Healthy Easter Treats - Easter Bunnies Bring More Than Chocolate Eggs

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Easter baskets don't have to be full of chocolate and peeps. Here are some great ideas that will fill your Easter basket without all the extra fat and sugar.

Bubbles

What child doesn't love to blow bubbles? Grab a couple of bottles of bubbles for this year's Easter basket. The kids will have a blast with them and with a little luck it will be warm enough outside to keep them busy and running around chasing bubbles for quite some time.

Sidewalk Chalk

Another fun treat is sidewalk chalk. This is the perfect time to draw on the sidewalk with the weather warming up. Plus we get enough rain in the spring that your driveway or sidewalk won't be decorated for too long.

Homemade Playdough

Make some playdough using your favorite homemade playdough recipe (we have one at kinderinfo.com). Get a couple of small playdough toys to go along with it and let the fun begin.

Toys from the Dollar Store

You can also pick up some very inexpensive toys at the dollar store. I have found anything from Easter themed coloring books to kites in there. This is also a great place to shop for the Easter baskets themselves, as well as some plastic Easter eggs that are great for hiding small trinkets and treats.

Of course every child should have some special treats in the Easter basket as well. Along with the obligatory chocolate bunny, include some healthier treats.

Chocolate and Yogurt Covered Raisins

Both chocolate and yogurt covered raisins look like little mini Easter eggs and are a yummy treat. Fill a small cellophane bag with these sweet treats and tie a pretty bow around it.

Trail Mix with Jellybeans

Mix some low sugar cereal like chex, or cheerios with some small pretzels, peanuts, raisins, and some jellybeans for an Easter inspired Trail Mix. You don't have to feel bad about your kids filling up on this. Pour your trail mix in a small bag, or fill some large plastic Easter eggs with the mix.

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Cake Recipes - Scrumptious Easy Layer Cake

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The best thing about this cake, other than it being so easy, is that you can make it to please your taste buds! You really can choose any ingredients that you would like, but these are the ones that I have used in the past:

Cake

Pudding

Fruit

Cool Whip

Here are some other ideas of things that you may wish to choose from:

Cake: yellow, angel food, chocolate, strawberry, white

Pudding: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, lemon, pistachio

Fruit: pineapple, cherry pie filling, bananas, peaches, pears (you can use as many fruits as you would like)

Chocolate chips, cinnamon candy, coconut, walnuts (or any other kind of nuts), are also great options.

Now to "build" your new layer cake, all you need to do is, layer the ingredients into a clear glass bowl. The presentation is so beautiful because you can see all the colors & ingredients through the glass! You may want to choose ingredients & colors to match whatever holiday that you are preparing the cake for.

Start with the cake as the first layer - (break into pieces or cut into squares), add fruit, then some pudding, then cool whip. Cake - fruit - pudding - cool whip, etc - until the bowl is almost filled.
You can then top with items like: coconut, nuts, or cherries if you wish.

If you'd like to have colored coconut, just place coconut in a ziplock bag with a few drops of food coloring, and mix until desired color is reached.

An example of a nice holiday display; a large platter with the glass bowl in the center. Add green coconut "grass" around the platter. Then, add a few nicely placed Easter eggs (candy, or the real ones =) around the green grass.

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Chocolate Easter Nests Your Kids Will Love to Make

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Instead of coloring eggs this Easter how about having your kids make edible chocolate Easter nests? These nests are easy to concoct and will look and taste just like the expensive candy nests you see in the stores this time of year. Best of all, your kids can help with these. They'll have fun forming this chocolaty mixture into nests, then decorating each nest with jellybean eggs.

What you will need:

A double boiler

A medium size muffin tin

1 (14 oz.) bag sweetened flaked coconut

1 (6 oz.) bag milk chocolate baking chips

1 can chow mein noodles

1 (7 oz.) bag assorted jelly beans

1 Tbsp. solid shortening

Non-stick cooking spray

Directions:

In a double boil (or place a glass bowl over simmering water) melt the milk chocolate chips and one tablespoon of shortening. After mixture is completely melted, fold in flaked coconut and chow mein noodles. Gently mix together until thoroughly blended.

Spray muffin tin with non-stick cooking spray. Spoon enough chocolate mixture into each section of a muffin tin to flatten along the inside of each section make a basket shape. Immediately press jellybeans (gently) into nest.

When all sections of the muffin tin have been filled with a "chocolate nest," let them dry completely. While they last, display on a pretty dish covered with colorful Easter grass.

