Easter Fruit Salad

This Easter Fruit Salad with sweetened whipped cottage cheese dip is the cutest addition to an Easter buffet. Serve in adorable jars or on your prettiest platter.

Salads for specific holidays are becoming a hobby of mine. It all started with Thanksgiving salad, which became very popular and snowballed into Thanksgiving fruit salad.

Naturally, I tried my hand at salad for Christmas and Christmas fruit salad as well, and those were popular, too!

So this Spring, I’ve already brought you Easter salad, and you can definitely guess what is coming next, can’t you?

This Easter fruit salad recipe with sweetened whipped cottage cheese dip can be served in adorable little jars like you see here.

Or, serve it as a bowl of fruit salad, or arranged on your prettiest platter as an Easter fruit tray or fruit plate for Easter, with skewers to dunk into a bowl of dip.

Just like all of my holiday salads, it certainly isn’t meant to ONLY be enjoyed on that specific holiday (just like I wouldn’t hesitate to make shrimp deviled eggs in the middle of the summer).

Think of this more like a Spring fruit salad idea that you can enjoy any time you want this season. It’d also be right at home on a Mother’s Day brunch menu, alongside bacon in oven and vegetarian quiche.

What goes into this Easter fruit salad recipe?

• cottage cheese – I used small curd cottage cheese, but since you’re blitzing it in a food processor until it’s smooth, large curd (which I love in both a cottage cheese breakfast bowl and a cottage cheese lunch bowl) would work just as well.
• honey – This is used to sweeten the dip. Maple syrup or agave nectar are good substitutes if you don’t want to use honey.
• vanilla – Classic vanilla extract is perfect for this Easter fruit idea. Or, for an even more special touch, you could use vanilla bean paste, like I use for my frozen yogurt pie.
• melon – watermelon, cantaloupe and/or honeydew all work for this fruit salad for Easter! I like to use a few different kinds so I have a variety of colors.
• grapes – I used black seedless grapes, but red or green work just as well.
• pineapple – I love the tart taste of fresh pineapple in pineapple sangria, as well as this Easter fruit salad recipe!

How to make the whipped cottage cheese dip:

A lot of people don’t like cottage cheese due to it’s lumpy texture. I totally understand that, but I consider it a superfood because it’s loaded with so much protein and calcium, so it’s a fridge staple at my house.

And just like how the cottage cheese melts away into my cottage cheese lasagna and best veggie lasagna recipe, you will NOT be able to tell the finished dip for this Easter fruit salad recipe is made with cottage cheese.

Simply add the cottage cheese to a food processor along with the vanilla and honey and blend it until it’s completely smooth (this may take 30 seconds to a minute).

By the time it’s done, the cottage cheese for your Easter fruit tray will look and taste more like sweetened yogurt.

You can also make yogurt fruit dip for this fruit salad for Easter!

That being said, if you wanted to use plain Greek yogurt in place of the cottage cheese for this fruit salad for Easter, you definitely can. I recommend full fat Greek yogurt because it has the best flavor and mouthfeel.

If you use yogurt, you don’t need to use a food processor at all, since it’s already smooth. Simply stir the vanilla and honey into the yogurt in a bowl until everything is well combined for this dip for Easter fruit kabobs.

If you have extra plain Greek yogurt after making yogurt fruit dip for this Easter fruit salad recipe, I highly recommend my Greek yogurt pasta sauce!

Serve this fruit salad recipe for Easter in jars, as a fruit charcuterie board, or on your prettiest platter.

Since Easter is such a special Spring celebration, I decided to serve this Easter fruit salad and dip in small jars, kind of like jarcuterie.

I simply spooned some dip into the bottom of each jar and then threaded the fruit onto small skewers and placed a few kabobs in each jar for this Easter fruit idea.

This Easter fruit kabob serving method especially works well if you are hosting a brunch buffet for Easter or Mother’s Day. You could even add a piece of banana biscotti to each jar to make it even more special!

Everybody can grab a little jar of this fruit salad for Easter, and their plate is still free for all of the other things they want to load onto it, like my breakfast muffins recipe and smoked salmon crostini.

You can also serve all of these elements as a fruit plate for Easter, kind of like a fruit charcuterie board, with the dip in a small bowl, and the cut fruit arranged around it on a large platter.

Another pretty way to serve this is to spread the cottage cheese mixture on the bottom of a pretty platter, and spoon the cut fruit on top. Serve with a large serving spoon so people can spoon up the fruit with a bit of the dip for their plates.