Easter 1973

Well, “My, my, my” and a few “I declares” as well.  It’s a sultry, sitting under the old Magnolia, sipping a mint julep and talking about long lost beaus with Blanch Devereaux kind of day.  The late April rains are producing the moist atmosphere that plants adore and the rest of us sit around waving our fans back and forth in front of our faces to keep the air moving and minimize perspiration stains on our cotillion gowns.  But if the plants are happy, I’m happy!

I wait with baited breath every year for this part of April to come around, the part where spring blooms are in full swing and the world looks as painted as the eggs we decorate for Easter.  Even in the city, I can’t walk down an avenue or side street without the greeting of flowers suspended on heavily drooping bows, laden with pink and white.  Washington Square Park is blazing in a glory of sunshine and hot pavement inspiring everyone to lie down on the shaded grass and sit a spell.  The leaves sprouting around the flowers are acid green, chartreuse, and the freshest lime imaginable, only to be seen for a few short weeks before maturing to a deeper pre-summer color. 

I openly admit to having a love affair with this time of year.  The world seems new and strange once more, a place washed clean by rain and decked out with flowers as far as the eye can see.  Everyone seems to be breathing again with the feeling that “we made it through another one”…winter that is.  Even those folks who don’t care to garden are purchasing cut flowers at the corner deli to put on their desks and gaze upon fondly with a smile.  Fire escapes are taking on mounded form and function with the addition of plastic pots with hyacinths and tulips, later giving way to a few pepper, tomato and herb plants when things really start to heat up.

This rite of passage, this survival of winter turned celebration never gets old to me.  I find if anything, my fondness for spring grows stronger each year along with the excessive number of plants I order, trying to squeeze into an already over-burdened garden.   Purchasing plants at gardening centers and online plant retailers is an addiction I can’t shake, and one that isn’t helped out by all the brightly colored growth happening around me.  I want more, more, more!!!  Luckily, plants aren’t that expensive and can easily fit somewhere into my grand scheme of a garden.  Come hell or high water I will find a place to nudge in the latest and greatest specimen to catch my eye from the lovely, glossy pages of gardening catalogues.  With plants, I feel like I’m purchasing art supplies. 

The metaphor of the garden as a canvas is an old one, but as someone who really enjoys working with color (whether it be in design, food or plants) going to the nursery gives me the sensation of standing in the art supply store looking at all the tubes of acrylic paint, swatches of the hidden hues casually swiped across the label.  There is a certain smell to those stores, one of clay and chalk and oils…a smell that inspires me to make something.  The possibilities for creation are endless (and at times overwhelming), but when you find that perfect shade of red or purple you had in your head, the magic begins, a plan takes shape and you know what you are going to do.  The same holds true for flowers and the fragrant smell of soil.  

                Mitzvah trucks on their Passover mission in NYC


All of these color choices appear in our Easter celebration as well.  It’s the first observed holiday to occur in tandem with the growth outside, and it’s no wonder we borrow so much from what we see outdoors and transfer it to the ovoid shape of the egg.  Every year I choose a different palette, somewhat restrained because I have a hard time looking at too many colors of eggs gathered together at once…purely my own ascetic.  I find it nice to stick to one or two colors at the most and achieve a range of monochromatic color through different dying techniques. 

This year, in honor of Siena’s green dress, I went with a green theme (with a couple of pink eggs thrown in simply because I couldn’t help myself).  I saw a dying technique used by Martha Stewart where the eggs are dyed once and allowed to dry, then dyed a second time in colors that have had olive oil added to them.  The oil adheres to the side of the eggshell and doesn’t allow the new color to seep in, leaving what appear to be watermarks of the first color all along the shell.  I thought it was quite pretty.  Siena was fascinated by the colors and watched on with her large brown eyes as I held her with one arm and continued to color eggs with the other.  She’s too young to remember the experience, but I’m not.

As I was dying the eggs I began to wonder (as I often do) why we color them in the first place…and where did the whole idea of an egg-laying bunny come into play?  The pagans generally get these things started with their worship of nature and the world around them (those darn, pesky pagans).  This time of year coincides with the Vernal (Spring) Equinox, formerly held as a New Year celebration in some cultures, getting us into a joyous frame of mind. The appearance of eggs at the party certainly relate to fertility. 

