Becoming a Steward: food ideas

One of my very good friends is getting married this fall and we celebrated her wedding shower today with a Luau! One of my bridesmaid duties was to create a fruit display for her and I was so excited that she asked me to do it!

She sent me two photos (a palm tree platter and a pineapple tree with monkeys) that she really liked to give me some inspiration and set me loose to create something. This was by far my favorite fruit adventure yet. I loved this display more than anything I have done in the past, even more than the Sesame Street fruit and veggie trays that I made in February for our son's birthday party.

This is the entire display which included a pineapple tree with a bride and groom monkey and "coconuts" (kiwi), fruit bowls made from the rinds of a watermelon, two pineapples (one cut vertically, one cut horizontally), and two honeydew melons. I added whole bunches of bananas, green and purple grapes and strawberries to decorate around the fruit bowls, a palm tree platter, banana dolphins eating grapes and a bowl of fruit salad.

Pineapple tree and monkeys. The fruit needed to make this exact display is 4 pineapples, 2 mangoes, 2 oranges, 1 lemon, 1 tangerine, 2 grapes, 1 bunch of miniature bananas, and kiwis. I used wooden bamboo skewers and toothpicks to assemble. The most important part of this display is your base/dowel rods. This is a VERY heavy tree and the monkeys add weight as well. You need a sturdy and heavy base and a sturdy rod (or two).

The pineapple parrots were my favorite part of the display and they couldn't have been easier to make. The watermelon bowl is filled with chunks of fresh pineapple and some bing cherries.

I also loved how this little bowl looked. Once I started cutting up fruit for my fruit salad I couldn't stand to just compost all of the "skins" of the fruit. This gave me inspiration to use them as bowls to hold my fruit. This pineapple was cut vertically (you need a very sharp knife) and I added a orange peel flower.

Honeydew melon was filled with cherries and you get a glimpse of the banana dolphins in the background.

Close-up of the banana dolphins.

Using fruit is a wonderful way to bring life to your food table, add to your theme decorations and make eating healthy foods even more fun for your guests.

Enjoy!!

I have had so much fun sharing our Sesame Street Party on the blog and facebook! It has finally given me the push into the world of Pinterest and I am excited to discover a new way to challenge my creativity and party planning. We have another first birthday coming up in May for Baby #2 and I thought I wanted to share Baby #1's first birthday party from last year which was UNO themed! We had so much fun planning and throwing this party!! I love the many hats I get to wear as a mom and all the different opportunities I am presented with to get creative and do something I love!

Our kitchen set the stage for our main party area and I decorated using a combination of decks UNO cards (both retro styles and modern), handmade UNO card banners and signs and color coordinated foods and balloons. I tried to make sure everything was either White, Black, Red, Blue, Green or Yellow to stay true to our colorful theme!

This was my favorite decoration, our faux UNO birthday cake! I wanted the birthday boy to have a candle to blow out and a nice decoration for his photos but without the sugary overload. So his "cake" was made using scraps of cardboard and taped into circle tiers. I hot glued retro UNO cards on to each tier in color sets with some WILD card mixed in and a candle on top. It doubled as our table centerpiece.

Here is me admiring our UNO card veggie platter and trying to get the popcorn popped !

I cut out letters and used bright colored paper to make a homemade birthday banner of UNO cards as well as made some large cards out of poster paper. These aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I really enjoy our party decorations being a mix of store bought/hand made. I love the idea of using a cricut for this which would be less time consuming and more "professional" looking than mine. So if you have a cricut I would say go for it! If not, I think the old pencil and scissors works just fine too :)

We served almost all plant based foods and I made up several "trays" with our colorful snacks. I made my goal to be to use as little disposable products as possible. I did buy the blue takeout containers from Dollar Tree (3 for $1.00) to make my UNO popcorn caddies.

I really wanted to highlight his first year in photos so that our guests could look at how much he has grown in this first year! I edited his monthly photos to Black and White and taped them onto bright colored papers, using the UNO cards to label how old he was in each photo and this decorated our drink buffet. We served water with lemon and lime slices. Very refreshing and super simple. Nothing beats ice cold water!

Our family each had a UNO shirt that I made using the freezer paper method and some paints. I wanted a number 2 card on mine since I was preggo with baby #2 and my husband had a 3 card. The birthday boy's was the back of the card design.