Hey There!

How was your Easter? I hope it was fantastic!

On Easter morning, we picked up Grammy and headed over the mountain to my parents’ house for our traditional ham dinner and Easter egg hunt.

This year my mother was excited about my brother and I taking on making the deviled and pickled eggs. After much debate among the family as to the best way to make deviled eggs (My brother’s vote for hot sauce in the yolk mixture did not win), I brought these lovely pastel eggs.

I love how my  mother decorates her table for each holiday, and this year we used the DIY Easter Napkin Ties from last week’s post.

After dinner, we had our annual Easter egg hunt. Yes, we’re nearly 30 and married and that Easter egg hunt is going nowhere. My folks love it.

Every year, my father gets trickier with his egg hiding. Remember that episode of Gilmore Girls when Taylor lets Kirk hide all the eggs for the Stars Hollow Easter egg hunt, and he doesn’t make a map? That’s what it’s like. Every year. We always end up looking for those last three eggs.

Now, since we do this every year, and the egg hunt area is relatively small, I have a pretty good idea where the eggs tend to wind up. This year though Daddy went into full-on stealth mode. I actually took pity on the Fellow’s sad 6 eggs and showed him the correct way to look for the invisible eggs.

My father had buried some of the eggs along the base of the trees covered in fallen pine needles or leaves.

After we located all of the eggs, we regrouped on the deck to do a final tally and open our winnings.

Then we went back inside to warm up, drink a little coffee, and enjoy some family time before heading back home.

What are your favorite Easter traditions and Easter egg hiding spots? Tell me in the comments!

Hey There!

The Easter Bunny is hopping our way. Sunday is Easter, and I’m excited to share with you these adorable DIY Easter Bunny napkin ties (with Free printable) which will be gracing our table. The best part? They cost only $2.50 to make!

I figured after last year’s Surprise Easter Bunny Cake fiasco (which admittedly turned out fine, just not as planned), I would stick to something safer this year and make crafts and my deviled eggs.

My mother is one of those homemakers with a set of “good” dishes. Every holiday my entire life, I have eaten off of that set of Pfaltzgraff Remembrance dishes. From an early age, I have appreciated an artfully folded napkin. One restaurant we used to frequent, when we lived in Pennsylvania, had especially fancy folded napkins. I deconstructed that fold, so that I could recreate it at home. From that point on, napkins were my task along with setting the table. I thought I’d do a throwback to my old job and get a little creative with these Easter Bunny napkin ties.

Now let’s hop to it!

For this project you will need:

• The free printable Easter Bunny template which you can Download Here
• Craft felt sheet. I used tan and white ($0.24)
• Small white pompoms ($0.97)
• Ribbon ($0.97)
• Hot glue gun (I’m going to assume you have a hot glue gun and glue on hand.)

1. First things first. Plug in the glue gun and cut out the Easter Bunny template you downloaded.

It looks a little silly with the neck being so skinny, but when you trace the pattern, the lines tend to thicken up and it doesn’t look as silly. The thin point in the neck is where you will tie your ribbon. If the neck were thicker, when you pulled the ribbon tight, it would scrunch up the fabric and make the bunny’s body pucker.

2. Trace around the Easter Bunny onto the felt.

Be sure to trace as many Easter Bunnies as you have guests! I used a regular pen and made the side with the pen marks the back of the Easter Bunny.

3. Cut out your bunnies.

If you’re anything like me, you can’t cut a straight line to save your life. It’s ok. These are forgiving bunnies. Just do your best and no one will notice if one side of Flopsie’s ear is thicker than the other.

4. Glue on the tail.

Use a bit of hot glue and press down the pompom. As always, be careful! My worst burns have been from distracted or quick crafting with a hot glue gun.

5. Cut your lengths of ribbon.

I have a confession. I’m a ribbon overdose-er. I’m bad for always cutting more ribbon than needed and trimming off the excess. For this project, I used ribbons cut to around 15″ in length.

6. Fold the napkin.

Lay your napkin out turned at an angle, so it looks like a diamond with your flatware in the center.

Pull the bottom corner up over the flatware and meet the other corner covering the utensils, then bring the outer two corners up to meet the first two and hold tightly.

7. Tie the ribbon.

Tie the ribbon around the napkin/flatware once, and then place the Easter Bunny over the first tie.

Tie your Bunny’s bow and trim any excess ribbon.

