Tis' the season to get festive and have fun with your food presentations! Whether you're hosting a party this holiday or just enjoying a cozy night in with your loved ones, a platter that's loaded with all sorts of creamy cheeses, fruits and crackers is bound to impress everyone. I love putting cheese platters and charcuterie boards together for holidays and parties. Not only the colours are inviting, they are also easy to assemble and variations are endless. 

Here's a guide on what you'll need to make this holiday charcuterie/cheese board:

A Guide to Create a Holiday Charcuterie/Cheese Board

For this Cheese-mas tree platter, I used cheeses from Cheeseworld.ca's ultimate gift box that came with a good mix of both hard and soft cheese such as, Président Compté, Petit Saint-Paulin, Societé Roquefort, Président Camembert and Président goat cheese. To make the snowflakes, I cut the shape using my cookie cutter onto Compté cheese. Compté is a hard cheese that makes cutting intricate designs easy without loosing the shape. For the big star, I used Le Petit St Paulin as it has a large area to cut out the shape. With this type of semi-soft cheese, I needed to be gentle and careful when releasing the cheese from the cutter.

When assembling the tree, I started from the bottom and worked my way up to the top. I followed in the order of meat, cheese, fruits to separate different colours for visual interest. For meats, I used prosciutto as the bottom layer and crunched them up like a long piece of garland. I like to fold my salamis twice and placed them side by side of each other for dimension. Fruits like strawberries, blueberries and green grapes are great choices for adding bright and festive colours to the platter. 

And finally, for the tree stump, I used prezet-like biscuit sticks from Twigz. I love that these biscuit sticks give the platter a different texture. 

And that's it! This is how you assemble a cheese-mas tree platter this holiday season. If you give this a try, be sure to share your pictures with me on IG @tingandthings_ or use hashtag #diywithting. I'd love to see your version!

Have a happy holiday!