Tag Archives: Food

Mooncakes and tea under a fish lantern’s glow – Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival in LEGO

While in much of the world, October is spent getting in the Halloween spirit, in much of Asia, the month aligns with the Mid-Autumn Festival (it fell on October 6th this year), when mooncakes and tea are enjoyed to honor ancestors. Khang Huynh celebrates the festival with traditional cakes and tea alongside a Vietnamese-style fish lantern. The builder photographs with his usual care, lending a soft glow to the tableau that makes it easy to overlook as LEGO.

The sand green and turquoise teapot is a beautiful sub build. Dinosaur tails are used to create the ornate handle and spout, while leaves lend subtle texture to the sides.

While the pot and lamp are new builds, the cake comes from a Mid-Autumn festival tribute that Khang created three years ago. That year’s tableau featured an equally elegant teapot design.

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You’ll want to enable cookies for this adorable LEGO creation

Stewart Lamb Cromar is one of the nicest AFOLs you could ever hope to meet, and I was lucky to get to see the builder and his latest MOC at Skærbæk Fan Weekend last month. The creation, Milk and Cookies, of course features Stewart’s favorite theme – Fabuland – but rather than taking place at animal scale, the mice are feasting on 1:1 scale props. The brick-built chocolate milk carton is a the building highlight, but it’s the inclusion of human-sized LEGO mugs and inspired use off a paper bag as a ~~cookie~~ biscuit wrapper that make the build truly special.

The cheeky mice feature in this beautiful postcard illustration that Stewart commissioned from artist Kornél Pittmann that I was lucky to receive at the event.

As cheerful a person as Stewart is, I’ll never forget how dark his humor can go, as evidenced by his entry in our Dungeon Crossing contest earlier this year.

Soft serve toad with a cherry on top

We never get tired of seeing new additions to the Frogust lineup, even in October, and this spin from LEGO’s newest set designer, Nathan Don, is especially sweet. Dubbed ‘Cherritoad’, this frog gives the theme its just desserts with a whimsical design that wouldn’t be out of place in the Pokémon universe. For a LEGO model, the shaping and techniques are incredible. My favorite details are the wide cartoony eyes and the way the ‘cone’ scales upward (we’d love to see what the inside of this build looks like!). You can’t help but love this little guy!

You can read more about this build on Nathan’s Woomy World blog.

Not even Senshi could top this delicious dungeon meal

Back in my delving days, adventurers only ate the food they brought with them into a dungeon. Lately, a growing number of would-be heroes are following in the footsteps of tall-man Laios Touden and creating meals based on locally-sourced monster meat. LEGO builder Syrdarian joins the movement with this mouth-watering meal of sea serpent steak, complete with all the trimmings. Syrdarian spares no expense on the brick-built meal, pairing the delicious dish with a frothy mug of brick beer (love the shells and other bits for foam) and setting the mood with candles. The builder offers a fine LEGO fork, but no knife is necessary as the entree is quite flaky and easy to eat, considering it appears to be a cleverly arranged mosaic of elements that aren’t technically connected. With a meal this tasty, maybe I should consider eating monster meat after all.

Gourmet Taiwanese food builds in LEGO that look good enough to eat!

For the grand opening of a new LEGO Store in Tainan City, two of our favorite Taiwanese builders celebrated with delectable brick-built versions of local dishes. Hsinwei Chi, fan designer of the LEGO Ideas Jazz Quartet, created a trio of dishes. Starting from the top, we have shrimp rolls, a fried snack of shrimp, fish paste, and vegetables wrapped in tofu skin. Next, shrimp rice is an iconic bit of home cooking with shrimp, shallots, and white rice stir-fried with soy sauce and rice wine. Last is a mouth-watering bowl of danzai noodles, with roasted pork, mashed garlic, and shrimp sitting atop chewy wheat noodles in a deep, savory broth. In case you’re curious where those noodles come from, they’re yellow flex tubes exclusive to the DC Heroes Bumblebee Helicopter set.

James Zhan showed up with two dishes. First we have a pair of guan cai ban – Taiwanese “coffin bread” – in which a thick slice of white bread is hollowed out and fried and filled with a creamy stew. James employs a fun mix of parts for the stew texture, including white bananas, large clamshells, and technic ball peas.

Fittingly, our last dish is a dessert – beh teung guai, aka Taiwanese churros. The fried dough of glutinous rice flour is similar to Japanese mochi, with a chewy interior, and flavored with sugar and crushed peanuts. For both dishes, James elevates the presentation with elegant serving trays and leafy garnishes.

If these Tainan comfort foods leave you hungry for more LEGO cooking, check out our food archive for more delicious models. (Especially this street food noodle cart that seems like a great place to enjoy some of those danzai noodles!)

MOCs of the LEGO Masters: Summers siblings get on the LEGO Masters diet

Ian Summers is a wizard transforming LEGO elements into tiny objects that barely look like bricks at all. His miniature food is especially magical, like this sushi tray with translucent tuna wrapped gently in skirts of rice and rubber-wrapped maki aligned ever so neatly. Ian made these micro meals a couple of years back, and now a steady diet of LEGO ingenuity has landed the bricktacular builder and his sister Sage a spot on LEGO Masters season 5.

Is sushi not to your taste? Ian has you covered with this amazing diner food that looks a whole lot more wholesome than what they’re selling over at Krusty Burger.

