easter egg birds nest cupcakes

Easter is coming up soon, so I thought I'd share these easter egg cupcakes that I made last year! I've always loved those Cadbury chocolate mini eggs, so I knew I wanted to use them to decorate the cupcakes, and I decided to make them extra chocolatey desserts by making them chocolate cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting!

For the cupcake batter, I used my favorite chocolate cake recipe (you can find it in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), except I used coconut milk instead of regular milk. This is a great way to make this cupcake recipe dairy free, since the recipe also uses vegetable oil instead of butter. I often do this when I'm making cupcakes for my friend Reggie, who's daughter Rachel is allergic to dairy. 

Of course this specific cupcake was not going to be dairy free, because of the chocolate cream cheese frosting and Cadbury mini eggs, but if you still wanted to make these cupcakes you could always use a whipped dark chocolate ganache (and use coconut milk again instead of milk) and jelly beans for the easter eggs!

After the cupcakes were baked and cooled, I started on the chocolate cream cheese frosting (the recipe for cream cheese frosting is also in my book, you'll just need to add melted chocolate to taste!) Then to form my frosting "nests", I used a disposable pastry bag fitted with a small round tip, and piped circular rings of frosting all over the top of the cupcake.

Be sure to pipe more frosting around the perimeter of the nest, so that you can nestle your chocolate eggs in the middle of the nest!

Done! Super simple, and super tasty!

When I served these at my mom's house, my daughter actually went around to everyone asking for their chocolate eggs! So you may want to bring extra chocolate eggs for the little ones!

Happy Easter!

deviled eggs

I normally don't write about savory items on my blog (there are so few that you can see them all here), but since it's Easter I thought it would be the perfect time to share my favorite recipe for deviled eggs! They are the perfect easy snack or appetizer to make for any gathering, including Easter!

For the eggs, you can boil them or steam them like I like to do (in a rice cooker for 12 minutes, with the eggs propped up on a metal trivet!), but be sure to submerge them in an ice bath afterwards for easy peeling. Once all of the eggs are peeled, cut them in half and carefully pull out all of the yolks, and add them to a bowl with the rest of the filling ingredients. Then you can use a fork to smash the yolks with the rest of the ingredients. (I've also seen shows where they whisk the filling in a standing mixer for a smoother consistency!)

Once the filling is well mixed, I like to use a disposable pastry bag and a large star tip to pipe the filling into each egg white cavity, bur you could also just use a small spoon to drop the filling in.



Then top each egg with sliced gherkins (I also added homegrown cilantro instead of pimentos, but you could also do green onions or other herbs), and then sprinkle a bit of paprika over each one, and you're done! Super fast and easy, and the kids even helped me decorate them!

Happy Easter!

easter egg rainbow jello

I made these rainbow jello Easter eggs for Melodie's class party this year, and they were definitely an improvement from the last time I made them two years ago! (Last trime I tried to make pastel colors, but they didn't turn out so great! I much prefer standard rainbow colors like with this seven-layer jello).

Last time I scored this egg-shaped jello mold for free with the purchase of three boxes of jello, and while I scoured my grocery store for the same deal this time, I could not even find any molds for sale at all! Bummer, this meant that I could only make six jello eggs at a time, and I needed to make enough for 18 kids!

By 4am, I was done. But I had only made 12 eggs, so I chose to make the rest of the jello in a 9x9 inch pan.

Next time I'll remember to start earlier! Either that, or order another couple of egg-shaped jello molds in advance!

They were worth it though; the teachers and kids (especially Melodie) loved them!

Happy Easter!

*** Update: You can now find the recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!

easter egg layer jello

Last year for Easter I made these birds nest cupcakes.  And this year, when I saw this blog post at Just a Taste on how to make a jello egg inside of a real egg shell, I was enamored with the idea, and I wanted to make layered jello eggs for Easter!  I was already brainstorming in my head how I would do it, what I'd do with the leftover insides of the egg, what colors/flavors of jello I would use ... and then while I was at the grocery store later that week, I found this crazy gadget - it's specifically meant for making jello eggs!  Best of all, it was free with the purchase of 3 boxes of jello!  Score!

I practically skipped home with my new gadget, ready to make Easter jello.  I had signed up to make jello for my daughter's daycare Easter party anyway, so I would just use some of the mixture to make my layered jello eggs.  I decided that I wanted to make pastel layers in between the colors, instead of the white layers like I normally do.  So I made my usual layer jello recipe, but for the pastel layers, I used the colored jello and replaced 1/2 cup of the water with heavy cream.

The resulting pan jello for my daughter's daycare party turned out pretty, although it didn't exactly scream "Easter".  Also it wasn't very tall since I only did six layers (instead of the usual seven), plus some of the jello mixture was subtracted to be used in my experiment with the jello eggs.

As for the layered jello eggs, they did not turn out so pretty.  I must not have closed the two halves of the form all the way, because all of the eggs had an ugly seam all the way around the middle.  Plus because I was experimenting with the order of the colors, they all turned out looking rather odd.  But still cool because they're shaped like eggs!  Next time I'll try solid colors instead, or maybe I'll just stick to using the white layers of jello in between the colors.

Hope you have a Happy Easter!

easter cupcakes - brown sugar pound cakes with browned butter cream cheese frosting

There are a couple things that led me to this combination of flavors for my easter cupcakes.  First, I've been drooling over various pictures of easter egg nests (see here and here), which made me to want to make cupcakes decorated with mini nests.  And second, I recently scarfed down a whole box of Samoas Girl Scout Cookies (it may or may not have been all by myself), and it reminded me how much I love the combination of coconut, chocolate, and caramel.  This led me to make these brown sugar cupcakes with browned butter cream cheese frosting (the caramel flavor component), decorated with chocolate-coconut easter egg nests.

The day before making the cupcakes, I assembled my coconut-chocolate nests.  I toasted some shredded coconut, then mixed it with melted chocolate.  I pressed the mixture into a mini cupcake pan, and pressed in my Cadbury chocolate eggs while the coconut-chocolate mixture was still warm.  Then I put the pan into the fridge so that I could easily pop the nests out after they had hardened.

The next day, I made the same brown sugar cupcakes as I did for my Thanksgiving cupcakes, but instead of topping it with the Bailey's frosting (somehow Bailey's and Easter just didn't seem to go together), I decided to pair it with the browned butter cream cheese frosting that I made for my Halloween cupcakes.

The cupcakes turned out moist and fluffy, with a slight caramely brown sugar flavor.  And it went perfectly with the browned butter cream cheese frosting.

I even had leftover batter, so I made a few mini cupcakes too.  Perfectly bite-sized for the kiddos!

Happy Easter!