Make a Fruit Bouquet

When Allrecipes member Kiele Briscoe sent us her idea for making a fresh fruit bouquet, we knew it was a perfect project for a semi-handy, intrepid home cook with a can-do attitude.

Our conclusion: You can make a beautiful, colorful fruit bouquet as an applause-worthy gift. It takes time. It takes a little work. It will cost you a little bit. It helps (a lot!) to have a friend to give you a hand. But you can make it yourself, with all your favorite fruits, and it will be gorgeous, and you will be famous.

If your vase opening is small, cut pieces off the foam ball with a serrated bread knife so it will fit into the vase. The round ball of foam will give your bouquet a nice shape.

Fasten the lettuce leaves into the ball with toothpicks to hide all the foam.

The next step is fun and messy. Using the cookie cutters, cut 1-inch slices from the watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, and pineapple. You don't need to peel anything, since you're cutting shapes from the slices.

Cut out pink hearts from the watermelon, and cut flowers out of the cantaloupe, pineapple, and honeydew. Cut little balls out of each fruit with the melon baller to use for centers. Cutting the pineapple is a challenge. You have to push that cutter firmly to cut through the fibrous fruit.

In addition, cut a lot of skewers in half with scissors, and make half-size skewers out of strawberries, grapes, and various melon balls, to help fill out the bouquet. Core the strawberries so everything will be easy to eat.

Poke skewers firmly into the foam ball through the lettuce. Space the skewers evenly, putting tall ones towards the back. Fill in with half-size skewers. Thread the cut fruit onto the skewers. Squint, consider, and move a skewer here and a pink heart there, until you are satisfied with the arrangement. Fill in some more fruit as your artistic sense tells you. There are no rules, so have fun!

It's easier to push the skewers in first and then thread on the fruit, to keep things from falling apart.

Kiele Briscoe, our original submitter, noted you should store the finished bouquet in the refrigerator until it's time to present it. It could take as long as an hour to cut out and assemble all the fruit skewers, so keep the lettuce-covered foam ball and vase in the refrigerator while you make the flowers. 

As we made our sample bouquet here at Allrecipes, we got comments in the beginning like "what the heck are you doing?" But they ended with "isn’t that cute?" and "wow! That looks great!" We were greatly encouraged by our first efforts and hope you can learn from our mistakes. Now, go make one of these for your mom.