Saturday, April 23, 2011

Some Favorite Easter Treats


Easter is a wonderful reason to have fun with food! Here are some of our favorite Easter treats!


For Easter morning, everyone loves to wake up to this gooey nutty pull-apart bread, Paula Deen's Ultimate Coffee Cake. The recipe is here.

It is so easy. You put it together the night before. Toss some frozen yeast dinner roll dough into a bundt pan and top it with nuts, brown sugar, butterscotch pudding mix, and melted butter. Cover it with a cloth and let in sit on the counter overnight. The dough thaws and rises, and you bake in the the morning. What a wonderful aroma to arise with on Easter morning!

Another absolute must-have at our Easter feast is Jello Eggs. Jello makes an egg mold and you use the Jigglers recipe. I make them in every color so I have several molds since each mold makes only 6 eggs from 1 large box of Jello. It would take me days to make all the colors of the rainbow with only one mold, but it can be done.

I usually line an Easter basket with green leaf lettuce and put the eggs inside.


I made these with the pina-colada flavored jello. The are opaque and look just like peeled hard boiled eggs.


And, of course, what would Easter be without deviled eggs - lots and lots of them! They go so fast!


See my post about our traditional Easter deserts: the lamb cake, bird's nest cupcakes, and Italian Easter pie HERE.

Whatever your family's favorite Easter treats are, I hope they find their way to your Easter table this year, and maybe one or two new ones as well! Happy Easter!

Friday, April 22, 2011

To Dye For!

AtticGal Rachelle says:


Looking for some easy fun new ways to dye your eggs? Here are a few my kiddos had fun with:



May favorite: wrap boiled eggs in pieces of wide lace and tie it tightly with a rubber band. That's it!

Dye as usual. The extra lace makes a nice handle for easy dying, and the lace can be reused over and over.

So pretty!!!






Even easier - wrap eggs with rubber bands of different widths.


The effects are really cool!


My kids love the stickers! Use hole reinforce stickers for fun circle shapes.


Or Letter stickers for personalized or monogramed eggs,



and Easter words, of course.


I absolutely LOVED these, but the we had a tough time getting some of the stickers off.

Have fun dying your Easter eggs! Have a wonderful Easter!


Tidy Mom

Monday, April 4, 2011

Babies, Babies, Everywhere Babies!

AtticGal Rachelle says:

It seems that everyone (but me) is having babies these days! I have been invited to so many baby showers lately, so I have had to come up with some fun baby girl and baby boy gifts. I started by buying some fun fleece and making several girl blankets and several boy blankets, then assceesorizing the other gifts, cards, and wrapping to match. (I have a matching problem - everything has to match!)

The girl blankets are bright pink. I found this super darling owl pillow at Target and couldn't resist! So I used my Owl punch and SU! stamps to make these darling scalloped circle cards and also to stamp the gift bag.


The blanket was made by simple cutting a scalloped edge onto the fleece using a soup can as a guide. Then I sewed on a textural, baby-friendly applique. What a pretty package!

For the boys I got a bit messier! I made their blankets with orange dump truck themed fleece. I used the dump truck, and it's accompanying dirt as a theme for everything. The card and bag are stamped with construction vehicles moving pounds of dirt, and the word "DIRT" colorfully spelled out.

I tied the edges of the blanket and added another applique - a dump truck this time. I also added a toy dump truck to the gift.

Inside the cards I wrote "Welcome to the wonderful world of Dirt!" I should know. I happen to be an expert on boy dirt!

This worked out great! I might have to make this a habit of making baby gifts in batches like this, several at a time, so i can be ready next time there is a bumper crop of babies around here.