Ideas For Fruit Salad – Festive Holiday Fruit Salad
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If you’re searching for festive ideas for fruit salad, you need this holiday fruit salad in your life! Featuring a variety of fruit in a creamy custard-like sauce, this fruit salad is one of my favorite treats… ever!
When it comes to ideas for fruit salad, I’ll always instantly turn to and recommend my Grandmama’s holiday fruit salad recipe. It’s my absolute favorite thing in the entire world to eat. I adore it. I love it. As my son said once, “This is so good. If it were a girl, I’d marry it!”. Yep, it’s THAT good.
So, what makes this refreshing fruit salad recipe so irresistible? Well, it includes lots of different fresh fruit, like apples, oranges, and grapes, plus multiple cans of fruit cocktail. Then instead of a , you drain the fruit juice and make a deliciously creamy and custard-like sauce with the juice, sugar, and egg yolks. Let the fruit salad sit in the fridge overnight so the fruit can soak up all that creamy goodness and you have yourself the perfect winter fruit salad.
This is a great dessert dish to take to festive potlucks and gatherings with friends and family. No one will be able to resist!
Recipe Ingredients
- Apples
- Oranges
- Seedless grapes
- 3-4 cans fruit cocktail (with juice)
- 1 cup sugar
- 6 egg yolks
Let’s first start with the ! Peel and chop apples. Place in a bowl.
Peel and cut up oranges. Cut oranges up over apples and stir so that the orange juice prevents them from browning.
Yep, no need for or . The does the job!
Cut grapes into halves. Place in the bowl.
Pour all of the fruit cocktail cans into the bowl, juice and all.
Stir well.
Drain the juice from the bowl of fruit into a saucepot.
Add sugar.
You CAN use Splenda in place of sugar here!
Separate eggs.
You can discard the whites or find another use for them. I’ve included some ideas in the notes section of the recipe card at the bottom of this post.
Beat egg yolks well.
Add to the saucepot. Stir well.
Cook for approximately 15 minutes over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until slightly thickened.
Cool.
Pour over fruit. Stir, cover, and refrigerate.
Make at least 24 hours ahead so that flavors can marry.
Or they can just date for a bit. They’ll likely get along better if they haven’t signed on for a commitment after such a short time anyway!
Serve cold.
If you had any idea how wonderful this tastes you’d be dying right now!
Grandmama and Mama always store theirs in glass jars in the fridge, kind of like this one.
Storage
Leftovers will keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator for a week. I don’t recommend freezing leftover fruit salad.
Recipe Notes
- When it comes to topping ideas for fruit salad, I recommend coconut and/or pecans. You could also garnish the with or
- If you’d like to add more fresh fruit, you can add bananas to this fruit salad recipe. However, they turn dark quickly and the fruit salad will not last as long in the refrigerator.
- This is a . I wouldn’t recommend using .
- Another idea is to transform this into a , by using .
- Instead of fruit cocktail, you could use a variety of canned tropical fruit, like crushed pineapple, peach slices, or maraschino cherries.
- This is the perfect time to save those egg whites for the meringue on top of a pie or banana pudding! Here are my favorite dessert recipes using meringue:
Here are more fabulously festive recipes to make these holidays:
Southern Plate’s Must Make Christmas Cookies
Christmas Candies (On A Budget & In A Hurry)
Christmas Tie-Dyed Cheesecake Brownies
Sugared Cranberries (3 Ingredients Only)
Ingredients
- 6-8 apples
- 6 oranges
- 1 lb seedless grapes
- 3-4 cans fruit cocktail 15-ounce cans. You can use generic, it is every bit as good!
- 1 cup sugar
- 6 egg yolks*
Instructions
- Peel the fruit and chop them into small pieces. Cut the oranges over the apples so that the juice from the oranges will stop the apples from turning dark. Pour fruit cocktail cans over the fruit.6-8 apples, 6 oranges, 1 lb seedless grapes, 3-4 cans fruit cocktail
- Drain the juice from the fruit into a saucepan. Add 1 cup of sugar and 6 egg yolks. Blend well.1 cup sugar, 6 egg yolks*
- Cook for approximately 15 minutes over medium heat stirring occasionally until slightly thickened. Cool. Pour over fruit.
- Stir, cover, and refrigerate. Will keep in the fridge for a week. Make at least 24 hours ahead so that flavors can marry.
- Optional: coconut and pecans. Bananas can be added but they turn dark quickly and the fruit salad will not last as long in the refrigerator.
Notes
Banana Pudding
Lemon Meringue Pie
Orange Meringue Pie
Coffee Cream Pie
Nutrition
My mother made this, just a little differently. She also added sliced bananas to the fruit. When the juice was poured out of the fruit, she added dry instant vanilla pudding mix to the juice and stirred it up. Then she poured it over the fruit and tossed. Yummy. (can be made with sugar free pudding mix, but has to be eaten within a day or it gets too thin to enjoy)
Christy dear,
Making this fruit salad and your Daddy’s coconut cake and the corn. All your recipes are so wonderful and kin to what I’ve been cooking for almost 60 years. I appreciate you and love you. Phil1:12 is so true of you. Giving your Sweetness to lots of family this Christmas!
Have missed seeing you.
Grace and peace to you and yours this wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas season!
Love, Patsy McGough
I do not like fruit cocktail anything I could substitute ? Thanks
Just add more fresh 🙂
I want to try this salad for a family Christmas meal, can you tell me the size of jar pictured?……I have couple of these jars one large and one small..
Is it larger than a quart?
Thanks in advance in you get a chance to answer.
Merry Christmas!
I’m going to estimate that it is about two quarts but that is just going on my best guess. This is actually a jar at my mother’s house. You will so so so love this salad though!
Hi Christy.. I am seeing this recipe for the first time but it sounds delicious.. will try it for my Christmas ‘open house’ this year… Thank you so much for all the lovely recipes which you so generously share with us… God Bless you and your family abundantly with good health, peace, joy and much love…. from Malaysia… Toni Vincent
Thank you Toni!! Blessings to you and yours as well!
Iam in the process of making this and my concern is not enough liquid for such a large amount of fruit. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, my fingers are crossed
I usually just get fruit, strawberries, a small pineapple, pears (firm), apple, maybe blackberries, sometime green and red seedless grapes, chop the pinespple, apple and pears up, halve or quarter the strawberries depending on skize, dump in ghe grapes, sprinkle with sugar, usually start with the strawberries, so they get maybe 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar, the next is yhe apple and pear, they get stirred into yhe sugared berries, then the pineapple and any juice from the cutting board, have been known to add catelope, cassava melon, honey dew or all three in season, then the grapes and blackberries, all get stirred into the bowl to spread the sugar around and then they all go into the fridge, I usually get teo huge bowls, which doesn’t last long, this is my summer salad, and of course it needs thick whipping cream to top it off.