During this time of year all the animals have become twitter-pated, starting their new families while frolicking about the wood and glade.  Bunnies are no strangers to reproduction and have been closely associated with frequent sexual encounters due to their fertile abilities.   The idea of the Osterhas, or hare came to the United States with German settlers to the Pennsylvania Dutch area of our country. Akin to Christmas, the tradition holds that children would build brightly colored nests to be filled by Osterhas with toys and goodies for good boys and girls on what would become Easter morning.  But bunnies aren’t the only prolific reproducers out in the field.  Flowers are in abundance in every shade imaginable.  Taking nature as inspiration and ingredient, dyes can be made to color those abundant eggs and celebrate the palette found outside our windows.  It’s funny how things potentially evolve, isn’t it?

This is obviously only one take on things.  The Christian religion also has it’s own associations with the egg and color.  Jesus’ resurrection is linked to the egg, a living being hiding inside a shell (rising from the tomb) and many eggs used to be dyed red to represent his blood. Eggs were also in abundance at this time of year because they were forbidden foodstuffs during Lent in some forms of Christianity.  Whatever the real reason behind the Easter tradition (there are obviously many potential components to this story) it’s something fun to do with or for your kids and a good way to spend time together developing those hide and seek skills.  Just make sure you find all the eggs the same day you hid them otherwise your house or yard may start to get ripe awfully fast.

Collecting all this input I decided to go for an all out Easter extravaganza by way of coloring eggs, buying lots of chocolate and of course baking!  Since this was Siena’s first Easter celebration I wanted to make it a special one with an egg filled basket and a cake shaped like none other than the magical, egg laying Easter Bunny himself…is the Easter Bunny a boy???  I have mentioned the Cut-Up Cake Party Book a couple of times in the past with regard to a cake shaped like a daisy and more recently as basic inspiration for my Sunshine Shortbread.  What I love about the book is it’s simple instructions for creating very fun, kid themed cakes.  Anyone can make the cakes in this book.  No fancy equipment is needed (although I can’t live without my Kitchen Aid stand-mixer). The only requirement is patience and a few hours in which to create your masterpiece.

There are many, many ideas in this cookbook, all involving the use of coconut as a decoration.  For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why so much coconut was being used other than the copyright reads 1973 and maybe coconut was all the rage.  Then I realized finally that the company who makes the book is called Baker’s, the same people who to this day make the packages of chocolate and flaked coconut you find in the baking isle of the grocery store.  Ding!!  (That’s the sound of a light bulb going off in my head, or an oven timer if you prefer).  Now it makes sense, and I don’t have to assume ’73 was a free wheeling year of coconut love-ins.  It was 2 years before I was on the scene, so I don’t recall exactly what was going on at the time.

Of the many cute cakes in the book, there were two obvious choices to help celebrate Easter…both were bunnies.  One is listed as being easier than the other, the bust of a bunny versus doing a whole bunny with arms and legs.  I chose to do the head with the bowtie for time’s sake, and because it has a simpler, cleaner look than the full body.  The other thing to consider is the platter you have on hand.  Once you start cutting up these cakes and laying out the pieces they can become quite large.   A regular serving platter, one you might use to serve your turkey at Thanksgiving, will accommodate the simpler bunny head cake.

Another thing I like about this book is you can use whatever cake recipe you want.  They give several recipes for cakes, frosting and decorating techniques, but after looking at them you quickly see the basic building blocks, a springboard if you will, to take these fundamentals and use them in any manner of creative ways.  I have a favorite cake recipe out of Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook, a moist, sour cream and lemon cake I come back to time and again.  There is nothing fancy about this cake, just simple to make and delicious.  All the ingredients go into one mixing bowl without any additional steps such as separately whipping egg whites to incorporate at the end (a step often used to create a lighter cake).  This cake is moist, firm and perfect for use in any stacked or cut-up cake.  You will only need two 8-inch cakes to make the bunny, but the cake recipe makes enough for two 9-inch pans.  I was able to measure out the batter into two 8-inch pans and placed the extra batter in a 6-inch pan.  The 6-inch cake can be used for experimentation with cutting or decorating, or simply devouring.  The recipe is as follows:

