Easter is a holiday that moves around – but it is also a holiday that always falls on a Sunday, which is nice because it gives you plenty of time over the weekend to decorate easter eggs and do some Easter baking. Here are a half dozen ideas to get you started, all of which are easy to make and fantastic to serve at an Easter brunch – or just to enjoy at home with family, a cup of hot coffee and a giant chocolate bunny.
- A Braided Easter Egg Bread is one of my favorite breads to make for this holiday. It is a beautiful bread that is lightly sweet and buttery, that reminds me a lot of challah, pashka or similar egg breads. Not only is it tasty, but the bread is topped off with dyed Easter eggs and has an especially festive look to it!
- Easter Egg Shortbread Cookies are also topped off with Easter eggs – but they’re topped with chocolate ones. Take any brand of small, hard-shelled Easter egg candies and press them into these cookies while they’re still warm for a very fun way to easily decorate a cookie for the holiday.
- Hot Cross Buns are traditionally served on Good Friday, a few days before Easter, but the light and lightly spiced rolls make a nice addition to an Easter brunch if you serve them with butter and jam.
- Brightly-colored marshmallow Peeps are an Easter favorite and something that many people look forward to even more than Cadbury Creme Eggs. Peeps Cupcakes are vanilla cupcakes decorated with a nod towards sugar-coated Peeps, and they use whole marshmallows for garnish.
- Speaking of Cadbury Creme Eggs, did you know that you can bake them into a batch of Cadbury Creme Egg Muffins? The muffins have a whole Creme Egg baked into the middle for a sweet surprise when you take a bite. I find that mini Creme Eggs give the best egg-to-muffin ratio, but even whole Creme Eggs will work with the recipe. You can also put them to good use in a hot cup of Cadbury Creme Egg Coffee (which is not nearly as sweet as it sounds!).
- Finally, Lemon Buttermilk Easter Cookies are a great cookie recipe to bake for Easter. They are soft and have a nice lemon flavor that makes them perfect for the springtime. This is a cut out cookie recipe that is easy to decorate with a simple icing. I like to use a bunny shaped cookie cutter, but all you really need is a round cutter and you can decorate your cookies to look like festive Easter eggs.
Macaroons are probably one of the easiest cookies that you can make. Mine are made with just egg whites, sugar and shredded coconut, with a little bit of vanilla extract (or some other flavoring) thrown in for good measure. I’ll make them just about any time that I have an unused bag of coconut lying around, and I’ll also make them when I need an easy to make dessert for get-togethers. The cookies are sweet enough to be satisfying and have a great coconut flavor to them.
One trick I use to get a good consistency to my macaroons is to run a chefs knife through the shredded coconut before I use it. This breaks up some of the long strands of coconut and ensures that you get a macaroon that doesn’t fall apart when you bite into it. You can really finely chop the coconut, too, but I prefer to keep some of the texture of the shredded coconut and go for more of a rough chop. The cookies can be shaped into round balls before baking, or patted into different shapes (I am a fan of little pyramids) before baking.
Macaroons are good plain, but you can easily dress them up by dipping the cooled cookies into some melted chocolate – dark, milk and white chocolate are all good choices – and placing them on a sheet of wax paper to firm up before serving. These are very good when they are fresh, but keep extremely well in an airtight container and become even more moist and chewy after a day or two.
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Years ago, I was watching an episode of the original Japanese Iron Chef and was amazed to see one of the chefs cut the top of an eggshell off, cleanly, with a knife and then use the eggshell as a serving cup. I had seen eggshells used as serving cups on occasion before then, but the ease with which he sliced it off made a big impact – and made me want to do it myself. I’ve had some success in this department, but it seems safer and easier to use an egg topper.
An egg topper is a little gadget that is designed to cut the top off of an egg. They’re generally used to cut the tops off of soft-boiled eggs, cutting through the shell of the egg and removing the top piece of the egg white within to reveal the soft-cooked center. Simply place the ring around the narrowest part of the egg and squeeze the scissor-like handle to have a series of sharp, knife-like “teeth” poke through the eggshell. It works much more easily than trying to remove the top of the egg with a knife, and it is much more effective than carefully cracking the egg and peeling back the “lid” by hand.
I use a topper to make egg cups for dishes like my White Chocolate Easter Egg Panna Cotta. The gadget is small and inexpensive, and you get a big reaction when you serve a dessert this way. That said, you’ll definitely get a bit more use out of it if you are a fan of soft-boiled eggs.
