  However, I have seen other people say to have the fat end of the egg down into the bottom of the mold and then clasp the top of the mold down over the egg sitting up.  This doesn’t seem logical to me, though. 
5. Put mold into cold water.
6. Let the eggs cool completely in the molds, in the water (about 10 minutes).
7. Open molds to reveal your shaped eggs.
I first made these with regular eggs.  I found them too small so the tips of the shapes did not fill in.  Then I bought Extra Large eggs and they worked perfectly!  YAY!  A little of the egg white does squish out on 2 of them, but you can trim that off.
Other options:
If you had the heart or star shapes you could make the cutest deviled eggs!
You can also dye these shaped eggs fun colors.  I think it would be best to do this using natural dyes like beet juice.
Shaped rice balls would be so cute using these molds.  I’m going to try that out next week!
I have read online that you can also buy premade hard boiled eggs at the grocery store for this.  You just heat them up in a pan of water and then follow the rest of the directions starting at #2.  However, I have not tried this myself.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my kids’ school lunches /bentos.   Is this something that interests people? I’d love to know what everyone thinks about this.  Do you have these molds?  How do you make your kids’ lunches more enticing?
Rebecca

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