How to Carve a Watermelon into a Lotus Blossom Serving Bowl

I agreed some weeks back to take on a challenge from the National Watermelon Promotion Board to design and carve out a watermelon to serve fruit. Now, if you Google "watermelon carving", you'll come up with an array of images so daunting in their complexity as to terrify the amateur melon carver entirely. So I decided to focus on ease of preparation... and to keep myself tranquil and calm while working, I thought it would be nice to meditate on the perfect, lovely lotus blossom for inspiration.

The finished version (above) features watermelon and a few honeydew melon balls, but you could mix it up with any kind of fruit pieces. To make a fancier presentation, you could stand the lotus in a shallow bowl of water surrounded by floating candles.


Here's how I did it. First, I marked and cut guidelines to divide the melon into six wedges. I also cut guidelines for the 12 petals. I should have made them shallower; it would be best if they don't cut right through the hard part of the rind.

Then I cut a slice off one end large enough to act as the base of the lotus (see top), and a second, thinner slice off the other end. This made it easy to slide a knife around the inside, top and bottom, so as to be able to pull out the core (pictured above).


To form the petals, I cut out a W shape across the top of each of the six sections. I looked at some pictures of lotuses online to get an idea of how their petals curve.


Then I shaved the green part of the rind off every second petal. I carved the sides of each pink petal back at an angle so they would slant in a bit. This also made them white below and pink on top, which is how many lotus blossoms look.

If you wanted to be very fancy indeed, you could make all the petals pink and white. However, the bowl would be less sturdy.


Remember that very thin slice I cut off one end? If you check the third photo, you'll see that I squared the edges, and in the photo above I'm fitting it onto the bottom of my lotus bowl so it will show off the fruit piece better and keep them from leaking juice out the bottom. (If you were really worried about leaking juice, you could line the inside with plastic wrap or a small bowl too.)


Now the melon baller comes into play. I used it to turn the core into tasty little balls, but you might prefer to cut it into quarters lengthwise and then into wedge-shaped slices.


Finally, you assemble the lotus by standing the flower on the base (inserting toothpicks as needed to guarantee stability) and fill it with cut fruit. Your lotus blossom serving bowl is complete!

Grateful thanks for the lovely photos to Niamh Malcolm.