Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category
After all of the Easter Eggs have been dyed and all of the chocolate bunnies have been passed out, one more tradition that many people follow on Easter is to have a big family Easter brunch. Brunch is a great way to celebrate with friends and family because there are so many options, both sweet and savory. Whether you’re hosting or merely bringing a single dish to a potluck event, here are a few egg-cellent Easter brunch recipe ideas to get your holiday started out on the right note:
- Easter Egg Challah is one of my favorite Easter foods to make. The braided bread is topped with dyed eggs, so it is incredibly festive in addition to being delicious. It makes a nice centerpiece before serving, too!
- Hot cross buns were an Easter staple for years, but seem to be slightly less popular these days in favor of sweeter or richer breads. Homemade Hot Cross Buns are still delicious and a nice addition to a brunch. The yeasted buns are tender and lightly spiced, and they go well with a variety of sweet and savory dishes.
- A Cheesy Egg Casserole is a lot more elegant than it sounds and is always a hit with a crowd at brunch. The souffle-like egg dish is rich with cheese and perfect for serving a crowd. It can be prepared in advance and can be complimented by many different sides and toppings, from fresh herbs to salsa.
- A batch of Deviled Eggs is the perfect way to use up all of those hard boiled Easter eggs (which should be stored in the fridge if you’re using hard boiled eggs) and is always a nice brunch dish. I like mine served with a sprinkle of paprika, but they can be dressed up in any number of ways. For instance, you could put a squirt of Sriracha on top if you like them with a kick!
- Sugary Marshmallow Peeps are an Easter staple for many and Peeps Cupcakes are definitely Peep-inspired. These vanilla cupcakes are topped with a marshmallow cream cheese frosting and decorated with colored sugars to give them that sugar-sanded look. Regular Peeps can serve as fun toppers. Chocolate Coconut Easter Cupcakes are another cupcake option, this time with a chocolate cake as the base. They’re topped off with green coconut “grass” and garnished with homemade chocolate bunnies.
If those Easter baskets weren’t already full of chocolates, you can always thrown in a few homemade candies. Homemade Peanut Butter Filled Chocolate Easter Eggs are easier than you might think. Sea Salt Caramels offer a more grown up option. And don’t forget that you can put Peeps and chocolate to good use by turning them into Peep S’mores if you have extra lying around after the holiday is over!
No matter how old I get, it will always be fun to decorate eggs for Easter. This is true both for decorative eggs, made with hard boiled or hollowed eggs, and for edible egg-shaped butter cookies. It is also why the Easter Stamp & Style Cookie Cutters that Williams Sonoma are offering this holiday season are so appealing. The cookie cutter set comes with four perfect-for-Easter cookie cutters and quite a few tools for decorating them and creating a fun, uniquie holiday look. The large cookie cutters include an egg, a basket, a daisy and a bunny, each offering a lot of space for decorating. The tools include six small stamps with a variety of designs and four rollers, which allow you to easily add stripes and other textures to your cookies. The stamps and rollers can easily be used with other baking and cake decorating projects at other times of the year, as well. Everything is plastic and dishwasher safe, which means that it is light weight, easy to clean and can be handled easily by kids of all ages.
This cookie set comes with a recipe that works well with the included tools. You can use other cookie dough recipes, as well, but to get the best results you should choose a butter or sugar cookie dough recipe that doesn’t spread too much in the oven. This will keep your designs clear and clean, so that they will be just as sharp and detailed after baking. If you do want to dress them up even more, the cookies can be decorated with sugar sprinkles or decorations before baking, or the designs can be filled in with colorful icing after they have cooled.
