This is a quick and fun activity for the littles in the days before Easter that doesn’t require too much prep for them to do it all themselves. When Wee One #3 does something entirely on her own, she’s the happiest kid in. the. world.

The prep took me maybe half an hour the night before and it entertained both girls for way longer than it should have – almost an hour. That’s like, daaaaays in preschooler time! Of course they got glue all over the table and a little on themselves, but they also made 5 of these little Easter chicks each and they’re currently hanging in the living room window to decorate our patio! Cute!

You’ll need:

yellow paper plates
yellow wings (either teardrop shapes cut from construction paper or craft feathers)
orange construction paper legs (accordion long strips of paper)
orange construction paper feet
small orange diamonds for beaks
glue (most fun for littles is a fresh bottle of white glue)
googley eyes (or you can lose them the night before like I did, and suggest they use markers)

I made one myself after I had prepped all the pieces so they’d have a finished product to go by, but I told them if they wanted the accordion legs to be arms, that’s their call. They ended up making them as I had because they decided that was ‘the cutest way’.

I’m sure you can figure it out, but they found it helpful to glue the feet to the legs and then glue the legs to the body.

Are these Eastery? I’m not sure that rainbows = Easter, but my littles seem to think so, so I embraced it and we whipped up these little treats yesterday. This recipe makes A LOT of cookies, so my neighbors will be getting an extra visit this week!

Rainbow Cookies via Pint Sized Baker

3 1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cups room temp butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
Jello! I used grape, blue raspberry, orange and strawberry (you can use whatever flavors you want)

It starts out as a pretty standard cookie. You know, cream the butter and sugar then add the egg and vanilla. Stir the baking powder into the flour and slowly add that to the butter mixture.

Then the magic happens! Divide the dough into as many pieces as you have Jello flavors. I only had four flavors when my littles wanted to make this right now with a whole lotta urgency, so I had four big pieces.

Sprinkle about two tablespoons of Jello powder per piece. I found using a spoon in a big bowl helped mix it in faster. Some flavors will need more than two tablespoons – with the grape I ended up using a little Wilton food coloring to kick it up to actual purple (instead of this wimpy lavender color it was giving me). I scooped out 1/2 tablespoon balls and dropped them in a bowl of their matching Jello powder before flattening them with a Hello Kitty shot glass. You could use any drinking glass I guess. 😉

Bake at 350 for about 8 minutes! The kids loved them and they smelled amazing.

These little bunny buns are the cutest food I’ve made in a very long time. So so cute. I will admit right now – some of them look like cats. But you can tell they’re all at least trying to be bunnies. It’s actually a very basic and entirely painless process. Essentially, you mix it all together, leave it alone for a bit, then roll it around, a couple of snips and pokes later, and you’re done! Easy!

The dough itself is just a little sweet, so you could also play that up with a desserty filling like cream or chocolate or jam or something. It’s not too sweet to interfere with savory fillings though, so I went with Monterey Jack because Wee One #3 was helping and it’s her favorite. 3 of the 20 or so that I made leaked in the oven. My kids and carbs are best buddies though so they were happy to eat the deformed ones. 😉

I will use this dough again for sure. It has great potential for some kind of cinnamon bun situation! Or pizza pockets!

Sweet Bunny Buns via Kit Frazier

2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup warm milk
1/3 cup warm water
4 tablespoons sugar
1/4 oz active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt

Dissolve 2 tablespoons sugar in warm milk and water. Add yeast and set aside 10 minutes.

Stir in the rest of the sugar, salt and 2 cups flour.

Mix until the dough holds together and isn’t sticky, add more flour if you need to. Knead until smooth. Place in a greased bowl, cover and allow to double, about 1 hour.

After you punch it down and roll it out, roll a long log, cut into 18 pieces (you may get more or less depending on how big you make the pieces), and roll each piece into an oval shape. I filled mine with small pieces of cheese.

Use kitchen scissors to make small snips in the front of each oval, and use a knitting needle to poke some eyes (or I suppose you could use a toothpick or something, but the original recipe used a knitting needle too). The instructions I wrote to myself on the index card for this recipe were ‘Cut ears. Poke eyes’

If you use cheese (or whatever) as a filling, make sure you pinch the dough closed securely! It’s so not fun to make treats like these and see the filling running out of the buns in the oven! Also, bake them seam side down!

