Plan Ahead and Prep Early

If you are planning a few pieces for a buffet or a single piece to garnish a meal it helps to do a lot of the work the day before. Shop at least two days before your event so that you can concentrate on the decorating work. All the flowers can be carved and left over night in ice water. In fact, most will improve overnight by opening up to look more like real flowers. This is especially true of scallions, leek flowers, onion flowers and radish roses. I have on many an occasion carved the flowers even two days before with no loss in quality as long as the flowers are kept in water in a refrigerator.

Big turnips flowers can be left in water with food color to create the orange, red, blue and yellow flowers seen in the photos on this blog. Before use they should be drained then lightly rinsed and drained well again to remove excess color. You will probably want to handle these with plastic gloves on to avoid dying your fingers all colors.

Leaves made of leaks and scallions are also best cut the day before as they will develop a more natural curl overnight as well.
Bowls and vases made from hard pumpkins or calabash can be carved the day before and wrapped in plastic wrap until needed. Small vases made with acorn squash will keep particularly well overnight. All hard vegetables used in this way can be rubbed with a light coat of cooking oil before use to give a nice shine and a fresh look.
Softer items like watermelon should be carved the day needed as they don't hold up as well and give up a lot of juice.

The flowers can be arranged an hour or two before use and should if possible be kept in a refrigerator until use as well. Once removed from the fridge it helps to occasionally spray them lightly with water to keep them fresh. Not that they look really bad if allowed to dry, sometimes they look quite interesting even the next day after use!

Carving Designs Onto the Face of A Large Squash

The large size carving sets that are available come with various cookie cutter type templates for carving designs onto the face of a pumpkin or calabash type squash. These metal shapes can be gently tapped into the face of the melon or squash used to a depth of about 1/4". This can be accomplished using the back of a large chef's knife or a light mallet of some sort. After the template is sunk into the vegetable one can begin to remove the "meat" of the vegetable around it. The picture above shows the result of using a double happiness template. Digging between the tighter parts of the design requires a little care and the use of the smaller knives and chisels included in the carving set but if the template is kept in place until the cutting is almost complete no real damage to the design is likely to happen.

This image shows yet another Asian design made using a template cutter from the larger carving set. These sets also contain a wonderful selection of "chisels" in many shapes and sizes allowing a limitless amount of creative freedom and experimentation. 

To accomplish a similar result without purchasing such a carving set a free hand design can be cut into the face of the vegetable and this can be carved simply with the paring knife and/or bird's beak knife recommended on the tools page. The image below depicts my first ever freehand design. You can see that one does not have to be an accomplished artist  to achieve decent results when doing this work. People see only the big picture when presented by a buffet and are not judging the details. This has been observed many times by myself when folks have been around the food table for quite some time and suddenly realize that the flowers in the centerpiece are not flowers at all but carved vegetables and even then they find it hard to believe that most of them are simply turnips!

In this image the "petals" of the flowers were made using a small melon ball cutter twisted around but not allowed to go too deep. Everything else was carved using the paring knife freehand. Other tools used in this image were a channel knife and one fluted chisel for the edging around the design.