How to make a flower bouquet on focaccia bread
flowers, Food and Drink
Focaccia bread flowers are easier to make than they look.
Here, I’ve used the natural shape of the orange and yellow bell pepper slices to make a sort of daisy with caper centers.
I then turned short strips of peppers into petals to make an another shape of flower. I used strips of pickled red onion in the same way.
With the onion, a half of a black olive is used for the center of the coneflower-ish bloom. For the orange pepper, black olives sliced lengthwise become the base of the bachelor button type flower.
Roses are a bit more complicated. I started with a dark red, sun dried tomato center, and made the rose petals from jarred red peppers that I cut into petal shapes, then spiraled around the tomato. Narrow strips in the center, wider at the edges.
The greenery ties it all together, with rosemary and thyme as twigs and stems. I used asparagus cut lengthwise to make leaves and stems too. Green olives are used throughout and the finished piece is generously filled in with lots of thyme, then I spritzed the bread with olive oil and sprinkled it all over with Italian herbs.
One flower that didn’t work as well, but tasted good was the mushroom one. It was a center slice of the stump as the center, then petals formed around that center from the slices of the cap. The color was simply too neutral to stand out. I could’ve done the same look with cherry or grape tomatoes and it would’ve turned out better.
The design can also be very simple, like this mini serving with an herb heart and caper posy that I made for a guest who had food allergies and couldn’t eat the various peppers on the bigger bread.
I made my own dough in the bread maker, then flattened it out on a sheet pan for these. It’s pretty thin, for a crunchy crust, but you could use a smaller pan for a thicker, chewier result. I made mine so thin because I wanted more “canvas” to create flowers.
I can never have enough flowers.
The nature inspired artwork
Which so far, hasn’t worked out like I’d hoped it would. Having two viruses at the end of the year took away major chunks of my time intended for packing.