8. Enjoy your Easter meal! 

Do you ever get one of those ideas that are going to be t-totally awesome? Like, change the course of history, better than sliced bread, this changes everything type of idea? Yes? Then you probably know as well as I do that those types of ideas usually end in disaster.

If you Pinterest cakes at all recently, you’ve probably seen a “Surprise Cake.” Basically, when you cut into a cake, you see a shape.

(Seriously, check these out; they’re super neat!)

I got the bright idea to make a cake for Easter dinner. Before I settled on a Surprise Cake, I mentioned to my mother that I was thinking about making a carrot cake. She, in turn, mentioned this to my father who was very excited about having carrot cake since it’s one dessert that my mother doesn’t make. I hated to disappoint him so I thought, well, I can just make a Surprise Carrot Cake…

I was soon to find out that this idea was a huge mistake.

When making a Surprise Cake, you need to have cakes in two different colors. I figured that a cheesecake would work. I was very wrong.

The cookie cutter that I had gotten was too tall to use in one of my regular 9 or 6-inch cake pans, so I figured I could bake the whole cake in one layer in a coffee can. Fun fact – coffee cans aren’t metal anymore. Realizing this, I went and got a giant gallon can of green beans I would then have for dinner. You can’t have green beans by themselves so I also ended up buying a ham (In case you hadn’t realized it yet, this story is quickly turning into If You Give a Mouse a Cookie meets A Series of Unfortunate Events).

Once I got the green beans home, I learned that my can opener wouldn’t handle the industrial walls of the giant green bean can… I had the fellow open it with his multi-use tool, but the edge was ruined. Luckily, he had gallon cans he had saved from work for use in some crafts (so I didn’t need to buy the green beans after all…).

I made a cheesecake from scratch and made up the carrot cake batter (which was an entire situation to itself; my tiny food processor raged a fierce war on my kitchen with all of the carrot mess). With the cheesecake out of the oven and cooling, and the carrot cake batter mixed and sitting on the counter, I realized I’d neglected to account for the cooling period of the cheesecake.

Panicked, I threw the cheesecake in the freezer and ran to the store to grab a pre-made cheesecake since it was eight at night and I needed to go to bed. Second mistake: I grabbed a frozen cheesecake and didn’t think about the time needed to thaw it.

Thankfully, by the time I got home and finished fooling with the frozen cheesecake (which is still in my freezer….) the homemade cheesecake was set up enough to hold.

I cut out my bunny and put it in the can. Enter problem number three: Somehow I had decided that I should start to make a layer of the cake first so the cheesecake wouldn’t sink to the bottom. This was a terrible, terrible life choice.

The cake did actually bake very nicely in the can, and I turned it upside down as the recipe recommended. This was something else I hadn’t accounted for – how much water the carrots would add as the top of the cake was very, very moist. I’d never made a carrot cake before and didn’t realize quite how crumbly this would be.

The next day I got up at four to go work out and figured I’d get the cake out of the pan and all ready, so I could ice it right when I got home from the gym. Thank goodness I was up early. When I got it out of the pan, the layer I had baked before adding the cheesecake split causing the top two-thirds of the cake to shift – which then put stress on the cheesecake center and the whole thing fell to pieces.

(Excuse the quality of the photo; I snapped it to send to the fellow as I was freaking out at 4 am.)

So there I am, Easter Morning, 4 am with our dessert in pieces on the counter.

Frantic, I threw on my shoes and ran to Wal-Mart for a box of carrot cake mix. I hurried back; mixed it up and got the cake in the oven, and then went to clean up the mess of my homemade disaster.

I threw out one of the sections, but then started to feel bad about just throwing out all of the ingredients/time/effort. A quick Pinterest and Google search offered plenty of suggestions to reuse birthday cake, but a carrot cake trifle just didn’t seem appealing.

Then I got an idea… I would take half of the cake and some of the smaller sections and turn it into a rabbit-shaped cake.

See how cute?!

I had already baked the other cake, so I ended up with two Easter carrot cakes. I took the larger box mix cake for my family’s dinner and the smaller rabbit cake to the fellow’s.

 

(My family wasn’t a fan of the edible Easter basket grass, but I thought it was adorable.)

Looking back, I should’ve timed it better, and started much smaller. I just took on way too much without enough background experience. Fortunately, it all turned out delicious in the end.

My family still has an Easter Egg hunt even though it’s just my Grandmother, 26-year-old brother and myself (and our significant others when they’re with us for Easter). Look at how adorable my grandmother is – she’s such a good sport.