Before you pop them in the oven, brush them with an egg wash (1 egg and a bit of water). Bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

I know that traditionally, Easter is very pastely, but I’m not a huge fan of pastels when it comes to Easter eggs (or anything really). A general rule for dying eggs is to just use water and your food coloring of choice if you want light eggs, add a little lemon juice for slightly brighter eggs and add a bit of vinegar for bright eggs. I knew I was going to go the vinegar route and I had a whole lotta food coloring. Still, those tiny food coloring jars from the grocery store are only going to get the eggs so bright, you need to amp up the food coloring to get them really, really, bright. So I used Wilton Food Coloring. Normally this gel food coloring is reserved for fondant and buttercream but you know, mega watt Easter eggs were top priority for me lol.

You’ll need:
hard boiled eggs (le duh)
Wilton food coloring
cups
3/4 cup hot water (per egg)
1 tablespoon white vinegar (per egg)

When I cooked these eggs, the oven was still hot from baking, so I just filled a couple of muffin tins with eggs and cooked them at 350 for about 15-20 minutes. Then I left them in there for a while longer after I turned the oven off. Then I let them soak in a big bowl of cold water for another 30 minutes before I started dying them.

The hands on part of the process is pretty minimal, and the longer you leave the eggs dying, the brighter they’ll be!

Once your eggs are cooked and cooled, pour 3/4 cup of hot water in each cup. Use a toothpick (because a little bit is really all you need with this stuff) to dissolve the food coloring paste in the water. Now add the 1 tablespoon of white vinegar to each cup and mix. Now plunk your eggs in – one to a cup! I made 2 dozen so the counter was littered with cups and I left them there for a day and a night! The littles insisted on checking on them every time they walked by, and it was neat to see the colors get deeper. These eggs were made for the potluck last weekend and since there were so many babies and small toddlers there I didn’t embellish them any further, but when I make these again this weekend for my littles, I’ll dress them up a lot more.

Whatever you do with them, the crazy bright colors feel festive and are a great canvas for further decorating.

I have had the most amazing treat of joining a sweet, tight, cheerful group of ladies here in South Bay. Our kids range in age from newborn to adults! The Wee Ones and I have been hanging out with them since last September and we’ve not only explored all over South Bay, but forged some wonderful friendships as well – both with the kids and with the moms! Yesterday, we came together to host a potluck in our neighborhood park and it was as close to perfect as life gets. Everyone brought something delicious to eat or something fun to do and we all pitched in to hire an Easter bunny! Everyone brought one dozen eggs per child and a few of us ran around laying them in the grass for the kids to find later.

I brought the decoupaged Easter eggs I blogged about this morning, three dozen really brightly dyed eggs, traditional Easter egg bread, Cheesy Onion Chicken and Sweet Bunny Buns. I’ll post these tutorials and recipes this week, I promise! So much Easter fun ahead of us still!

This is a pretty neat idea I bookmarked a couple of years ago on Say Yes to Hoboken. It’s very simple but very cute and can be used in Easter hunts, baskets or the as the original site suggested, as place settings! I made them for an Easter potluck my mommy group put on. I’ll post pictures of all of that insanity fun tonight!

First tap the top off your eggs and empty them, (refrigerate for baking or scrambling later). Then rinse them and let dry overnight (or longer).

Once they’re dry, fill them with whatever treats you want! I filled half with jellybeans for the kids and half with stickers for the toddlers.

Using a paintbrush, tissue paper and a whole lotta glue, attack these little guys until they are covered. Then let them dry for about a day! Voila!

I had a lot of grand plans for St Patrick’s Day this year and then Wee One #3 got sick with some horrible laundry-inducing illness. Yuck. Then just as she recovered enough for me to leave her side, I got some kind of sinus attack. Sinuses are tricky buggers, I am discovering. So by Sunday I was not really feeling the rainbow cookies and pot of gold brownies (here’s hoping I can make that happen next year).,

However, I did manage to pull together some very moist and delish Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes with a batch of Bailey’s Cream Cheese Frosting for a little Saturday night celebrating with my homie Vanessa. We had too much fun for photies, unless you count all the pictures we took of the kitten and tiny dogs we put in costumes…but I digress. The recipe for these little gems will be posted tomorrow, for now you get a little peek at what a leprechaun did while we were all sleeping!

