Easter Meal Ideas
Need some ideas for your Easter dinner? We have a few favorites to share.
Happy Easter from our family to yours!
Roast Leg of Lamb with Cracked Peppercorns and Herbs Read more
Roast Leg of Lamb with Cracked Peppercorns and Herbs
March 28, 2008 by Andrea
Filed under Grow Your Own, Holidays, Main Course
Big cuts of meat scare me. No, I don’t have nightmares about them, but for years I have studiously avoided them because I hate to ruin a good piece of meat. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter were the only times of the year when I would break out a big roasting pan and tackle anything bigger than a chicken. The thought of botching a beautiful piece of meat and inadvertently turning it into a tough piece of shoe leather offends many of my sensibilities. Read more
Easter Bunny Cake and a Lesson in Frugality
When I was a little girl, my mother used to make a bunny cake for us at Easter. She cut the instructions for assembling the cake out of Parade magazine in 1968 (photo below), which showed a finished cake as well as diagrams for cutting two round cakes into the shapes necessary to make two ears, a head, body, and four paws, and for assembling the pieces. She saved the instructions in her recipe box, carefully folded and taped to hold it together, but it’s been many years since she made one. Now that I have children and we go to visit my parents around Easter time, she decided to revive the tradition and on Sunday we all made a bunny cake together. The boys were very excited about the cake, and my oldest helped with the decorating. Let’s just say there was lots of coconut everywhere! I don’t remember ever helping my mother make the bunny cake when I was young, so it was especially heartwarming for me to watch my children help her.
To make the bunny, you bake two 9-inch round cakes using whatever cake recipe you choose, though it should be a cake that isn’t too soft because you need a texture that will stand up to carving and frosting on the open cut sides. We tried a Five Flavor Pound Cake recipe but skipped the soaking syrup, and it tasted great and worked very well for carving and frosting. (I plan to make that cake again with the soaking syrup and post about it separately.) After the cakes have cooled thoroughly, cut each cake according to the diagrams below and then place the pieces together. We used a plastic bowl as the pattern to cut the circle piece, then just cut the large ring into eight pieces. After frosting the cake, decorate with flaked coconut, jellybeans, and licorice. Instead of adding a bow, we made a “pearl’ necklace out of jellybeans and named our bunny Pearl. Read more
Butter Lamb for Easter
[Updated March 22, 2010.]
Until Michael and I got married, I had never heard of a butter lamb, a Polish Catholic tradition for Easter. His family always has one on the table on Easter Sunday, and his mother grew up with the same tradition. The lambs are placed on the table but not eaten until after Easter, and they are decorated simply with a flag or a red ribbon around the neck and sometimes peppercorns for eyes. Michael’s mother likes to put a piece of parsley in the lamb’s mouth so that it looks like it’s grazing.
You can purchase butter lambs during the weeks preceeding Easter in Polish delis or some grocery stores, or you can make your own using plastic molds or a carve one with a knife and make fur with a garlic press. I found a butter lamb this weekend at Wegman’s and brought it home for Michael as a special surprise. I knew to get it early because his mother had a hard time getting one last year and for the first time did not have one for Easter.
The tradition has also been extended to other holidays by some enterprising companies. Keller’s Creamery produces butter lambs for Easter as well as turkeys for Thanksgiving and trees for Christmas.
Making Your Own Butter Lamb
Taste of Home – Woolly Butter Lamb
Polish Art Center – Plastic Butter Lamb Mold
Polish American Journal – Clear Plastic Butter/Chocolate Lamb Mold
Hot Cross Buns
Yesterday was Good Friday, and I had many good intentions for what I would accomplish. I wanted to surprise Michael with a few of his favorites—his mother’s hot cross buns with the secret ingredient (this would be my first attempt at making them) and some gourmet mac and cheese for dinner. He has begged me to make the buns for several years, but for a long time I didn’t have the family recipe. I finally got it from his mom last year, but we were traveling for Easter weekend so another year passed before I finally managed to attempt the family recipe. Read more
Grandma’s Coconut Cake
We love this cake for holidays and birthdays. The nearly 100-year-old recipe was handed down to my mother from my late paternal grandmother, who learned it from my great-aunt Gladys. My mother tried for years to get the recipe right because it’s my father’s favorite cake. When Mom finally made a coconut cake that tasted like Grandma’s, Grandpa proclaimed that she was now “a McClure.”
The boiled frosting is the most difficult part, but when done correctly it has a consistency very much like a soft marshmallow creme. It can be very tempermental based on humidity, so make sure your kitchen is cool and dry. Store the finished cake in the refrigerator, otherwise the frosting will drip and run. Read more
