Drain the brine from all of your olives and other pickled items, if applicable.

Cut your cheeses into bite sized pieces - I usually aim for relatively uniform cubes.

Prepare your meats. I tend to stick to sausage type meats, slicing into rounds. If one has a larger diameter, I’ll slice those particular rounds in half.

If you’re using any fresh produce, wash and prepare those items as necessary.

See “Food Safety” advice in the post for advice on handling your ingredients.

Remove any packaging or stickers from your styrofoam cone.

Carefully wrap the entire cone in plastic wrap or food safe cellophane. Make sure that none of the actual styrofoam is exposed, even on the bottom.

On that note, make sure the bottom is covered thinly and evenly - you want it to be stable!

Set your wrapped styrofoam on your charcuterie plate.

If you want to give it a bit of stick to hold it in place, spread some melted cream cheese on the bottom of the wrapped cone - it’ll act as glue.

Spread your ingredients out on baking sheets, and stick a toothpick through each piece.

I like to stick the toothpicks in so that they’re through the entire piece, but NOT hanging out on the other side.

Piece by piece, stick your ingredients to the tree, pressing the toothpick in only far enough to secure it - you want a fair amount of toothpick *out*, so it’s easy for guests to pull each piece out!

It’s easiest to start from the bottom and work your way up.

If you’re doing spirals - I like to - I find it easiest to do a bottom ring, then pick a “starter” item, and set a spiral of that one item, all the way up the tree.

I’ll work out from there, adding rows of ingredients on either side of that spiral. Try to keep your ingredients butted up close to each other, not allowing styrofoam to show through.

As you get further away from the starter spiral, you’re going to have to end some lines of ingredients early, merge with other lines, and fill in odd areas as you go.

Don’t worry, no one will notice!

As you get to the top of the charcuterie tree, start building it upwards, leaving only a small section at the very top open.

Cut a thick slice of cheese or meat, and use a cookie cutter or a sharp knife to cut a star shape from it.

Affix the star to the top of the tree with one last toothpick - I put it in from the bottom of the star, hiding the toothpick entirely.

If you’re not serving it immediately, wrap with plastic wrap and store in the fridge until you’re ready to serve it.