Makes approximately 24- 30 nests depending on your muffin tin.

Variation: These nests can be made with white chocolate baking chips as well. You can also add a couple of drops of either red or green food coloring to make pink or green nests from the white chocolate.

Happy Easter!

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The Risen Christ on an Easter Monday

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The Christian and Roman Catholic world commonly celebrates the day the Lord resurrected on Easter Sunday. The secular world may celebrate Easter Sunday as a day full of egg hunts, children's activities, meals with family and friends, and a visit by the Easter Bunny. While these have nothing to do with the religious observance of the day that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, it's a wonderful way to spend an afternoon in a beautiful garden filled with people that you love. This, however, isn't what Easter is all about.

What exactly happens on Easter Sunday?

Easter Sunday, as a religious celebration, is the day that Jesus rose from the dead after 3 days of death. The Catholic Church holds a special mass during Easter Sunday, and so does the Christian Church. In more traditional scenarios, merry-making and having fun between Maundy Thursday up until before Easter Sunday is not allowed, and so most celebrations (e.g. dinner with friends and family) happen on Easter Sunday itself, when the Lord has risen.

The secular world participates in Easter Sunday through various activities and shopping mall promotions. The Easter egg hunt also happens on this day, wherein children are given the chance to search for hidden eggs around a given area. Various prizes are offered during this egg hunt contest. Also as previously mentioned, the Easter Bunny makes its presence felt on this day as the harbinger of said Easter eggs.

If this is what happens on Easter Sunday, what happens then on an Easter Monday?

Just like Boxing Day, Easter Monday is a public holiday that immediately proceeds another holiday. It's a time spent visiting friends and relatives, and is a time of rest from the activities done on Easter Sunday. The Catholic Church holds a "crucession" as well as a mass that is held specifically for Easter Monday. This mass is almost identical to the previous day's service, aside from some minor changes in hymns. After the celebration of holy mass, citizens usually rest and spend time with loved ones.

Searching for more information on this UK holiday

If you'd like to know more about Easter Monday, there's a wealth of information to be found on this Internet about it. A quick search on Google reveals many tidbits that one could use to help him or her understand more about this largely Catholics celebration in the UK, and would also give some insight on some of the secular activities that are involved during this day.

While it's easy to dismiss Easter Monday as a UK holiday that does not hold much significance as the globally acknowledged Easter Sunday preceding it, it just goes to show that much worth is placed upon the Roman Catholic Holy Week in this part of the world. While other Catholic nations may have varying customs and traditions, celebrating Easter Monday and the entire Holy Week is an important religious event in the UK, and citizens are given the opportunity not only to observe the standards and practices of their religion during this time, but to give them a much needed break after it as well.

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Fun Jello Recipes For Holidays

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Whether you are planning your Christmas, thanksgiving or Easter recipes, there are all kinds of fun things you can do with jello. You might already have made jello poke cake recipes, jello cheesecake or even jello mousse recipes for special occasions but there are many more recipes you can try as well.

One of the great things about jello is its versatility. It can be used to color, flavor and add texture to dessert recipes and there are lots of different flavors you can choose from. You can also choose from jello gelatin and jello pudding.

A Few Jello Ideas

For Christmas, you might like to use a jello mold, perhaps a Santa or a Christmas tree. You can use red and green jello for a festive look to your jello mold recipe. Jello cookies are also very nice at thanksgiving and Christmas and they are also great for birthdays.

A jello poke cake is a very easy recipe to make. You can bake a cake using a cake mix and simply poke holes in it with a fork and pour jello over the top. The jello soaks into the cake, coloring it and adding flavor and you just need to let it set for a couple of hours. This is a great method of making a homemade cake recipe the easy way.

How to Make Easter Jello Eggs

This recipe makes twelve jello eggs and it is a fun recipe for kids. In fact, you can let the kids choose which flavors of jello to use for making this jello eggs recipe. You do not have to stick to the flavors suggested in the recipe. To blow out eggs, you need to make a hole in one end, poke a needle through the egg to pierce the yolk and use a thin drinking straw to blow the egg out. The hole must be big enough for this to be possible.

Afterwards you should run water into the eggshell to remove any egg traces. Finally, microwave the eggshells for fifteen seconds to dry them and strengthen them.

