Easter Dinner (A Belated Report)

It all got started while I was visiting my sister in March. She baked a beautiful cake for a friend's birthday while I was there. I sent a photo of that cake to both of my daughters, who both announced they wanted cake! I said I could make an Easter cake, and that I could also make an Easter dinner. It seemed like such a great idea at the time, but reality is: preparing a holiday meal can be lots of work.

For assorted reasons, I am just now getting around to a food post about that day. All of my kids were able to come up in the evening for supper! That does present some complications, however: two people are allergic to beef, one is also allergic to dairy, another one prefers not to eat pork, and I have eaten so much chicken recently I can hardly bear to look at it. In despair I informed husband that we would just have to eat salad. "How about quiche and salad?" he suggested. Great idea!! And so we had quiche and salad!

This photo was taken by my son on his Android phone

I looked online for a non-dairy quiche recipe, and this is what I found and tried. I did not need to worry about the gluten-free aspect, so I really cheated and bought ready-made pie crusts from the refrigerator section of the grocery store. You see, I didn't have much time to prepare this meal! I had church in the morning, followed by a BBQ with my son-in-law's extended family, including Easter egg fun for the little ones. It was after 4:30 by the time I got home, and I was hoping to have supper ready around 6:30. And I succeeded, thanks to helpers and big bags of salad from Costco. The quiche was light and fluffy, and a big success!

And there was cake! Well, cupcakes, which I made the day before. One of my daughters had sent me the link to this Easter egg cake as a suggestion. It's is a beautiful cake, but requires three 6-inch cake pans. Who has those on hand?! Then I noticed a cupcakes suggestion in the fine print somewhere, and figured I could do that. You can see in the following photo that I had to experiment a bit before I got the hang of sprinkling the frosting with the cocoa powder/vanilla mixture. I ended up using a brand new toothbrush to spray it on, and that worked really well.

Ever since I learned there is something unhealthy in ordinary sweetened shredded coconut (perhaps just the sugar; I don't remember the details now), I've been using unsweetened shredded coconut. If I were to make this recipe again, I would buy the "unhealthy" kind; the finely shredded unsweetened variety did NOT make a very good bird's nest on top of the cupcakes! I couldn't find any suitable chocolate eggs, so I used jelly bean eggs instead. My granddaughter is still too young to manage a jelly bean, but she can eat M&Ms, so I fixed one for her with pastel M&Ms on it. She was quite pleased! I will finish with a photo of one of the jelly bean-topped cupcakes.

The second and third photos were taken by me on my Android phone.