We had been challenged to use our creativity to come up with a modern take on the traditional Halloween Jacko Lantern, by using other fruit to carve and decorate for Halloween. This is a great way to make some healthy Halloween party food, to balance out some of the other sweet treats that little ones may be having at this time of year. The “spooky” fruit was lots of fun to make and eat for my kids and made a fun seasonal table display a long with lots of sparkly Halloween sequins and glitter.
I took the children to the supermarket to choose our selection and we came out with:
- Melon
- Apples
- Bananas
- Peppers
- Satsumas
- Dates
- Celery
- Small Pineapple Pieces
- Large Pumpkin
We decided to make a table display out of all of these. It was our first time carving fruit, so although not the most advanced fruits carvings I am quite pleased with it.
We decided to place some black and silver glittery scarfs down on the table to set the scene for our Spooky fruit display, and we also sprinkled black and silver shiny sequins and stars. The boys wanted to sprinkle the pineapple pieces and some hundreds and thousands too – why not!
Although the challenge is more about other fruit, we couldn’t resist having a pumpkin too! We decided not to carve it though as I wanted to try out an idea I had seen on the Imagination Tree – Pumpkin Drip Art Painting – although we should have added more paint really to get the proper effect (We started running out of paint!!!) it still looks cool 🙂 We also sprinkled the sequins and stars onto the paint of the pumpkin so it stuck to it as it dried.
The other decoration we made for the table was to paint letters onto stones with nail varnish and paint to spell out Halloween. (Mr T recognised the letter H! So proud!)
Onto the fruit! We carved simple faces into the melon, apples and pepper. We did a more scary angry face for the pepper and the others are smiley. We also made a face on the bananas using googly eyes and tissue paper for a surprised mouth. This was Mr T’s favourite fruit character!
I also wanted to try a simple idea that I had spotted earlier on Pinterest – making Pumpkin designs out of Oranges or Satsumas and celery pieces. This is so easy and looks quite cute.
Mr Z and Mr R love satsumas, so this is a sneaky way to try and persuade them to eat a bit of celery as well!
So here is the finished Spooky Fruit table!
As soon as it was finished and the boys had admired it for about 5 seconds they dived straight in to start eating up all the fruit!
