I started making the edible arrangement by stuffing a box with some styrofoam. It was a pain to clean up those little white balls off the knife, so don't use the knife you want to cut the fruit with! All that aside, I sliced up the pineapple first. The cookie cutters cut through the core easily, but they mashed through the softer parts of the pineapple a bit. I used kitchen shears to tidy up the hearts and flowers. I used bamboo skewers to hold the pineapple pieces.
Next, I washed and lined up the grapes and strawberries. I had 42 good strawberries from two pounds. By the end, I wished I had more.
I melted bakers semisweet chocolate and put it in a juice glass, and dipped about half of the strawberries. They sure look yummy! These berries were all nicely shaped.
I put the lettuce in a bowl I had made from pottery. The terra cotta pot (background of above photo) did not look big enough once I had all the fruit out. The bowl I used fit the head of lettuce perfectly! I toothpicked in some of the parsley. In retrospect, kale would have worked better, since it is a much larger leaf, and it would fill in the gaps much better. I cut the canteloupe in half and used a melon baller to make the centres of the flowers.
When inserting the fruit, I cut most of the sticks almost in half and I started at the bottom, with the larger items - the flowers.
I used a Pampered Chef corrugated knife to slice up the rest of the melon into wedges. I hadn't planned to use it, but there were a few too many grape sticks and not enough strawberries to fill in all the gaps and the melon worked in nicely. I'm pleased with the results. You can still see some of the sticks, but Mom won't mind!
Some of the melon wedges got cut in half to look nice sticking out at the bottom.
Here's more of a top-down view.
Happy Mother's Day!