Easter is always a good time to find whimsical, spring-themed bakeware to add to your collection, and Wilton’s new Easter Cookie Pan is a perfect example. These cookie pans have been becoming increasingly popular over the past few years. They have shallow cavities with a distinct shape or design to them that you can simply press cookie dough (or brownie batter, etc.) into and bake. The pans give you a lot of design options and they have the advantage that they can be used with every type of cookie dough, while traditional cookie cutters restrict your options to plainer cookies and doughs that don’t spread. This particular pan has an Easter theme and offers a dozen unique designs including rabbits, Easter eggs, a chick, a tulip, a watering can, and a lady bug, as well as others. The pan has a nonstick surface, so your cookies should pop out easily after baking, with designs that are clear and easy to see.
This is one of the only cookie pans I’ve seen that offers twelve distinct designs for its cookies, and I think it’s great to see such variety. It makes the cookies a lot more fun – especially when you’re putting them out to serve – and gives you a lot more decorating to do as you work your way through the designs. Of course, the design is imprinted on the cookies during baking and will be clear enough that the cookies don’t need to be decorated, but some colorful frosting to highlight the details makes the cookies even more festive (and will give kids something to do besides dye eggs for the holiday).
St Patrick’s Day isn’t a holiday that is know for its desserts or baked goods. Corned beef and cabbage are a little more likely to be what people looking to celebrate gravitate towards. But there are many delicious baked goods that are perfect for St. Pat’s, including both sweet and savory dishes, as well as those made with and without the help of a little green food coloring.
Shamrock Chocolate Peppermint Cookies (pictured) are easy to make chocolate wafer cookies topped with peppermint shamrocks, drawn with green tinted icing. I like to do a mixture of three and four leaf clovers. Eating them will make you feel a little lucky – and a little minty!
A Chocolate Stout Sheet Cake can use either Guinness – always a favorite drink for this holiday – or another chocolatey stout beer. It may not be green, but when made with Guinness it definitely has enough Irish spirit in it to work perfect for St Patrick’s Day and appease chocoholics.
Irish soda bread is a free form quick bread that can be as satisfying as any savory yeast bread – and made in less than half of the time. Traditional Irish Soda Bread is primarily flavored with buttermilk, but you can play with other flavors and make breads with oats and honey or citrus for a change of pace.
Tiramisu doesn’t sound particularly Irish (because it isn’t), but when you add a generous splash of Baileys Irish Cream, it starts to sound a lot more appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day. Baileys and Vanilla Tiramisu is a grown up dessert that is worthy of any celebration.
Green Velvet Cupcakes are a kid-friendly and very festive way to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. Start with a recipe for red velvet cupcakes or even red velvet whoopie pies and substitute green food coloring for red to get a deep green Irish-inspired color to your cake.
There are many flavors that pair well with chocolate. Coffee is one, and it is often included in chocolate cakes to bring out some of the darker notes of chocolate. Believe it or not, but dark stout is another. These dark beers often have an intense malty flavor and an almost chocolate-like profile to them, and they can enhance the bitter and malty notes that you find in dark chocolate, giving a cake a great chocolate flavor and a lot of character.
This Chocolate Stout Sheet Cake is made using a stout beer. I used a beer called Boatswain Chocolate Stout, which is actually brewed with cocoa to enhance the chocolate-like notes often found in stout beer (although it doesn’t have more than a subtle hint of cocoa to it). It is worth noting that any stout beer will do the trick in this recipe. The cake is very moist and tender, using butter, vegetable oil and yogurt in it. It has a great dark chocolate flavor to it thanks to both the beer and a generous amount of cocoa powder. You won’t taste the beer in the finished cake, but it definitely takes the edge off what would otherwise be a fairly sweet cake and gives it a grown up chocolate taste.
I topped this cake off with a Chocolate Stout Buttercream, adding a little bit of my chocolate stout beer to a simple chocolate buttercream. This introduced a distinct malty note to the frosting (again, giving it a grown-up flavor) and really tied it in well with the cake. You can leave out the beer and opt for a plain chocolate buttercream by simply adding milk to your frosting instead. This cake is also good with vanilla frosting, and is satisfying enough to eat plain – with a cup of coffee or even a glass of that chocolatey stout that you used to make it.
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