Easter Traditions

Growing up the one tradition I remember about Easter is making our own Easter baskets. We would make them out of construction paper and usually weave it together then decorate. We leave the basket out at night and in the morning we would have to find them. Of course they would be filled with candy. My brothers weren't too excited about decorating an Easter basket, but the rule was, no basket, no candy! Sometimes they would staple a handle onto a brown paper lunch sack for their basket. Then they got real creative and used a big brown grocery bag thinking, bigger basket, more candy, though that wasn't the case. So, I thought this year it's Ellie's turn to begin the tradition. I couldn't resist helping to decorate her basket. She likes the messy stuff and then she is off playing with the dogs. So I finished it for her. I keep telling her the Easter Bunny is coming tonight. Now that she saw the Easter Bunny and gave him a high five at Wal-mart she is pretty excited about him. I think I will find a bunny in one of her few hundred stuffed animals and re-give it to her, she will never know.

A New Tradition

We had an Easter recipe exchange at my house the other night. I didn't have any Easter recipes so of course I go to Allrecipes.com. I found this Peanut Butter Easter Egg recipe. It was very easy and turned out to be very fun to make as a family. It's quite simple, you combine peanut butter, powdered sugar and butter, then shape into eggs, or whatever shape you want, then dip into chocolate and decorate. The recipe called for semi-sweet baking chocolate, but I used milk chocolate melting chips you can find at a cake shop or Jo-Ann's. Then to decorate I bought white chocolate melting chips, already colored in pink and purple and white. After dipping in chocolate, I melted the color chocolates in the microwave and then poured into a small Ziploc bag. I cut the corner and decorated the eggs with fun designs and colors. David and Ellie also helped to decorate the eggs. We had so much fun I wanted to make this a new family tradition. It would be fun to make hearts for Valentine's or whatever holiday it is. Let me find the recipe and I will post it with my changes.