Easter Desserts add a little color and brightness to early spring. This list of my favorite Easter recipes includes beautiful show-stopping cakes, fun cupcakes and plenty of color.
Especially here in Minnesota, Easter is one of those first milestones of spring. By this time of year we are getting some warmer weather, and that makes it a great time to make colorful and floral desserts. Below is a list of some of my favorite Easter desserts that you can make for the holiday, or on any of those nice spring days.
It’s the perfect time for comfort food and these Paleo Chocolate Chip Cookies from Stephanie Meyer’s The 30-Minute Paleo Cookbook are the ultimate snack to satisfy. They are super decadent and rich with flavor because they are made with almond butter. The cookies, like everything Stephanie creates, is gluten-free, in fact, these have NO flour at all and can also be made vegan. Stephanie is a friend, a sista blogger and the master at batch cooking healthy meals. She is one of the most spectacular home cooks I know, and her recipes are always absolutely delicious. The recipes in the book just happen to be Paleo, so if you have dietary restrictions all of her recipes will work in your daily meal planning.
Stephanie’s over-arching goal is to help people transform their health by cooking real food at home. Amen! The 30-Minute Paleo Cookbook is a great introduction to experimenting with fresh-food cooking and seeing how doable and delicious it is. Her Project Vibrancy Meals meal plans are a mapped-out system for making that happen most days of the week. The plans include menus, shopping lists, simple recipes, clean-up and storage instructions, and a community of supportive and knowledgeable people. I am a baker and not a cook, so her meal plans help me get actual food on the table, so my family has more than cake, pie, cookies, and bread! 😉
Find out more about her Project Vibrancy Meals This is the perfect time to be cooking great food for your family.
In just about a month my newest book, Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day, will hit the shelves in stores near you and online book sellers. This is the bread book I have always wanted to write, because I got to bring my pastry chef ways to the pages, with all the sweet and decadent holiday breads from around the world. Below I have shared just a few of the photos from the book that represent so many cultures and their gorgeous breads. I even got to take some of the photos for this book, along with my friend and fellow blogger, Sarah Kieffer. For the first time we have color photos throughout and gorgeous how-to pictures of the process, so even the more intricate breads (like flaky croissants and Danish) are simple to make.
This is the 7th book in our 5-Minute Bread series and Jeff and I could not be more excited or prouder of this one. I hope you enjoy it as much as we loved putting it together.
My 15-year-old is not one to spend time cooking, so when he does I watch with delight. Turns out he’s been paying attention. He moved with confidence and ease as he made this chocolate marble cake, so there is hope he’ll leave home someday with at least a few skills in the kitchen. Truth be told, on this occasion I’d asked him to bake me a cake, because he owed me one. That, by the way, is a euphemism for the fact that he’d done something I wasn’t entirely thrilled with. He invited his friend over to help and they set out to bake me a cake with all the intensity and focus of real pastry chefs. It was awesome and tasty!
Henri and Sophie wanted to make a chocolate marble cake, so I helped them find a recipe they could do without a lot of input from me. We chose a white cake from Carole Bloom’s The Essential Baker, since her recipes and directions are always spot on. Henri made the white cake and then Sophie and I adapted it to have cocoa powder for the chocolate marbling. Not jumping in is hard for me, but I got behind the camera and let them go, because I knew Carole’s recipes wouldn’t fail.
As you may know, my son (The Fabulous Baker Boy, as I call him on Instagram) baked his way to the bank this summer. You can read all about his baking adventures here. One of his customers requested peanut butter cookies and they turned out to be one of the most popular treats of the summer.
The recipe he chose came from David Lebovitz’s book Ready for Dessert. They are magnificent and easy, easy, easy to make. David has you refrigerate the cookie dough, which really does improve the texture and they don’t spread out or lose the crosshatch pattern. The Fabulous Baker Boy used Skippy peanut butter, per David’s request not to use a natural, freshly ground version. I couldn’t agree more, even though I prefer to eat the all natural kind. Peanut butter made with hydrogenated vegetable oils will hold their shape better and won’t be as greasy or dense. One thing we found is that the texture changed considerably with the amount of baking. If you want a softer cookie, as David describes, you want to err on the side of under baking slightly. Our cookies were more like peanut butter shortbread, because we made the cookies way bigger and baked them several minutes more, but we LOVED them like this. Maybe try a tray each way and decide which style you like better.
Last week my husband got a craving for scones. Instead of turning to me, or making them himself, he asked our 12-year-old son to bake them. He challenged Charlie to have hot scones ready by the time he left for work the next morning. 7:30 a.m. is an hour my boys rarely see, because they are deep in REM sleep. Agreeing to this request was based on one thing, and one thing alone: money.
My sons get an allowance, but it isn’t always enough to satisfy all the activities and toys they want, so the thought of a few extra bucks in his pocket was enough to get him out of bed. And, he loves to bake, so it wasn’t much of a hardship.
The night before, he picked a recipe from Baking with Julia, set up his mise en place (a fancy way to say ingredients and equipment), then set his alarm for 5:30 a.m. He woke me up at 6 a.m., so I could sit in the kitchen, bleary eyed, with my coffee and answer any questions he had.
It was quite something to watch him navigate the recipe. He didn’t know what a pastry blender was or what cornmeal looked like, so the instructions of “cutting the butter into the flour with a pastry blender until is resembles cornmeal” meant nothing to him. I showed him a jar of cornmeal, handed him the pastry tool and off he went.
Scones are really quite easy to make, but it does require a gentle touch, so they don’t come out too tough. He did it perfectly.
My husband is a big fan of raisins, so Charlie folded them in during the last steps and added a bit of zest to the dough as well. He made an entire batch, which was way more than my husband could eat, so Charlie got the idea of texting our family members, who live nearby, to tell them he had hot scones coming out of the oven and he was selling them.
The price is fair, the product is amazing, the baker is adorable and he sold out for the day. By the time the scones were cooling on the racks and his customers were showing up at the back door, he had crawled into my bed and fallen back to sleep. I was left to run the store, which was just fine with me.
The scones were such a success that he’s now taking pre-orders for all kinds of baked goods and has a schedule of when he has to deliver the goods. It’s the best summer job I can think of and he’s going to be a skilled baker by the time he hits 8th grade. Could I be any prouder of him? Nope! Not possible. He’s my fabulous baker boy.
