Christmas is all about spending time with your loved ones and I always try to not fall into the "Christmas fever" full of stress, rushing around and just worrying to fit all tasks into the last days 🙈
So, when it comes to Christmas food, I don't want to stress myself too much and prefer something that I wouldn't need all day to prepare and something that would still look nice and eye-catching. Specially, because my family is not vegan - so I put some effort to show them that we don't eat only boring food and salads 😁
I found this idea of snack-Christmas trees on Pinterest (much of my food comes from Pinterest 😃) and it looked so cute that I had to try it out myself.
I made this snack with bread, vegan ham, cucumber and some red pepper-star on top. You can use whatever decoration you want to put on top instead of pepper, such as star from cheese, tomato, carrot, etc. It also doesn't have to be star - it was really difficult to cut out the shapes of star (I would recommend to use cheese as it should be easier to cut out desired shape) but the stars look super nice so I tried my best during the process to not ruin them 😁
You could also add extra ingredients at the bottom of the tree (on top of the bread), I feel that some plant-based cheese would fit perfectly here.
This snack would also really fit for children (they just would have to be careful with the toothpick which holds the snack-tree). Or, I'm sure, each family member/friend would appreciate your efforts and would be surprised of this snack!
You will need:
For 12 one-bite snacks
- 3 slices of chosen bread in the shape of square
- 6 slices of vegan ham, also preferably in the shape of square
- 1 cucumber (I would recommend the long ones)
- 1/4 or half of a red pepper
- 12 toothpicks
Preparation
- Cut the cucumber in half (if it is the long one).
- With a peeler, cut the cucumber (one half) into stripes. Push the peeler hard so that the stripes would be thicker. You can also do this carefully with a knife. Make at least 12 stripes or more as some of them might break during the process of making the snack-tree.
- Cut each slice of bread into four equal squares.
- Cut the ham slices in half.
- Now prepare the little stars from red pepper (or cheese). Carefully cut out the shapes of stars with a sharp knife. I ended up using that sharp paper cutting knife and it was much better than a simple knife.
Or, as mentioned, simply use stars from cheese as it would be a bit easier to cut out. - Now place a toothpick in each of the bread squares that you cut.
- Bend a slice of ham (also the one that you already cut in half - use one of the half) so that it becomes a square and put it on the toothpick, on top of the bread.
- Take a slice of the cucumber and put it on the toothpick as you can see in the photo - it is really hard to explain in words so best is to simply recreate how it looks 😁
- The last step is to put the star from cheese or pepper on top.
Do the same with the rest of the snacks.
The recipe is a bit difficult to explain in words, so I mainly share this as an idea for a snack which you can also modify or recreate for Christmas. 🎄