My Fruity Valentine

At the beginning of the school year (during a moment of weakness), I voluntarily agreed to be the room mom for my son's class. One of the responsibilities of being a room mom is organizing classroom parties. My son's teacher recently approached me with a request for the upcoming Valentine's Day party - please provide fruit, lots of fruit. So here are some hopefully cool ways to serve fruit to a bunch of first graders on Valentine's Day.

Idea #1: Using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, simply cut out the shape in a slice of watermelon...



You can also cut out a heart in a different type of fruit (in this case cantaloupe) and place it inside the watermelon cutout. My little guy thought this looked, and I quote, "awesome"!



Idea #2: You can psych the kids out by giving each of them heart-shaped candy boxes filled with grapes...



Idea #3: What child doesn't like things that come on a stick? Again using the heart-shaped cutter, you can make fruit kebabs.



Idea #4: My husband thinks this is cheating because it involves chocolate, but I still think it's a good idea. First cut out 'x' and 'o' shapes in different types of fruit (I used cantaloupe and bananas) and then lightly dip them in melted chocolate - yum!



Good luck to all the other room moms out there - hope this helps!

Orange You Glad You're a Pumpkin?

A few years ago I was asked to provide fruit for a fall harvest party at my son's school. I thought I would have some fun with it by dressing the fruit up in a "costume". See if you can guess the disguise.

I started off with these...



and then added some of these...



to make these...pumpkins!



Here is a how-to guide for creating "Orange Pumpkin Cups". By the way, this is my first attempt at a tutorial, so please bear with me!

Step 1: Cut about 1/4 off the top of the orange.



Step 2: Scoop out all of the flesh from the inside of the orange and the top. Note - this will be super messy, much like cleaning out the seeds from a pumpkin.



Try to get the inside as clean as possible. You might need to use something sharper than a spoon to get all of the little bits out.



Step 3: Cut a small hole in the top of the orange.



Make sure the hole is not too big - it will need to be snug enough to hold a gummy bear. Remove the little stem part and discard.



Step 4: Use a black marker to draw a pumpkin face on the front of the orange. Tuck a green gummy bear through the hole in the top of the orange so that it partially sticks out.



Step 5: Fill the cup with anything you like - I always use mandarin oranges.



That's it - hope this tutorial helped!