Oscar the Quiche

My son’s second birthday party is barely a week away and I have so much to do. It is a lot of work to host a Pinterest perfect birthday party, especially when you can’t start any projects until after 8:00PM. Frankly, it’s not a great idea. If you have any other way of fulfilling yourself creatively and personally, I suggest you do the other thing and order a cake from the grocery store. If you insist on going all out, you’re going to need food—themed food.

Now, sweet themed food is easy. You can decorate cakes and cookies with icing, build characters out of fondant, modeling chocolate, or marzipan, mould candy, or wrap store bought candy bars in decorative paper; you’ve been on Pinterest, you know all this. But you can’t just serve sweets at a party full of toddlers. It doesn’t matter how cool your mom friends are. There’s going to be some judgement if you don’t at least throw a carrot stick in there.

Savory food is harder to make on theme, double so for something healthy (ish). So I’m really proud of how this came out.

I present to you

BAM BA BA BAM

Oscar the Quiche

I’d love to give you a tutorial, but honestly, I did so many things wrong that it’s a wonder it came out. I went wrong trying to make a spinach quiche with a layer of cheese and egg on top. I wanted a nice white background so you could really see Oscar. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, the layers mixed. To smooth it out, I just kept adding eggs, milk and cheese. I stopped measuring. The cheese formed a crust on top that made it impossible to get the spinach to stay on. Because it took so long to cook, I was up until 2:00AM. It’s a good thing my kid likes Sesame Street, because he watched a lot of it the next day. Yay super mom!

Instead of telling you what I did, I’ll tell you what I wish I did.

Blind bake a roll out pie crust according to directions on the box. Or, you know, use homemade if you’re fancy. Cut a scrap of dough for Oscar’s eyebrows and bake on a lined cookie sheet along with the crust.

 

 Find a recipe for a white quiche and prepare it. If it’s just too weird to serve a plain quiche with spinach toppings (is it weird? It feels weird, but I can’t really articulate why), layer spinach leaves at the bottom of the crust before pouring in the filling. That should work, right?

Fill the crust and bake for 10 minutes less than the recipe suggests. While it’s cooking, blend a cup of spinach in the food processor, and beat one last egg. Take the quiche out and arrange the spinach and olives into Oscar’s face. After sewing a dozen Oscar puppets, I’ve become fairly familiar with the features. Use small amounts of spinach for more control. Place the crust eyebrow in place and carefully brush the egg all over. Bake for the remaining 10 minutes.

 

 That should be it.

Oh, and I also made this far less impressive bacon snuffleupagus quiche.