A late easter note.

Like every holiday Easter has come and gone in what seemed the blink of an eye. I’ve been quite busy the week before easter, baking cupcakes and cakes, tinkering on surprise eggs for my oldest nephew and making bread to be consecrated at the Easter service. My absolute favourite this Easter were those cute little bunny cupcakes you see above. I came across the idea at Created by Diane and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Finally I chose this really yummy vanilla cupcake recipe and topped them with mascarpone mixed with vanilla and sugar. They tasted really excellent and everybody loved those cheeky little bunny bums .

Another thing I really couldn’t wait to make this Easter was a traditional paschal lamb cake, or in this case paschal rabbit. In Austria these soft, white, sugary cakes are baked especially for the days around easter. In my family they usally just were topped with some icing sugar and mostly ate for breakfast. Since this tradition had stopped now for some years I was eager to revive it. I found this quite lovely recipe on the web and coated the bunnies with a mixture of egg whites and icing sugar. Topped with some sugar flowers they really looked lovely I think. And they also tasted really good.

Last but not least I made this easter surprise eggs for my oldest nephew. As I mentioned in one of my last posts, I really fell in love with the idea by not martha to disguise easter eggs as chocolate filled surprise eggs. You sould really take some time to make those, keeping in mind, that they need some time to harden at each step. But just stick to the instructions over at not martha’s and you’ll be really fine!

 

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Eat a rainbow.

These days the internet is filled with recipes and photos of this lovely rainbow cakes and I couldn’t wait for an occaison to try it myself. So finally, my nephews 16th birthday gave me the perfect excuse to create something a little bit spacy – so here is the rainbow cake he got! The original is made with lots of white cream but I had to camouflage it as a chocolate cake – so this is my version with lots of apricot jam and chocolate icing. For the original recipe go to the Whisk Kid blog.

And here is my recipe for a 26 centimeter baking pan and with jam instead of white cream:

339 g butter, room temperature
699 g sugar
7,5 egg whites
3 tsp vanilla
562 g flour
6 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 1/4 cups of milk
1 glass apricot jam
2 cups of chocolate icing

Preheat the oven to 175°C and follow the other instructions on Whisk Kid’s blog! Don’t worry for a moment, this recipe is marvellous! And for  a little bit more inspiration, see many other possibilities for rainbow cakes on foodgawker!

Sweets for my sweets.

It’s the same every year: Starting in late autumn I get a little nervous, I search more often for the term “gingerbread house” on the internet and I descretely try to find out my nephews new likes and dislikes regarding sweets, chocolates and everything the tooth fairy forbid.

And I’m proud to show you this years and in a row third gingerbread house – only this time totally WITHOUT GINGERBREAD. It shows that my nephews just don’t like gingerbread as much as they did a year ago (well, taste changes) so this time I tried some totally new things:

First of all, it isn’t A house but a little village (okay, there only two houses – I meant to make more, but somehow there wasn’t enough room…) and this time there is also a christmas tree made entirely out of candies! The bottom of the village is made out of cookie dough and the houses consist of shortcrust dough. And, of course, there are lots and lots of candies and chocolate everywhere!

I just gave the little village to my big sister, who will secretly hide it until tomorrow morning for St Nichola’s Day. I can’t wait to hear from her and how my sweet nephews liked it!

Happy St Nichola’s Day to all of you! Hopefully we all have been good kids! :)

Finde more photos on flickr.