By Kelly Youngblood
Editor’s Note: We pulled this post from the archives. Enjoy!
I’m a fairly decent cook (I know, not a ringing endorsement) but I can follow a recipe pretty well and I enjoy it. That’s half the battle, right?
What I can’t do is make food look cute or pretty. I took a cake decorating class a few years ago thinking I would walk away with a new skill and possibly my own business. (I even had a name picked out!)
But sadly, professional cake decorating was not my destiny. It’s hard work and definitely requires a skill I don’t possess!
So when I was looking for fun and cute Easter treat ideas, I gravitated towards the ones that even an AVERAGE cook/baker/decorator like me could do.
One of my pet peeves is when a recipe seems simple enough, but when you get down to it, things end up going really, really bad. (I’ve had my fair share of Pinterest fails.) So I will try to give you the absolute truth about each treat’s level of difficulty.
Peep S’mores
So this one was pretty easy, but I will say you need to keep your eye on the Peeps while it’s in the microwave. You only need to heat it for a few seconds (I did it for about 6 seconds) until you start to see the Peep puff up. You don’t want to heat it too long and have it “fluff up” off the cracker and all over your microwave. But I was happy with the way these turned out- cute and colorful and perfect for Easter!
Ingredients
2 graham cracker halves
2-3 pieces of Hershey’s chocolate
1 Peeps
Directions
Add chocolate and the Peeps to one of the chocolate halves.
Microwave for a few seconds (until the marshmallow starts to puff).
Top with other graham cracker half.
Goldfish Carrots
Ok, so this can’t really be considered a “recipe” but I love it as a treat/snack idea for the kids’ Easter basket, lunch box, or even a classroom snack. My only tip here would be to make sure you buy the 12-inch piping/icing bags instead of the 16-inch (unless you want to use an entire bag of Goldfish per piping bag.) That leads me to my one (minor) complaint about this snack- one bag of Goldfish only fills up about 4-6 12-inch piping bags. That being said, it’s a pretty cute idea that isn’t candy and is peanut-free.
Ingredients
1 12-in pastry piping bag
1 piece of green ribbon
Goldfish crackers (or any other orange cracker)
Directions
Fill bag full of crackers and leave some room at the top to tie with ribbon.
Chocolate Birds’ Nests
This looked easy and it actually was easy to make! They are pretty darn cute too! The only downfall I would say is I’m not a fan of eating chocolate covered chow mein noodles. (My kids, on the other hand, will pretty much eat anything if it’s covered in chocolate.) I see this more as an adorable decoration and a nice place to put a few candy eggs.
Ingredients (makes 4 nests)
4 oz of semi-sweet chocolate (I used Baker’s chocolate)
1 cup of chow mein noodles
chocolate eggs
Easter Deviled Eggs
If you can make deviled eggs, you can make these! The only difference is you dye the egg whites after you boil them, de-shell them (my least favorite part), and pop the yolks out. At first I was concerned the dye wouldn’t show up as well on the egg without the shell on it, but I was pleasantly surprised. I used Neon food dye, which might have helped brighten the eggs a bit.
Rice Krispies Easter Baskets
I was nervous about this one. As it turns out, I had a good reason to be nervous. I managed to snap a quick photo with everything intact, but the second I turned my back, the basket handle (which is made of Twizzlers) started to droop, slide, and fall over. Sigh. But here’s my disclaimer- I used Twizzlers while the recipe called for pull-apart licorice, which is much thinner and could possibly stand up better. And I think if I would have spent more time on it, I could have managed to make something a little more semi-permanent. The Rice Krispies are very pliable and easy to work with and that is definitely in your favor. One of the recipes I found actually said to reserve some of the Rice Krispie mixture to help stick the handle to the “basket.” I was hoping the icing would be more of a sticky agent too but it didn’t seem to help much, at least in my case. But overall, I am happy with this recipe and would attempt it again.
Note: I may have adapted some of the recipes a bit, but you can see the original recipes for the first three treats here.
Kelly is a mom to three wild and wonderful children and a freelance writer for a weekly newspaper. She lives in Mansfield with her husband, kids, and two dogs.