Turtle Fail

Last week I got a crazy cold that had me in bed each night with the boys - at 7pm. This week I am feeling much better, but I am still quite exhausted and also trying to catch up on everything I didn't do last week. I'm not sure if I have mentioned it on the blog, but we are going to be moving to the US for a few years. Y put in for a transfer and got it! We will probably head out in May, which gives us a bit of time to go through our entire place, throw stuff out, and organize for the move. As a result, I probably won't be doing too much for the blog in the coming weeks. The good news is that I have a lot of projects that I have done and just not yet blogged about. So, hopefully I can stay up on posting twice a week, but I might slide every once in a while.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, K's school took a field trip to the aquarium. K was very excited about this! They got to take an onigiri for lunch and some snack. I asked K if he wanted to go to the grocery store to pick something out, but he requested that I make bread that looks like a fish. Hmmmm...I had no idea if this was something he had seen before or had just come up with, but my breadmaker book has a recipe for sweet turtle breads (カメロンパン - kame melon pan）. I decided this would be the easiest route. I started with the dough in the breadmaker. Once the dough was ready, I divided it into quarters and then chopped the tops off of each triangle.

I divided the top half into five little balls and put them on a lined cookie sheet.

I streched the balls so that they slightly resembled a head, a tail, arms and legs. Then I rolled the top and put the turtle's back on the body parts.

The next step was to make the top cookie part of the bread. I mixed butter and sugar with some egg.

Then added flour and mixed until it looked like batter. Kind of.

I divided that into quarters, rolled each quarter out, and put a shell on the turtle.

Then I scored the cookie so it would look more like a shell. This was not in the instructions in the book - I just thought it would look cute. This could be the start of where everything went awry.

I let them rest so they could rise and when I checked back on them I was so sad. They turned into little blobs. Not the cute little turtles I was hoping for.

From the side they don't look too bad, but this was prior to baking, mind you.

When they were baked, they didn't look like turtles at all. Luckily I made them on a Tuesday night and the field trip wasn't until Thursday. We still had time to go buy something else for K to take. In the morning I showed him the blobs and told him that it was no problem if he wanted to go to the grocery store to get something else to take. He looked me in the eye and with the sweetest little voice said, "But mama, I love them." My heart exploded. I didn't know if he was just saying that to be nice to me, but Y told me that K told him how excited he was about his kame melon pan that mama made. I love him.

The final obstacle was to find something to put the turtle in so that K could throw it in his backpack without crumbling it. I found this bento box at the 100 yen store and it was the biggest one I could find. I had to squish the turtle in there, but he fit and K took him on the field trip. He only had a few bites of the turtle, but that was just fine by me.