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.
This post is originally from 2011 and it is hilarious for me to read it, since my boys are now 17 and 19 years old and no longer have little fingers, because they’re 6 feet tall. The only thing that remains the same 7 years later; they still love these Blueberry Bars!
2011: Yesterday was the official end of summer in my house. Back to school for both boys, and I spent the day wishing they were home again. “Seriously?” You may ask. I spent the past several weeks anticipating the beginning of school with a certain glee, which may have bordered on unhealthy. I couldn’t wait to have peace and quiet in my house, for hours at a time. I looked forward to doing my work without interruption, sans little fingers dipping into the bowl. But, when it came to the actual day, I missed them and couldn’t wait for them to get off the bus.* Instead of pathetically staring out the window waiting, I decided to bake them some Blueberry Bars. Every MN kid loves bars.
For those of you from the coasts, I am referring to a layered dessert baked in a pan resembling a brownie/cookie/pie, but can be made with fruit, caramel, chocolate or anything else your pantry contains. Then they are cut into neat bars. I was first introduced to this concept when I moved to Minneapolis in 1993. Bars are generally served on a buffet table with lots of crock pots filled with “hot dish.” Every family has their own recipe, usually a tightly held secret, mostly kept from the neighbors.
To watch me make these bars and for tips on easy lattice and stable fillings, watch my instagram video. Recipe below.
Everyone should have a great sugar cookie dough (or two) in their kitchen arsenal. The perfect sugar cookie bakes up crisp, sweet and able to handle a bit of icing without getting soggy. I’ve baked dozens over the years and Sarah Kieffer’s Olive Oil Sugar Cookie is one of my favorites, along with her Lemon Sugar Cookie recipe, both you can find in her best selling 100 Cookies book. It’s also where you’ll find her famous Pan-Banging Chocolate Chip Cookies and the amazing Peanut Butter Marshmallow Swirl Brownies (amazing!!!)! This is a must have book. You can watch my son, Henri and I make these Valentine’s Day Sugar Cookies with Blood Orange Glaze from Sarah’s book on his YouTube Channel “Baking with my Mother!”
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.
As many of you know, cookies were my first foray into the world of being a “professional” baker. Okay, I was 19, had zero clues what I was doing, but I loved cookies and so did everyone I fed them to. Since those first days baking cookies for my Zoë’s Cookies cart, I have probably eaten my body weight in cookie dough. It is one of the best parts of making cookies. Truth be told it has never made me at all squeamish to eat raw dough, but that’s just me and I know a lot of people are and maybe for good reason. So, when I heard about Dō, a cookie dough shop in NYC, I thought it was so brilliant and wondered how that took so long. I had the great pleasure of meeting Kristen Tomlan when I did an event in Brooklyn this spring and she’s just as fun and lovely as her cookie dough empire. Her method of making the cookie dough safe to eat is brilliant.
When her book came I immediately made the chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies to pack up and send to my son at college. He said the chocolate chip cookies were immediately devoured by the kids in his dorm and he hid the oatmeal cookies so he could eat them without sharing. That’s my boy! One thing Kristen and I disagree on is what’s appropriate to add into the oatmeal cookie dough. She is very clear in the book about her disdain for raisins and I am TEAM RAISIN ALL THE WAY! I soaked them in rum and tossed them in without apology, despite her begging us not to violate her dough with the dried fruit. 😉 And, they were so delicious I made more to eat myself.
This is an updated post from one of my very first blogging efforts back in 2007. The recipe is wonderful, but my photos were a bit rough back then. You can see them at the end of this post, I kept them because I am sentimental and a reminder of how far my photos have come ;). This Holiday Sugar Cookies recipe is perfect for simple cut-out cookies and for building a more intricate house. I live in a big house that makes me think of a wedding cake. I have been meaning to create it out of cookies since I moved in and I finally did. It was so much fun, I think it will become an annual tradition and I imagine I’ll get more and more detailed with every try. I am lucky to have the original blueprints for the house, which made it easier to trace the outline of the house.
2007 Post: My aunt Kristin is a great collector of recipes. She sends me packages of them, often! The recipes come from magazines, books, cooking shows, gourmet grocery stores, and various people she meets. They are far too numerous to try all of them, but I use them as a constant source of inspiration. This past week, just in time for Christmas she sent me a sugar cookie recipe by Dorie Greenspan she had clipped from Bon Appetit, and a set of snowflake cookie cutters. I am always searching for the perfect sugar cookie. I’m not sure yet if this is THE ONE, but it is really great. The flavor is not too sweet, slightly lemony (because I added the lemon zest) and the texture is crisp but not at all tough.
I decorated the holiday sugar cookies and house with royal Icing made with lemon juice, which is tasty, quite stunning, and strong enough to hold up as the glue for the house. I’ll admit that I love the fussy work of intricate decorations on sugar cookies. It is the closest I will come to ever using my BFA from college. If you don’t share my enthusiasm for precision piping then sprinkle them with colored sugar like my boys did and they are delicious and festive!
Obviously, this recipe and technique are great for Valentine’s Day, Easter, and any other holiday or special occasion when you celebrate with sweets! Which means every day…
book. It’s also where you’ll find her famous Pan-Banging Chocolate Chip Cookies and the amazing Peanut Butter Marshmallow Swirl Brownies (amazing!!!)! This is a must have book. You can watch my son, Henri and I make these Valentine’s Day Sugar Cookies with Blood Orange Glaze from Sarah’s book on his 
and here is a 
