Pink Tulip Flowers - From White Radish (3-Mar-2012)

When you want to make a beautiful vegetable garnish, white radish is the best veggie that you can use.
It's firm, but not too hard to be carved. And its white color gives you flexibility to make it into your preferred color (yes you can always use food coloring which will be easily found out in baking stores or supermarket).

With white radish, so far I have made rose flowers and tulip flowers.
Making tulip flower is much easier than making the rose flower, as you don't need to really carve the petals.
What you need is just peel off the radish and cut the white radish's edges using a knife, to make the radish into pentagonal shape (with 5 flat surfaces). And then cut down every corner 5 edges from top to bottom center part of the radish (so you will get five petals). You just estimate the flower's height. One medium size radish can produce 8 - 10 flowers (from the tiny small flower to the biggest one).

When the flowers are ready, put in a cold water for 4 hours or more to firm up the texture and spread up the petals. What I do normally is put it in a container with tap water (as people will not eat the flowers I believe - raw white radish taste is not too nice :)) and keep it in a fridge over night. By putting in fridge, we can prepare it long time before the day and avoid it to become spoiled because of the bacterias which is much easily growing in a room temperature.

Voilaaa.. the flowers are ready.

I'm thinking to make the video version on how to make this carving, so that it will be much easier for you to see and know on how to make these flowers... Hmm..I'll upload it ASAP, ok.. :)

 

As mentioned, we could use food coloring to make it merrier and more interesting. This time I used pink color and paint it using a small brush to the flower's petal edges (outer side).

And here how I arranged the flowers. I used spring onion as the background leaves.

Below is one of Indonesian traditional meal set . If you are not an Indonesian, you could make the same, just mould up white rice (you could use Japanese rice or mix the normal white rice with sticky rice) using any shapes of tin you want (e.g.: car for your son's party, etc). And put the dishes surrounding the rice, and decorate with pretty garnishes. You could put it as a centerpiece on your dinner table. I'm sure your guests will be amazed of it and your party will be so unforgettable.. :) :) :)

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