Bouquets need fresh fruit.
If you are having a few friends over for lunch, a bridal shower or a family holiday meal, a fruit bouquet makes your table look like a celebration. Fruit cut and assembled to resemble flowers is festive, artistic and provides fun with a nutritious bouquet. A fruit bouquet is a collection of cut or whole fruit placed on bamboo or wooden skewer sticks for the flower stem. Arrangements require play dough, a head of lettuce or florist foam placed in a container to hold the fruit sticks.
Fruit Preparation
Gather fruits like apples, oranges, pineapples, kiwi, strawberries and bananas. Core the apples and cut them into wedges. Keep the orange rind in place and cut the oranges into wedges. Remove the outer dark skin of the pineapple. Cut the edges of the pineapple to maintain a cylinder shape. Cut the pineapple into round slices 1/2 inch thick. Remove the dark outer layer of the kiwi fruit and slice into 1/2 inch thick circles or into wedges. Wash the strawberries and remove stems and leaves. Peel the bananas and cut them into 1-inch cylinders. If you have melons, use a melon baller to make small spheres of melon.
Fruit Flowers
Using a flower shaped metal cookie cutter, cut each pineapple slice. Use the circumference of a peanut butter cup candy and cut out the center of the pineapple slice. Place the peanut butter cup in the hole. Push a wooden stick through the edge of the pineapple, candy and pineapple to form the flower. Make an exotic flower from a skewered slice of kiwi with the sliced edge showing as the flower. Slice the rind from the orange wedge halfway down the wedge. Curl the end of the cut rind into the orange pulp attached to the rind. Place a wooden stick in the other end of the orange wedge. Grapes and melon balls can enhance flowers as the centers or as part of the "greenery" stems.
Chocolate-Dipped Fruit
Place sticks through the stem end of strawberries and dip the berry in dark chocolate. Place berries side by side around the circumference of the container. Dip more strawberries in milk chocolate and add as the second layer in the container. Dip strawberries in white chocolate for the next layer. Finish the top with one red strawberry. Apple and orange wedges look exotic with the cut edges dipped in chocolate with one end of the wedge pushed on the stick. Strawberries and fruit wedges with piped white or dark chocolate in a scroll design or stripes look festive.
Other Ideas
Dip strawberries in chocolate. Let it set up and then dip the tip of the chocolate strawberry in white chocolate. Food coloring added to white chocolate provides a variety of colors for dipping fruit. After dipping the fruit in chocolate, roll the fruit in colored sprinkles, coconut or toasted coconut, crushed candy bars, peppermint candy or toffee morsels.
Tags: into wedges, white chocolate, dark chocolate, dipping fruit, fruit bouquet, inch thick, orange wedge