bento#43 Castle Crashers April 11, 2009

I’ve worked on the sketch for this bento for about 2 weeks, but I just couldn’t draw it. I thought about not doing this and moving on, but I just hate giving up, and my boyfriend and I love this game so much. After failing to make it about twice, I made Totoro Parade bento to keep me motivated, and finally I made it.

Bento #43: Castle Crushers
Created and eaten on: 4/10/2009

Castle Crushers is a xbox 360 arcade game. It’s a button mashing action RPG game by the Behemoth. I usually get bored with a button mashing games, but this one is also an RPG, so it has a story and just like a normal RPG, you get experiment points, money, new items, etc… so it keeps you entertaining for a pretty long time.

As soon as I watched the game, it made me want to make the bento of it. There are so many cute characters in the game, and seemed so easy to draw, but the problem is the composition. I was going to reenact a scene from the game first, but this bento had to have at least 4 characters. If I made it a 2-D bento it would’ve been easier, but I wanted to make it 3-D. I drew a sketch, but the 4 main characters were so tiny… When I was looking at the wallpaper and art from the Behemoth site, I saw a bunch of characters’ heads in a line, comparing how big they were to each other. Then I had an idea of making just the heads. After looking at each character’s head, and thinking which food it could be, I picked 2 more characters on top of 4 main Knights.

Before I started making characters, I prepared the bento box as usual. I Put lettuce at the bottom, and put sauteed renkon (lotus root) over it.

First I made the Knights. I made three barrel shaped rice balls first. For the red one, I carefully peeled off the outside part of fake crab stick, and put it on seaweed and wrapped it around a rice ball. For the blue one… Well, I could’ve made an egg sheet with egg white, and dyed it blue with cabbage juice, but I didn’t want to use too much blue in my bento, so I just decided I’d substitute seaweed for the blue. So I cut seaweed, I wrapped it around a rice ball.

For the orange one, I mixed egg with ketchup and beat it, and made an egg sheet. (see “how to make an egg sheet”) I cut it to the size of the rice ball, and wrapped it with it. For the green one, I microwaved lettuce, and wrapped potato salad with it.

For the Barbarians, I cut Japanese style hamburg (see “how to make Japanese style hamburg”) I had made the night before into square, and put sliced konnyaku (yam cake) in boiled water and cooked it a couple of minutes (to remove the smell), took it out and cut it to make the face and horns on Barbarians, and put it on the hamburg.

For the Bear Sharman, I made a rice ball, made smaller rice balls for the ears.

After all the characters were put into the bento, I cut cheese for the white cross pattern for the Knight, and put it on them. I cut out circles of seaweed using a hole puncher for the Knights’ eyes, Bear Shaman and the holes on Barbarians’ face mask. I cut tiny pieces for the nose and mouth for Bear Shaman, and the lines on the mask for Barbarians. At this point, I noticed that the eyes were smaller than I wanted… I was so running out of the time, so I couldn’t make bigger eyes.

Originally, I wanted to make one Animal orb for each Knight. Animal orbs are like a pet which you can find in the game, and each animal has a different ability to help you through the game. But, I had so little time left… So I just made the chicken, which was used on the official site of  Behemoth. The chicken is made with carrot and left over egg sheet on a quail egg. (see “how to make chicken with an egg”) When I was making the chicken’s crown and tail with carrot, I made carrot flowers (see “how to make vegetable flower”).

Aside from the fact the Knights were thicker (wider) than they were supposed to be, I made a crucial mistake. I knew about it, but I was making a mad rush to finish it, I was probably delusional. I was going to use tomato skin to make the bloody paw print on Bear Sharman’s forehead. But for some reason, I used sliced cheese… I could’ve just used ketchup, but I remember ketchup easily seeps into rice so I used cheese instead. But I could’ve put ketchup on top of the cheese, but like said, I wasn’t thinking straight.

It seems like whenever I try to make bento of something I really really like, I always make a very small mistake that can make a big difference in the final bento. T_T I will definitely make Castle Crashers themed food again! But before that, my boyfriend and I should probably finish the game. 😛

Knights:
– Rice ball wrapped with fake crab meat on seaweed for red knight
– Rice ball wrapped with an egg sheet mixed with ketchup
– Rice ball wrapped with seaweed
– Potato salad wrapped with lettuce
– Seaweed on cheese for Knights’ face

Barbarian:
– Konnyaku (yam cake) on Japanese hamburg
– Seaweed for the mask

Bear Shaman:
– Seaweed and rice on rice ball

Chicken:
– carrot and egg sheet on quail egg

Other food:
– Lettuce
– Sauteed renkon (lotus root)

For more pictures of my bento, visit Bento! set and Bento details! set on my flickr page.