Easter is basically synonymous with chocolate these days and whether you celebrate the holiday or not, it is hard to pass up an opportunity to get a little more chocolate into your diet. Chocolate bunnies are delicious, but I prefer chocolate Easter eggs – especially when the chocolate dessert in question happens to be White Chocolate Panna Cotta Easter Eggs.
For this dessert, I made a delicate and creamy white chocolate panna cotta and poured it into egg shells to set up before serving. The panna cotta itself is easy to make, with a base that is made with melted white chocolate and half and half. The white chocolate gives the creamy custard a real richness and a lot of body, without making it too sweet. The most important thing in making this panna cotta is to use good quality white chocolate (made with cocoa butter, not vegetable oil) and make sure that it is completely dissolved in the cream before finishing up the dish. If it is not completely dissolved, small particles of white chocolate may float to the surface of your custard and form a chocolate “crust” on top that distracts from the rest of the panna cotta.
To make the egg cups, I hollowed out the egg shells (saving the eggs for later use) and cleaned them thoroughly. I placed the eggs cut-side-up in an egg carton and filled them with the panna cotta mixture, then slid the whole tray into the refrigerator to set up. This recipe makes about a dozen egg-shaped panna cottas. The egg cups really complete the holiday look for Easter, but this dessert is good any time and you can also simply pour the panna cotta mixture into ramekins (I like espresso glasses for small servings) to set up.
Panna cottas are typically unmolded to serve by dipping the ramekin they were molded in in a dish of very hot water to loosen them, but you can serve the panna cottas in nice dishes without unmolding them, too. I served the egg panna cottas right in the shell. Make these in advance and allow them to set up overnight before serving.
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Saveur Magazine is accepting nominations for their 2011 Best Food Blog Awards. If you have a moment, head over to their site and nominate Baking Bites! And then, of course, check out all of this week’s fantastic Bites from other Blogs:
- Fresh baked some Coconut Chocolate Chip Tea Cakes to celebrate the turn of the seasons, leaving behind heartier far in favor of lighter and fluffier springtime snacks. These tea cakes fit the bill as tender, snack-sized cakes that are baked in mini bundt pans. They are flavored with chopped bittersweet chocolate and shredded coconut, as well as a little bit of coconut extract to boost the coconut flavor a bit. It would be easy to put a few simple twists on this recipe, too, adding white chocolate or some finely chopped nuts to go with that coconut, as well.
- Strawberries aren’t the first ingredient that I reach for when baking cookies (although it has been known to happen), but Budding Baketress‘s Strawberry Shortcake Cookies look like a good reason to change the policy. Her cookies use fresh strawberries to produce a versatile cookie for strawberry lovers that is somewhere between cookie, scone and muffin top. The moist cookies can be used as a base for a strawberry shortcake, crumbled on top of ice cream or simply eaten on their own.
- The Potato Pie that Always with Butter made is a fantastic, savory pastry dish. The pie is filled with potato, cheese, garlic and other delicious flavors – and that filling is sandwiched between two buttery layers of puff pastry that are baked until crisp and golden. The pie looks like something you might buy at a bakery, but it is easier to make than it looks and is one of those dishes that you just might find yourself trying again and again, serving with salad as a light dinner at home or serving as a side along with a bigger meal at holidays.
- I often make granola with a variety of nuts and spices, but Chocolate and Carrots‘s Lemon Blueberry Granola has a very springy feel to it with the bright additions of dried blueberries and lots of lemon. The granola has homemade applesauce in it, which helps bind everything together until it is baked and crispy, and the applesauce is spiked with lemon zest and juice. Some additional lemon extract (or oil) is added to the granola as it is mixed together to ensure that it keeps that zesty flavor. Dried blueberries finish off the mixture, but serving it with fresh berries is a great option, too.
- The Galley Gourmet will assure you that this Italian Almond Raspberry Tart is the type of recipe that starts with simple ingredients and produces spectacular results. The filling features a light filling made of almond paste that is spread over a layer of raspberry jam. The contrast in colors and flavors – the sweet and sticky jam underneath the light and nutty almond layer – is beautiful to look at and delicious to taste. Making the pastry for the tart yourself is well worth the effort, too, as the buttery and crisp crust is the perfect backdrop for the subtle fillings within.