What you will need:

12 eggs
4 packages Knox gelatin
1 package strawberry jello
1 package blueberry jello
1 package orange jello
1 cup cold water
3 cups boiling water
2 tablespoons lemon juice

How to make them:

Add a cup of boiling water to each jello flavor and stir well until the jello powder dissolves. Dissolve the gelatin in the cold water and stir in the lemon juice. Mix a third of this mixture into each jello and boiling water mixture. Blow out the eggs by making a hole in the base and letting the raw egg run out.

Pour the liquid jello into the eggshells and store them hole side up in the egg box in the refrigerator until the jello sets. This will take a couple of hours. Take the jello eggs out of the refrigerator half an hour before serving them and peel them like hard boiled eggs.

Serve them on some green colored coconut flakes. You can make these by stirring a few drops of green food coloring into a dish of coconut flakes.

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Holiday Cake Decorating Ideas

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Good holiday cake decorating ideas don't have to involve complex creations or multi-layered cakes - you can make your cakes more interesting by simply making a few changes to the shape and adding some decorations. In this article we'll cover some popular holidays and discuss some ideas for unique cakes to impress your guests on these occasions.

Christmas Cakes

You have plenty of different angles to come from when planning a Christmas cake. You can celebrate the traditional values of Christmas with some biblical symbolism - a cake made in the shape of a cross is not difficult to pull off even if you have little baking experience. All you need to do is create a few cakes in a long, narrow pan and then cut these into pieces to arrange in a cross. Cover over the edges between each piece with icing, or fondant if you want a very smooth look. Another option would be to do a simple square or round cake and set up figurines to depict the scene of the Nativity.

You can also try other shapes like a Christmas tree, which would involve baking a triangle shape as well as a smaller rectangle for the trunk. You can get creative with the icing for this cake, with brown for the trunk, green for the tree and red and white for decorations. Using an icing bag for the decorations will help give you more precision.

Other options for the more creative baker include a Santa cake or a Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer cake. You could also try a simple cake in the shape of a gift box, with icing for the ribbon.

Halloween Cakes

Halloween is a great time of year to let your imagination run wild, and there are plenty of options ranging from old favorites like ghosts or Frankenstein through newer creations from the world of horror movies. Face cakes are all fairly simple to make, as they generally just require an oval cake and icing for the features if you want to do a basic version. If you want to get more complicated, you can bake extra parts for the nose and ears. You can get creative with icing - for example, using an icing bag to create red streaks dripping from a vampire's teeth. A skull cake is another popular Halloween choice.

Easter Cakes

Again, the cross cake could be an option for this holiday. Alternatively, you could do an Easter bunny cake with marshmallows for the eyes, nose and mouth. Another option if you're good at icing cakes would be an elaborately decorated Easter egg cake.

Fourth of July Cake

There should be a fairly obvious idea already springing to mind for this one - the American flag. This will be very simple to bake, but somewhat more challenging when it comes to icing. You will want to make use of an icing bag with a wide tip to create smooth, even stripes. The stars will be the real challenge, for which you will want a fine tip on the icing bag for extra precision.

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Dippity Do - Fun With Easter Eggs

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Easter is right around the corner and one of the great activities to participate in this and every Easter season is to color Easter eggs. Easter eggs are simple and fun to color; you just need to take note of the following tricks.

Easter eggs most often start with hard boiled eggs, so purchase a dozen or two for coloring. Gently lower them in boiling water for about 10 minutes. The eggs will cook and become hard boiled. Now just let them dry.

The easiest way to color your Easter eggs is to acquire an Easter egg coloring kit. These kits most often include dyes to paint your Easter eggs several colors, templates or stickers to adorn and design them, and an Easter egg holder to easily allow them to dry. Most kits only cost a few dollars and are very practical.

You can also prepare your own colored dye. You can blend about 1 tablespoon of food coloring with a half teaspoon of vinegar, then add about 1/2 cup to a third cup of water. Now just dip your Easter egg into the colored cup of water. The longer your egg sits in the water, usually the deeper and darker the color.

Moreover you can hand paint your Easter eggs. You can find many water color paints or other types of paints to design and decorate your eggs. Even undiluted food coloring generally works. It is important to note that you shouldn't eat any eggs that you have used paint on.

Creating or adorning your egg is fun and simple as well. Once the eggs are hard boiled, you can adhere stickers to the egg, use a brush to finely coat a creative design, or paste construction paper cut outs to your egg. Many people even dress their Easter eggs up with doll or handmade clothing made from cotton or other types of fabrics.

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