How To Decorate Beautiful Smoothie Bowls - 5 Styles - Tutorial

Have you ever wondered how Instagrammers make all of their smoothie bowls look so ON POINT?

Well… me too. Mine never seemed to look like that. They were messy and simply not as visually appealing as those perfect Instagram bowls. Sure, they were tasty. But the visual aspects adds another level of tastiness!

How does the idiom go?

You eat with your eyes first!
(Das Auge isst mit!)

Through experimenting, copying from others (or let’s say I was inspired by others) and putting lots of love & passion into my smoothie, nicecream and porridge bowls, I soon fell in love with bowls.

I loved bowls so much, I decided I’d create a theme where every other picture on my feed was a bowl. Mostly smoothie bowls or porridge bowls because I had a phase when I was addicted to nicecream, then there was the green smoothie phase, then the acai bowl craze and so on.

When you make a bowl every day for about 365 days, you get creative and experimental.

So in this blog post, I will uncover what I have been mastering over the last years…

How to make those freaking gorgeous breakfast bowls

Let’s begin with the basics.

Here are 8 tips, tricks and essentials:

1. Fruit. Use brightly coloured fruit such as berries, grapes, grapefruit, figs, and kiwis. Fruit is the food our bodies are designed to digest and thrive on. No wonder fruity bowls get many clicks on Instagram. The colors are something we are instinctively attracted to.

Pick out the most beautiful pieces. You will notice that some strawberries are prettier than others. Pick evenly shaped and sized fruits and make sure they are ripe but not overripe and not damaged in any unaesthetic way.
Colours. I love to create rainbow bowls but there’s no rule that says “the brighter the better”. Sometimes one-coloured red or blue bowls are just as popular on Instagram as multi-coloured bowls. Experiment with colours and find a colour scheme that works well for you! Opposing colours are satisfactory for the eye too. Purple and yellow, blue and orange or green and red. (PRO TIP: Red, orange & blue bowls perform well on IG. I’ve seen entirely yellow bowls do incredibly well too.)
Textures. Next to colours, textures are key! Circular shapes (aka berries, banana coins, figs, quinoa pops) and interesting surfaces (bumpy blackberries and raspberries, seeded strawberries) and symmetrical patterns (citrus fruit).
Foodporn ingredients. Think nut butters, creamy coconut yoghurt, chocolate sauce, melting chocolate pieces, cookies, creamy nicecream, caramel, you name it.
Less is more. I’m sure your smoothie bowl topped with fruit, granola, cacao nibs, chocolate sauce, coconut yoghurt, coconut flakes, mulberries and goji berries is healthy and tastes great, but don’t you think a few ingredients less would make it look more orderly and aesthetic to the eye?
Shoot in RAW. If you take JPEGs, you won’t be able to manipulate the colours afterwards without artificially altering them. If you shoot in RAW, you can import them to Lightroom, which takes your editing to the next level. Which leads us to the next point:
Photoshop Lightroom. I know some people swear on mobile editing apps such as VSCO. I used to edit with Snapseed and liked it a lot back then because of the variety of settings. Until I finally purchased Photoshop Lightroom, which changed my life. If you think your smoothie bowls look “professional”, try Lightroom. It will open your eyes.

If you want to read more about my photography equipment, click here!

And here are a few different styles I tried to cluster. These are the kinds of themes I always return to. Can you think of any style I missed? 🙂