We can’t wait to see what the Summers siblings cook up on the new season!

This is part of our series on MOCs of the Masters where we preview the work of the newest batch of LEGO Master contestants. Have a look at creations from other builders in the lineup.

Start your day the LEGO way

As any experienced LEGO builder will tell you, the inspiration for an original creation can come from just about anywhere… Looking at LEGO element in a new way. Seeing a LEGO part in the shape of an everyday object. Or perhaps just from the imagery suggested by a single word. Built as an entry to the 2025 Rogue Olympics, this creation, titled Charred, is Marion Weintraut’s answer to the theme “Temperature.” Just looking at this creation, I can practically smell the burnt toast. Or maybe I’m just having a seizure.
Feast your eyes on the Minifigure shovel used as the toaster’s control lever, or better yet the Baggage Tag lending its unmistakable shape to those delicious-looking cutting boards… A delicious part (usage) of this complete breakfast!

Corny builds as smooth as butter

Competition is cooking in a new Iron Builder duel between returning champ and prolific builder Duncan Lindbo and a fresh face on the scene, Ari “loafbuilds” Hytti. Per tradition, a challenger takes on one of four reigning Iron Builders to build models based around a surprise “seed part.” This time the seed part is the unikitty tail piece in bright light orange. “Allez Brick!”

Ari is a builder whose public LEGO creations have mostly focused on Bionicle and character builds, like his compelling entries in the 2024 Bio-Cup. You wouldn’t guess that from Ari’s first salvo, a brilliantly life-like pair of corn cobs that use 82 tails to create the truthy kernels, wrapped in complimentary sand green husks. It’s an ingenious use of the part that should serve Ari well in the competition.

It’s an iron builder tradition to respond to your competitor’s build with one that rhymes. Duncan ripostes with a playful scene of produce gone bad. Corn returns in miniature, with palm leaves making great husks at this scale. An appealing friend, perhaps resting his bones for a Fortnite, joins in the kitchen carnage. We can’t wait to see what these two builders cook up next!

Engage the forward flavor!

It’s been a while since a LEGO build has made me this hungry. Maybe that’s because I’m writing over lunch, or maybe it’s because Maxx Davidson‘s “Fish & Ships” is so delightful. Maxx is no stranger to creating tasty-looking ensembles involving French fries, but I’ve never seen a meal this swooshable before. Each part of the meal lends itself naturally to the ship, even the collapsible paper container for the ketchup, which serves as a thruster. The fries (sorry, chips) are simple but easily recognizable (and perfectly golden, as all good fries should be), while a series of irregularly placed elements like the “rock with claws” piece give the breading on the fish a tasty-looking crispy texture. Hungry? Better get yours soon; they’re going fast.

LEGO noodles fit for a ninja

After an intense day of training for ninja exams, nothing satisfies like a bowl of miso ramen with chashu pork and all the trimmings. This life-size ramen bowl in LEGO from H.Y. Leung, inspired by the signature dish from Ichiraku Ramen in the Naruto anime, looks delicious enough to slurp up. From the perfect marbling of the chashu pork, to the ripples in the opaque broth, to the prominent jelly-textured egg, to the careful arrangement of bamboo shoots and spring onion, Leung’s creation is the idealized form of a bowl of ramen. The naruto fish cakes employ a novel technique of red whips on 3×5 cloud plates. The ornamentation and kanji wringing on the bowl are reproduced beautifully in bricks. Leung’s best trick is the chopsticks, cleverly suspended and decorated with rune tiles. Even more impressive, they hide a play feature, sliding up and down as they pull noodles from the bowl!

Have you had a fruitful LEGO summer?

If there’s one thing you should know about me in this wonderful LEGO hobby, it’s that I love a good brick-built anthropomorph! So this trio of summertime fruits getting their chill on by Palixa And The Bricks really speaks to my core. First up is an adorable watermelon slice relaxing in a lawn chair. There’s nothing like a refreshing beverage to cut through that summer heat, and there’s no doubt this little dude needs to hydrate. While simple, the Converse-style shoes here are everything! But if you desire something more technical, the design of that LEGO folding chair is absolutely wicked.

We’re just getting warmed up. Check out the other two summer fruits below!

Two hot takes on the dog days of summer

In a tradition old as time, Iron Builder competitions see two top builders in the LEGO community face off with a serious of dueling creations based around a “seed part” that must be featured in each build. As summer 2024 comes to an end, two fresh-faced challengers vie for the title of Iron Builder in “Battle Red Cauldron.” After coming out swinging with a cool Harley Quinn, Eann “Miscellanabuilds” McCurdy turns up the heat with slice of backyard life. Cauldrons are cleverly employed as a propane tank for the grill, while also appearing as chimney and dogfood dish. It’s the brick-built pets who steal the show. Their personality, combined with the slick studs-free setting, evoke a stop-action cartoon more than a LEGO model.

Maven of microscale Geneva D ripostes by doubling down on the dog – hot dog, that is – with a life-size frank made from interlocking cauldrons. Minifig arms make for surprisingly effective mustard, and Wolverine claws in green, used by Eann for grass, return here as relish. A pair of cauldrons make for a convincing ketchup lid, but it’s the recessed cauldron representing a tomato on the label that scores the knockout punch.