Lemon Cake (from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook) 

2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans

1 1/2 cups cake flour (not self-rising)

1-tablespoon baking powder

1/2-teaspoon salt

1-cup sour cream or crème fraiche

Finely grated zest of 2 lemons (about 2 tablespoons)

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 1/2 lemon)

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Butter two 9-by-2-inch round cake pans; line the bottoms with parchment paper.  Butter parchment, and dust with flour, tapping out excess; set aside.  Into a medium bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt; set aside.  In a small bowl, combine sour cream with lemon zest and juice; set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium-high speed until fluffy, about 1 minute.  Add sugar, and continue beating until light and fluffy, 4 to 5 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition.

With the mixer on lowest speed, add the flour mixture in four parts, alternating with the sour cream mixture and beginning and ending with the flour mixture; beat until just combined, being careful not to overmix.

Divide batter between prepared pans, and smooth with an offset spatula.  Bake, rotating pans halfway through, until cakes are golden and pull away from the sides of pan, and a cake tester inserted in the centers comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes.  Transfer pans to a wire rack to cool 20 minutes.  Run a knife or thin metal spatula around edges of the pans.  Invert cakes onto the rack; peel off the parchment.  Reinvert cakes and let them cool completely, top sides up.

Baker’s company uses seven-minute frosting for all of its cakes.  I assume the coconut sticks quite nicely to the glossy white frosting.  Although it has great flavor I was in the mood for a different frosting, the most basic and primal frosting I know…the illustrious and sinful buttercream.  This particular recipe is the most basic, basic, basic of buttercreams using only butter, confectioner’s sugar and vanilla.  The coconut sticks to this frosting without any problems and you can even add food coloring to it if you are looking for a stronger color.   Most of the color on the cakes’ (from the Cut-Up book) is achieved through mixing water, food coloring and coconut together creating tinted coconut.  This is how the pink on the bunny ears was created and I thought it a nice, if not strange 70’s day-glow touch.

Several people mentioned to me how they had similar cakes to the coconut rabbit as children.  Even my mom mentioned having made such cakes when I was a kid.  The look is certainly of the time, more often than not cakes are now streamlined to within an inch of their life for the sake of modernity, but I love the rustic look of this.  The coconut is creepy in it’s resemblance to fur and the jelly beans and string licorice used to decorate the face and bowtie reminded me of items you would find in big glass jars behind the counter of a small town drugstore in the 1950’s. 

I recall my friend Andrea’s mother, Emily, made these cakes for her kids when they were growing up.  She is the one who turned me onto the Baker’s book in the first place, and I liked it so much I had to get a copy of my own.  Andrea must still be feeling the celebratory vibe found in animal shapes because she too made animals last week, in this case pig cupcakes for her son Finn’s first birthday party.  It seems as if we are on the same wavelength with our children and mammal pastry.   The pigs were adorable!

What is it about animals that naturally insert themselves into kid’s themes?  You name it, from clothes to room décor to desserts and everything in between, there isn’t an animal that doesn’t find it’s way into kid related items.  Undoubtedly, there is some animal-human empathy occurring on a primal level, which in turn finds exploitation in the commercial world (a marketing guy/gal is smiling devilishly somewhere), something along the line of kittens and monkeys tugging at our heartstrings because of their fragility not unlike a baby.  (Buy something) Plus, animals are quite often furry, cuddly and squeezable…also like a baby.  (Buy something) Easter bunnies and chicks notwithstanding, who doesn’t love the innocence of a fresh spring newborn with wonder in their eyes?  (BUY SOMETHING ALREADY!!!)

I don’t have the scientific answer to these questions, but I have a feeling I’m going to be making animal themed treats rather often in the near future…after Siena gets some teeth that is.  For now I’ll contentedly eat her Easter cake as she looks on in wonderment.  It’s just who I am.