Cute Yummy Time Review

I need to stop saying I’ll do something, cause that seems to curse my time management skills and suddenly all forces in the universe move to make me not do what I said. The review+contest I mentioned last week is still on hold as I make final decisions about how to do the contest, so just sit tight for a bit longer!

In the meantime, I’ll be reviewing another book today called Cute Yummy Time: 70 Recipes for the Cutest Food You’ll Ever Eat.

Set to be released on October 6th and written by Gothic Lolita fashionista La Carmina, the book is 169 pages in length and features (as noted) 70 recipes for making cute food. The book is quite clearly marketed for the bento community, offering up lots of creative ideas for accenting your bento lunches. However, I am not entirely convinced that the author knows much about bento making herself, which unfortunately ends up making the book feel as though it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not.

I say this because in her introduction, she talks about how “the most successful charaben usually abide by two constraints… the decorations are not too fussy. Intricate food sculptures may be impressive, but they’re not made on a regular basis or meant to be eaten.” I’m not sure what charaben she’s talking about, but I’m pretty sure one of the first rules of charaben is that you can cram the whole friggin’ thing in your mouth after all your friends OOH and AHH over it. The only charaben piece I’ve never eaten was my Shirt for Sawyer and that’s cause I couldn’t bring myself to eat my Nori Kate and the immaculate egg sheet that I cooked by nothing short of a miracle. I kept that sucker in my fridge as a trophy of my rare egg cooking success until it started to smell. Yes, my stupidity amazes even myself sometimes.

Speaking of Lost, I went to see Michael Emerson (Ben Linus) narrate The Tale of Babar at a Honolulu Symphony show yesterday. I went with two extra friends (Janice and a guy who is one of the stand-ins for a major character). We got to see Jorge Garcia (Hurley) there as he walked to his seat with his girlfriend. Me and Janice were hoping to see Michael Emerson afterwards and stalk him for a photo, but no luck there. He didn’t appear to be outside after the performance. Big bummer!

Anyway, back to the review…

The book is split into five parts: Ohayo! (breakfast foods), To Go (bento dishes), To Stay (dishes to eat at home),  Occasions (holiday themes), and Sweet Treats. Sadly, the To Go section doesn’t deliver much to bento fans. While the lunches are photographed inside bento boxes, some don’t really seem very practical or filling unless you’re trying to starve yourself to lose weight, which is Big No-No Number 1 in losing weight. The Gamblin’ Elephant Crackers is basically a fancy Lunchables with raw spinach leaves being the bed for 2 rye crackers with small squares of ham and cheese on top with a side dish of mixed berries and yogurt.

This picture is of the Politician Frog Pita, which was one of the few images I found to be cute, but it’s stuffed into a bento box that it wouldn’t fit into unless you ate half of it and then rolled up the rest. The bento boxes in this section seem to be more like photo props than actual containers for the dishes displayed.

The structure of the book is adorable, with cute little drawn characters accompanying a roleplaying story that continues on each recipe page. La Carmina makes her way through an imaginary land, meeting all sorts of cute foods along the way. The problem lies in the fact that a lot of the food just doesn’t live up to the title.

Case in point, the Hedgehog Pork Loin pictured above. When I came to this one, I was a bit alarmed. I thought maybe I was just a mean old foodie snob, so I showed it to a pair of innocent eyes. Baby Girl scrunched up her face and looked scared when I showed it to her. She thought it was a monster.

This photo is of the Little Birds Sushi, which is supposed to look like the kawaii drawing, but does not. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t make something similar if I tried because mine would probably turn out just as disastrous, but I wouldn’t put a photo of it into a cookbook that I wanted people to buy.

This photo is for the Waking Lovers Crepes. The story behind this one is that La Carmina comes upon two cute boy singers who try to get them to be hers. The crepes don’t look anything like the drawn boys. I’m not even sure that they’re supposed to be the two boys.

I feel terrible pointing out the worst parts of the book, but I suppose that’s part of the job of a reviewer. There were things in the book that I did like, such as the Animal Yogurt Popsicles shown here:

These were obviously made with the recently introduced sandwich cutters and it really is quite inventive to use them to make little frozen desserts. Still, you can see again about the weird use of bento boxes in the photography and why I feel like La Carmina is just throwing bento things in to appeal to a bigger audience.

This was cute as well, though I don’t know if I’d actually try the recipe out. The middle part is made of scallops, while the orange part is made out of mashed squash mixed with ginger and nutmeg. To be a honest, a lot of the recipes don’t sound like they’d taste good, which is a bad indicator for a cookbook.

These lattes were also among the things that were actually cute, but since I don’t make my own lattes or even drink lattes, I’d never use the recipe. One other cute dish worth mentioning is the Piggie Bread, which is the first recipe in the book and shown on the book cover. Cuteness aside, the recipe needs tweaking, as it relies on peppercorns as the piggie eyes. Imagine the reaction of your kids when they take a bite into those. Pandemonium would ensue for sure and you’d probably have to do some mental repair on your kids’ ability to trust what you feed them.

Overall, while Cute Yummy Time does have some cute ideas, I wouldn’t recommend the book to my readers, even with the low price of $11.57 on Amazon. The recipes are a little too gung-ho on the healthy factor for my own tastes. The photography was obviously done with a point and shoot, is grainy at times, and in general has poor lighting. Those who follow my blog know that this was precisely my problem with my own photographs in 501 Bento Lunches: 501 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento, which I consider an embarrassment I wish I could take back. The Coffin Tiramisu dessert was rather gross because it appeared to be photoshopped onto a black lace table so that it looked like it was oozing cream and crust onto the lace.

While the dishes no doubt had a lot of creative effort put into them, I think the book’s editor should have made a call not to include quite a few of them. While I’d like to provide readers with a more hands-on opinion by cooking something from the book, what I saw turned me off and I don’t feel motivated to try, which is vastly different from how I feel about Easy Japanese Cooking: Bento Love, which is a book I’ve cooked from numerous times in the short span of a week.

I don’t want people to think that I’m putting down their own bento creations, but this is a published cookbook. The bar is set higher for cookbooks as that’s where we look for inspiration. This one doesn’t deliver the cute factor it claims. If you want cute inspiration, stick to online bento blogs and communities and save yourself 12 bucks.