The Flowering

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter

This such an easy way to dye eggs, other than the hours spent beforehand expelling the contents, of course. Each year I make bigger and bigger holes in each end, and each year my jaw muscles are less and less sore. Tip: make sure you pierce the yolk before you start blowing away on that egg. Your jaw will thank you.

All you need is olive oil, vinegar, and regular old food dyes. This link will give you more detailed instructions.

We saw petit fours in this month's Martha Stewart, and FDPG was enthralled, so I got out some cookbooks and made a few (hundred thousand). I see why they have somewhat fallen out of fashion with the masses: time consuming and a little too sweet on the outside. They sure are pretty though. I might see how long they will look pretty on the sideboard, just like they do with those Happy Meals...











































Now for the Egg Hunt!

Making Peeps

Thought I'd follow on the heels of my Cowardly Parents rant with a fluffy piece.

As in marshmallow fluffiness. (isn't fluffy a great word?)


We used this recipe from the April issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine. We didn't use any vanilla and we used a lot more than one tablespoon of icing sugar to coat the baking sheet, but other than that it was all weirdly easy. I felt mildly abashed that it's taken me 12 years to get over my "they must be too complicated - don't think I'll make them any time soon" making marshmallows hang-up.

I know, I know. Call me irrational. Some people are afraid of spiders. I'm afraid of fluffy marshmallows.


Tips Based On Sheila's Experiences: have a bowl of hot water on hand, with a dish towel alongside to rinse the cookie cutters in between cuts; have the bowls of sanding sugar ready BEFORE you cut the first marshmallow- those marshmallows are sticky; have a side dish of icing sugar standing on alert for when you suddenly run out of sanding sugar - those marshmallows are sticky; make sure your children don't open the back door when they are all resting colourfully on a board in preparation for their Reveal, because the wind coming in the back door might blow the sugar all over the counter and sugar is sticky (when wet).
Next up: Marbleized Eggs

(early tip for blowing eggs: use a thumbtack to make the holes in the eggs, break the yolk, and make the hole large enough so you don't cause spasms in your jaw muscles afterwards)

Easter Chocolate, Did You Say?

I was casting around for some different egg decorating ideas this week, when I came upon Cami's Hot Rock Eggs at Full Circle. So that was what we did on Friday afternoon, right after track and field. Read her instructions carefully, because the eggs DO get hot and the crayon wax can get pretty singey on the fingeys (says the woman who no longer has any fingerprints).

Now I'm going to collect some rocks for the Hot Rocks version.


Later, in a fit of kitchen-themed madness on Saturday night, I made Nigella's hot cross buns (from my well-worn copy of Feast) and Martha's Truffle Eggs. That's Martha's eggs there on the plate, looking very pinkly at us. Martha made hers smaller and more egg shaped, and dipped them in blue-tinged white chocolate to to mimic a robin's egg, but I used pink (no blue, alas, in my food dye box) and then, deciding it was just a bit too weird having all these large pink blobs everywhere, reverted to some milk chocolate dipping wafers I had kicking around. Those were much easier on the eye. Facing a luridly pink Easter egg at 10am is not something for the faint of heart...not that anyone could ever accuse my kids of being faint of heart when it comes to eating chocolate, mind you.

After all that frenzy, Richard and I filled a bag of plastic eggs with jelly beans (orange sherbet! coconut!), chocolate coins (Canadian loonies!), and chocolate eggs so we could hide them around the yard for the kids to find. We waited until morning to hide them, in the event of marauding squirrels, but when we woke up it was raining so bleakly that we hid them around the house instead. Sigh. A typical Easter in the Pacific Northwest.

Then, finally, I congratulated my kids on keeping their Lent promises. I'd convinced them that Lent lasted a week longer this year (because they'd all agreed that this year's Lent would involve no Dollar Store visits), and I wanted that lovely empty space where the "Can we go to the Dollar Store?" noise used to be to last just a little bit longer. I think they all knew I was having them on, but they humoured me. Nice kids. No wonder the Easter Bunny was so good to them.