Happy Orthodox Easter!!!

This parade of frosted Easter love is especially dear to me because I used my Granny’s vintage cookie cutters to make them! It’s always a little sweet but sad to bake with her kitchen gear – she’s the only person who spent as much time in her kitchen as I do!

Today will be spent exploring a beach we haven’t checked out yet and general family fun on the wholesome end of the spectrum because today we spent the day in Hollywood and while we met Spiderman and the Green Lantern and Wee One #3 got a hug from Diego, we also saw a whole lotta Hollywood, you know? Yoda totally tried to cop a feel! I mean, hello!

Anyhoo, back to Easter. Usually we spent Orthodox Easter with my extended family (all Greeks have seriously huge extended families) however we will be sending long distance love to them this year and celebrating this one out here.

Moving to California update to come tomorrow!

I know this is a week late for a lot of people, but the Eastern Orthodox Easter Bunny (aka the Greek Easter Bunny in our house) is hopping around this weekend for a lot of us. I’ve mentioned about a zillion times before that I’m from a mixed heritage family, lovingly described as half painfully Canadian and half hardcore Greek. I love this family makeup and as I’ve married into a painfully Canadian family (a painfully Canadian family that I adore) I choose to be the hardcore Greek half, even though I’m hardly Greek enough for the role. It just means I’m a stern mama (most of the time), I insist on celebrating both Easters, both Christmases and the occasional name day – oh and I totally support the desire for two kitchens or at the very least two fridges. If you know any Greeks, that’ll make sense to you. If you don’t, too bad. 🙂

So anyhoo, Easter baskets for Eastern Orthodox Easter! Cheesecake isn’t an often requested treat in our house, but these things were way cute. They would be even cuter with Easter cupcake liners which are officially on my list of things to do next year. Maybe I wont be moving across international lines this time next year! Also, these were actually made last year.

Easter Cheesecake Baskets – adapted from Kraft

2 8 ounce pkgs cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
1/2 cups crushed graham crackers
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 1/2 cups flaked coconut, tinted green
36 small jelly beans
12 pieces shoestring licorice, 4″ lengths

Preheat your oven to 350F and beat the cream cheese and the sugar. Add the egg and beat until blended.
Mix the graham cracker crumbs and melted butter, then press into individual muffin cups.
Now pour the actual cheesecake batter over top of the crust.
Bake for about 20 minutes, then cool and pop in the fridge for at least 2 hours. The green coconut is for festive grass but my kids hate coconut so it’s a waste. However, they love mini eggs and jellybeans so I added those to the ‘baskets’ and then the licorice handles! Way cute!

Not necessarily in the order of the post title, but it’s been a seriously busy month! Knitting is not progressing fast enough to note, but the kitchen…oh the kitchen is buzzing!

My last post was just before Easter, and that weekend at the Stitch n Bitch, I made Chocolate Nests and Chocolate Mint Grasshopper Pie. The following week I made Strawberry Vanilla Pie, followed by Strawberry Mango Tarts, Banana Cream Pie and then last night Pineapple Pie. My Stitch n Bitch ladies (and Andrew) helped make about 200 Cake Balls for wee one #3’s baptism on the long weekend.

The chocolate nests were really, really painfully cute. The kids loved them, but so did everyone else. They tasted much better than I figured Shredded Wheat and honey would taste, even with chocolate. I pressed the mixture into a silicone mini tart tray and let it set in the fridge, of course I had to use Cadbury mini eggs in them!

Grasshopper Pie … This crust is Oreo cookie crumbs and melted Becel, next time I’ll try adding coconut to it. I didn’t make it exactly as the recipe, I didn’t use the Mint Oreos (instead used regular Oreos and a bit of mint extract), and I used vanilla pudding with green food colouring instead of pistachio.

I started making my own vanilla custard in March for fruit topped pies, and I’ve pretty much got it down now as I sometimes make it for the kids as well. But when I made this pie, I burnt two batches before I finally cooked one properly. Bad custard mojo? The last batch turned out perfect. Since I’m doing a different pie every week, I couldn’t just make this a repeat of Daphne’s Welcome to the World Pie, so I used graham cracker crust instead of Oreo cookie crust. Gill has a strange love of winding yarn, which naturally makes us knitters very happy. Here she’s wound the second ball of my snazzy Greek cotton for my mother in law’s socks!

I had been making a lot of these crumb + melted Becel crusts lately because they’re soooo good and so easy to make. But in the spirit of mixing it up and getting creative I had planned to make a mango pie. Of the mangos I had on hand, 4 were not ripe enough leaving me with only 1. I did however have strawberries that I just added in place of the rest of the mango pieces and made a tray of Strawberry Mango Tarts. Delish! This was the same evening that we made up the kofeta for the baptism, but I’ll save those pics for the baptism post. 🙂

Banana Cream Pie has been on the list since I started making a pie a week, but I hadn’t gotten around to it till now. I used a graham cracker crust and banana custard with a layer of sliced bananas between! This was for sure one of my hands down faves so far!

I settled on a Pineapple Pie this week because I had never made or even tasted one and came across a recipe for it on All Recipes. It was good, really dense but it wasn’t heavy when we ate it. Emerald free handed a pineapple cutout!

Now, on to the really fun stuff. When I made Cake Balls for my friend Lindsay’s birthday last month, all of us loved them enough to marry them. Really, they’re so amazingly good. So of course I wanted to make some for wee one #3’s baptism on the long weekend. We ended up making even more because several of these were eaten as the night wore on.

Next post will bring everything back up to date with a full post on all the crafty (and tasty) creations we made! My ladies are good at this stuff!