Getting Started With My Cute Food Project
Last Wednesday morning I decided to make adorable snacks for my niece’s birthday party after seeing Pinterest fails. Grabbed my phone and scrolled through tons of food pics for like an hour. Got super excited but realized I’m awful at food styling – my regular sandwiches look like roadkill. Hunted through my kitchen cabinets like a raccoon and found random stuff: cookie cutters, food coloring tubes, some sprinkles older than my dog, and half-squished strawberries.
The Actual Messy Process
First disaster happened with the sandwiches. Tried cutting bread into bunny shapes but the bread kept tearing like wet tissue paper. Got mad and squished the scraps back together – looked like Frankenstein bread. Poked holes for eyes using a straw – way too big, looked creepy. Switched to baby carrots for noses and suddenly the weird bread lumps became passable teddy bears!
My big takeaways:
- Always use stale bread – fresh stuff rips too easy
- Food coloring stains worse than permanent marker – ruined my favorite Avengers shirt
- Burned two batches of cookies trying to make “cute” paw prints with chocolate chips
Nearly gave up when making fruit skewers. The melon balls kept sliding off the sticks like they were escaping. Cussed loudly until I stabbed them sideways through the rind part. Worked like magic – ended up with little fruit hedgehogs! Added yogurt dip for “snow” and sprinkled edible glitter everywhere like a unicorn sneezed on them.
Final Results & Epic Failures
Spent 4 hours making what should’ve been 30-minute snacks. Half looked suspiciously like abstract art – the blue food-dyed mashed potatoes in heart shapes turned gray and got fed to the dog. But the winners were strawberry Santas with cream cheese beards and those fruit hedgehogs. Took 87 photos just to get 5 decent shots – turns out natural light hides my sloppy icing work!
Kids demolished everything in 3 minutes flat. Their chocolate-smeared faces were better proof than my Instagram pics. Next time I’m buying store-bought cupcakes.
