day 361: pineapple flowers

the flower ... in progress, takes 24 hours for them to harden and mould in the flower shape!

day 361 and i have been SO desperate to try these flowers to see if they actually work for mere mortals!  the picture below has been trending on pinterest and i know why, aren't they amazing!

the beautiful sunflower made of pineapple .. photo sourced from here

the picture comes from the duitang website but apart from that i can tell you very little as i think it is written all in han (?) and google wouldn't translate it for me! so i went to google image search and found a how-to by brown-eyed baker that was totally in-depth and right up my alley as the images from here went perfectly with the words from here.  as such, both tutorials are pinned to my party ideas board on pinterest :)

you start with a pineapple, take the outer green layer off, then using a spoon or similar take divots out all around the pineapple so it no longer has a uniform flat face.  then slice very thin pieces of pineapple and put into a low (~100 degrees celcius/225F) oven for 30 minutes.  you then flip them over and bake for another 30ish minutes until they are dry.  take them out of the oven and mould them into a muffin tray where they are left to harden overnight.

my holed out pineapple, it was at this stage i had real doubts!

still the doubts as my pineapple slices weren't as thin as i though they should be

doubts starting to abate as they seemed to be looking more flowery now!

and into the muffin tin they went for 24 hours of hardening

outcome: my pineapple was so juicy i just wanted to eat it but for the sake of art i ate a mandarin and left the pineapple ... so pleased i did and the result is still pending ... more tomorrow after they have dried and hopefully hardened in place.  looking good so far though :)

my sincere thanks to the duitang website for the totally inspiring photos that went so well with the words from brown-eyed baker ... together these two websites made the perfect tutorial for making these pineapple sunflowers.

and because i am a proud mama, i thought i would show you what the peeps baked today, venus transit cookies ... all by themselves, in honour of venus making its transit across the sun :)

ben and pollyanna's venus transit cookies