How about mac & cheese? Here's a real shortcut. Buy the color of acryllic paint that looks like Kraft cheese sauce. I think it's made by "Plaid" or someone -- not Liquitex. Buy some nice cheap doll dishes. Pier 1 used to have terrific soy sauce dishes, white with a nice rim. Arrange as much uncooked macaroni as you think proper for a single serving on the dish and pour the paint cheese sauce over it. It will dry overnight. The paint glues the macaroni to the dish. The cheapest serving dish for this is the aluminum mini-pie plates that come under individual sized graham cracker crusts -- 6 in a package -- not elegant but nearly free!

For years I've been struggling to get bread texture to look right and, thanks to Miki, I've finally figured it out. You will need a box of Farina cereal, some white Sculpey (it's stickier than FIMO) and maybe some beige Sculpey or FIMO if you want whole wheat bread. I've been making molds of bread by pressing Molly's PBJ sandwich into Sculpey and baking the resulting impression. But you can just cut the bread slices into triangles, too. Knead the sculpey until it's soft. If you're making wheat bread, mix the white into the wheat-colored Sculpey so you don't get too much white to start with. When the clay is nice and soft, pour a tablespoon of Farina into a small saucer. Roll the Sculpey around in the Farina until it's covered with cereal granules. Knead the clay again until it's swallowed all the cereal. Repeat until the mixture is too stiff to work any more. Roll out flat and cut into triangles that look to be a good sized half sandwich to you. Now you can add the filling: plain brown and red for PBJ, or make slices of bologna, cheese, etc. My favorite is cucumber sandwiches but you have to make the cucumbers ahead of time. I've even made cream cheese (white sculpey) and olives (small green cane with a red center, sliced thin). Place your sandwich filling between two triangles of bread, press gently and bake in a 275 degree oven for about 25 minutes. When cool, you can paint the two short sides of the triangle to look like bread crust.

Cucumbers and carrots are made in "canes". Canes work best if you start off with a length of 3 inches. A cane is a rolled up piece of clay. For carrots, roll a very thin snake of orange. Flatten a piece of yellow with a rolling pin so it's the same length as the orange snake and wide enough to wrap all the way around the snake. Wrap the orange snake in a thin layer of yellow and roll them together gently to seal the seam. Then flatten out another piece of orange that is as long as your snake, wide enough to wrap around it and at least twice as thick as the yellow. Wrap the snake in the thick orange blanket and roll gently. Cut the ends off clean with a sharp knife (exacto is good). Refrigerate your cane for 20 minutes. Then slice off your carrots. Bake for 15 minutes because they're thin.

With cucumbers, you need to mix a very small amount of green with a much larger amount of translucent clay. Then mix a little black into your remaining green clay to get a nice dark green cucumber skin color. Roll the translucent pale green clay into a snake. Wrap it in the darker green. Refrigerate. Slice with a sharp knife. For seeds, prick one side of each slice with a doll's fork in a crossways pattern. For tomatoes, make a larger diameter snake of translucent red, wrap it with a red skin, refrigerate and slice. Mark the center of each slice with indentations (I used a 6-pointed pronged tool) -- everyone thinks it looks exactly like tomatoes and it isn't worth the extra work to make all those inner sections. Believe me! For lettuce, mix lime green fimo with translucent. Don't overmix -- the variations in color look more realistic. I made lettuce molds from Addy's lettuce (in her gardening set) and from an old AGT lunch salad. But lettuce is really just round, torn on the edges and wrinkly in the middle. So experiment.

Peapods are fun. Find a nice pea green color clay or make it by adding a small amount of white and yellow to green. Make lots of little round beads for peas. Then flatten out the remainder with a rolling pin and use an exacto knife to cut out peapod shapes (long, sort of tapering on each end, wider in the middle). Tuck three tiny peas on top of one pod. Cover with another slice of pod and squeeze the back edge of the two pods together, plus the ends. Let the peas show on the front side. All veggies are thin so need only 15 minutes in a 275 degree oven. DON'T OVERBAKE!

OK -- someone else's turn.

<font color="#051E50" size="1">[ March 28, 2005 04:18 PM: Message edited by: Sakurako ]</font>