Tutorial: Carrot Butterfly

This tutorial is to make a carrot butterfly, which can be used as a cute little embellishment for food.  Be warned, this isn’t quite as easy as it looks, and may take several attempts to get right! I’m happy to admit that the first one I made took me 5 attempts!

All you need for this is a decent sized carrot and a sharp knife.

Start by cleaning and peeling the carrot, then trim one side so that it is flat. Cut a triangular groove into the carrot opposite the flat side, as shown below.

Lay the flat side of the carrot on the chopping board, then cut into the carrot as if you are cutting a thin slice, but do not go all the way through.

Make another cut next to it to slice the whole thing off.  You should be left with a double slice which is joined at the bottom.

Make two cuts all the way through your piece of carrot as shown below.

Cut a small triangle from the other side as shown.

Now comes the tricky part! Open out the butterfly ‘wings’ and bend up the the bottom of the antennae section until you can pop it between the wings. This should hold them open.  This step is where it usually went wrong for me, so good luck!

If you aren’t going to use the butterfly straight away, put it gently into a glass of cold water and pop it in the fridge.  This will keep it fresh and also help to stiffen it up a little.  When using my butterfly, I mounted it on a piece of cucumber to hold it more securely.  You can do this by cutting a slit into the cucumber and gently pushing the bottom of the butterfly into it

Here is the finished butterfly before it went into the lunchbox.  You can use this in any way you can think of; it doesn’t have to be put in cucumber. You could also try using radish instead of carrot for the butterfly.

Do let me know if you try out this idea, I’d love to see your attempts, and any other ideas you may have for these butterflies!

Grace