Mini Bread Bowl Bake Off

I wasn't kidding when I said I was on a roll today! In addition to the projects I've posted so far, I also spent the morning experimenting with how to make mini bread bowls.

For my Halloween menu I'm in love with the idea of tiny foods. Remember when Alice is trying to get through that first door and keeps growing and shrinking with the magic "drink me" potion? I think that gives me perfect license to play with proportions, and besides, mini foods are delightful. I'm going to use the font I talked about yesterday to make little signs saying "One side makes you tall and one side makes you small..."

So one of my mini food ideas I'm set on is mini bread bowls with spinach dip. I think this would be a great savory appetizer, and last year I noticed people gravitated much more towards the "food" than "sweets", so I'm trying to take that into account (even though I prefer MAKING sweets).


So, today's mission: Figure out how to make mini bread bowls! I knew it wouldn't be worth it to make bread from scratch (not my forte) so I picked up a cannister of Pillsbury bread sticks and tried a couple different methods.


Round one: I cut each of the dough strips in half, wrapped them around my finger, and pinched the bottom closed to form a little bowl.

I started with 6 of them, baked for 8 minutes at 375. They came out super cute!

Some of them started to peel away at the ends a little, but the ones I was careful to really smush together were almost perfect!

...but I still wanted to try a few other ways.

For round 2 I wrapped a whole bread stick up like a cinnamon roll, and then smooshed the middle, like the pinch pots you made in kindergarten art class.


They came out pretty cute too! Little round balls - though about twice the size of the first round, since I used a whole breadstick for each one.


For Round 3 I wanted to try using mini muffin pans, but mine is mysteriously MIA, so I tried a regular muffin tin instead. Again I took a whole breadstick and wound it around the muffin cup, and smushed down the bottom a little. I didn't worry too muc about covering the bottoms because of how much the breadsticks puff up, I figured they'd be covered...and I was right.

At first I thought they were stuck to the bottom of the pan, but with just a little prodding they came up and actually look better on the bottoms than the ones baked on a sheet. The shape was sort of cup like, but not very deep. My least favorite.

But before I could decide, I had to fill them all! For rounds 1 & 2 I cut out a little wedge with a knife, and for all 3 I scooped in some store-bought spinach dip (Cub Deli - it's decent). I think I might consider piping it in with a large frosting tip, since it was kind of hard to make look cute, but otherwise, I'm pleased!

I'm running one more "test" to make sure they'll work - letting them sit out for a while, like they would for a party. I want to make sure they don't melt or ooze or fall apart somehow. But saving a catastrophe, I think I'm going with method #1! That's on the far left in the last photo. They were the perfect 2-bite size, and using 1/2 a breadstick means I can get 24 per can - that means around $0.10 for each bread bowl.

There's a huge test project DONE! WHOO HOO! 6 weeks!