Do you have Easter recipes that you make each year?
Perhaps your recipes come from your great grandmother and have been made in your family for one hundred plus years?
Or perhaps you like to be a bit more spontaneous and try different recipes each Easter season?
My family and I enjoy good food and good traditions.
I enjoy being in the kitchen with my children whenever I can. As a homeschool mom, I love any opportunity to bring the kids into the kitchen to learn beside me. We especially love baking during any holiday celebration, and we look forward to certain recipes at certain times of the year.
Having lived in England with my husband for two years, I have tried to bring many English recipes back to America with me. I believe it is important to pass cultural recipes down to my children, and it is a way I show love to my husband in trying to make him feel at home with familiar comforts… even if we are some four thousand miles away.
Some of our favorite English-America Easter recipes are cauliflower cheese, roastie potatoes, hot cross buns, and chocolate eggs.
~Hot Cross Buns~
Hot cross buns you say…I can’t say hot cross buns without being transported to my fifth-grade music class. I can hear the familiar song now…”Hot cross buns, hot cross buns…one a penny, two a penny, three a penny, more… hot cross buns.”
If you are not familiar with hot cross buns, they are a soft, chewy, sweet roll that is laced with cinnamon, spices, and raisins. Not too sweet, but delicious served warm with a generous pat of butter on top.
I love the chewy texture of the flour cross on the top of this sweet bun.
In England, the hot cross buns that we bought from the grocery store most often had a flour paste cross, which is not sweet, in fact it doesn’t really have much taste, but instead it adds a nice chewy texture.
In America, if you see hot cross buns in a store, the cross is often made with a sweet icing, which of course, tastes lovely as well.
The children and I like to make these for Good Friday, and we do it as a part of our math and science lesson for that day.
If you and your family enjoy baking sweet treats- and you enjoy sweet breads-I would recommend setting aside time to make hot cross buns—a delicious, English-inspired, pillowy, soft treat.
~English Easter Eggs~
In England the Easter candy and chocolate is different to American, Easter candy. It seems to me that America has a lot of brightly colored jelly candies-chewy sweets- and lollipops- whereas, England seems to have more chocolate eggs.
Of course, many of us, when thinking of English candy may think of Cadbury eggs, and there are certainly plenty of Cadbury eggs on the shelves of English grocery stores. The chocolate eggs on the shelves that were most memorable to me, as an American living in England, were the big chocolate eggs that were wrapped in beautiful foil and filled with even more chocolate. They were beautiful…real pieces of art.
As it would be, my husband and I have not been able to find anything in America that is close to what we enjoyed eating in England. So naturally, we decided to make our own English-inspired, chocolate, Easter eggs.
We have now made it an Easter tradition, and we enjoy making them with our four children. We don’t like them to look perfect, but instead, homemade with little fingers and hands as our helpers. We like to fill our eggshells with Cadbury mini eggs, jellybeans, and peeps.
They make the table look sweet and serve as an edible table decoration.
Of course, I couldn’t forget to mention that the floral plate we placed our hot cross bun and our chocolate egg on is a thrifted find (made in England called Mayflower). The gold rimmed plate was my grandmothers, and the pink glass plate is another thrifted find.
Thrift stores offer a plethora of beautiful china and glassware (just be sure to be aware of the possibility of lead used in the old paints).
I hope these sweet treats inspire you to get in the kitchen and get baking. And as always, don’t forget to add the secret ingredient…a sprinkle of love. Happy Easter!