First he made bright green pancake balls in my cake pop maker – and didn’t clean up after himself! He did leave some chocolate coins though!

Then made little messes with the kid’s stuff and left them chocolate coins too! He took Wee One #3’s play food from her kitchen and made a little food rainbow with it, and a pile of chocolate coins at the end! The took all of Wee One #2’s library books from this week and made a little book rainbow with them – complete with the chocolate coins at the end.

Naturally, Wee One #1 was not spared just because he happens to be not so wee anymore. His XBox games were made into an XBox rainbow with, you guessed it, chocolate coins!

I found these little cuties over at Mollie Makes and I’m set on making one for each wee person coming to our Easter potluck! The bigger kids will get bunnies with button eyes and the babies will get bunnies with embroidered eyes. I’m still working on them and some other little treats for the baskets, I’ll post the finished product when it’s ready but I had to share this pattern! Even if you don’t feel that you knit very well you can pull these little guys together.

Their construction is pretty simple. You knit one ear and place it on a safety pin to keep the stitches live. Then knit the second ear and just knit the first ear onto the same needle as the second. Then the base of the bunny is knitted after that so it’s all one piece, no seaming! Hooray, I totally hate seaming (and you probably do too)!

These bunnies are deliciously wonky and I adore them this way. There are so many patterns for less wonky creatures but I think there’s something about the silliness of this pattern that makes me happier than it probably should.

This is for sure one of the more random holiday crafts I’ve tried my hand at, but when I saw one I knew I had to see it for myself. I decided to try it now because Peeps were on sale at Big Lots and this is not an edible craft once it’s been put together!

I have seen so many different versions of this project online I think we all gather our supplies, sit down with a tutorial and then we each attack it differently! That’s what happened at our house anyway and it worked out pretty well I think.

Peep Tree
-lots and lots and lots of peeps in different colors (chicks or bunnies, your choice)
-small flower pot
-styrofoam ball
-florist’s brick
-dowels
-eleventy billion toothpicks
-at least one bag of jellybeans
-spray adhesive helped me a whole lot

The only rules to follow really are to cut your florists’ block to fit your flower pot, poke your dowels in there and poke the styrofoam ball on top. Fill the flower pot with jellybeans to cover the florists’ block and away you go with the peeps! I found it helpful to spray a little spray adhesive on the back of each peep and on the toothpick so the toothpick would stick to the peep and the peep would stick to the styrofoam ball (and later to other peeps). I know the marshmallow holds on to the toothpicks anyway, but after a while gravity takes hold and really pulls those suckers down.

This tree is not really the kind of deco that kicks around from year to year. Since the jellybeans are loose it’s not really storage friendly, and since it takes some serious black magic for this thing to stay together without glue on it, it’s not like you can eat it when Easter hits.

I do however have a fun Easter morning deco that is edible but you’ll have to wait till we are a whole lot closer to Easter for that little gem. 😉

I. Love. Easter.

I know, I know. I love Valentine’s Day and Halloween and Christmas too. So what? I love to bake for my littles and their buddies and craft like a kid and any excuse for a party of small people makes me incredibly happy. My goal this year is to find the time to blog about it all!

My husband found some pastel candy corn while out running errands and knew I’d be able to use them for ‘something cute’. He was right, naturally!

Technically, cake pops are made by mashing frosting into cake and shaping into balls before poking sticks in the ends and dipping in melted chocolate. Lately, I have been using my Babycakes Cake Pop Maker and then poking a stick in and dipping in chocolate. This time around though, I felt that it called for ‘traditional’ cake pops and I went with mashing frosting into cake for the right texture.

The pastel candy corn of course ended up being used as their cute little ears. I used individual sprinkles and my serious kitchen tweezers for the eyes and little butterfly sprinkles for their noses. You can really use whatever you want as decoration for the bunnies as long as you get a basic bunny shape. If you’re feeling especially adventurous you can always make some cake pops and invite the kids to decorate them with you!

We were passing them out to school friends so we wrapped them up. I think I will make another batch to spread some Easter joy in our neighborhood!