My friend Laura likes chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting. I told her husband I would surprise her with a very special version of that flavor combination so I made her some homemade Hostess cupcakes. These are fun because they look like a boring chocolate cupcake with shiny glaze, but they have a surprise inside- a big yummy blob of vanilla frosting!

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As you know Easter was last weekend, so this post will actually not be useful to anyone for approximately 381 days- but I don’t really care because I don’t blog for money or anything, and I took nice pictures and if I don’t write down what I did I will surely forget. I’ll try to remember to re-post this in a more timely manner next year. Until then… allow me to “resurrect” the Easter spirit (ba-dam-cha.) I’m here all week, folks.

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I like Easter because it was my grandmother’s favorite holiday, so it always makes me think of her and brings up many fond memories. Also, because there’s nothing more fun than dying eggs and hiding/finding them with nieces and nephews! And finally, because I get to eat lots of ham and cheezy potatoes. So in that spirit, here is a roundup of some of my favorite and most Easterrific ideas… enjoy!

Last year I cut up some old neckties from a thrift store and made these gorgeous silk-dyed eggs… a stunning result from a surprisingly simple project!

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My nephew turned 5 recently and swore he wanted a circuit board cake. At the 11th hour he decided he wanted a car cake instead. Online searches for car cakes yielded a lot of lameness and ugly-ass cakes, so I winged it. Wung it? Whatever. I figured something out, and was pretty pleased when it actually, totally looked like a car.

I know the icing isn’t perfect here- that’s the beauty of making something for a person who is only 5. Perfection is not what they’re after. They are after copious amounts of frosting and candy on a cake that’s shaped like something other than a cake, which makes them pretty easy to please. I think the biggest compliment came when, after admiring the cake for several minutes, my nephew turned to my Dad and with saucer eyes and his jaw hanging open, and said- “GRAMPA- do you realize this CAR is EATABLE?!?!?”

Eatable indeed! I made this somewhat nasty hot pink strawberry cake in a 9×13 pan and then cut a third of it off, lengthwise. Then I cut the long skinny piece I had in half perpendicular. Like this:

I flipped the 2 pieces 90 degrees and set them next to each other on top of the remaining large cake and stuck them on with frosting. They were kind of slope-y which actually made it look more like a car. I wanted really sturdy, fluffy frosting for this, so I used a fluffy meringue frosting (my mom made it so I’m not sure how- something about like this) and tinted it blue to attach the cake pieces and cover the whole thing in gobs and gobs of icing. I made a little bit of white royal icing for the windows, doors, and writing. Tic-tacs for lights and blinkers, oreos for wheels, sour belts for racing stripes and windshield wipers, some weird white tootsie rolls for the bumpers, and voila! A car that any 5-year-old would love.

And now for something completely different: the GINGERBREAD CASBAH.

The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (“we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

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I was looking at Halloween ideas with my 8 year old niece last night, and we thought this stuff was sooooo cool. We also recognized that we are probably never going to motivate to make anything this complex but we love the idea that somebody might.

Martha Stewart doesn’t usually do it for me, but my GOODNESS these are lovely ghost and witch hat petit-fours. They don’t look as hard or time-consuming as I expected for a MS recipe but they are still kind of a lot of work. But how cool are they? Basically the recipe tells you take a cake and cut it into circles, then pipe a big pointy hunk of frosting on it, then pour a glaze over it. So if you bought like a pound cake or a banana bread or something instead of making a cake yourself, it would be a lot easier.

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My parents lived in Queretaro, Mexico for a couple of months 2 years ago- and ever since then my Dad has been OBSESSED with something he ate there ONE TIME. He does not stop talking about it! Using his descriptions, I did some detective work via my Diana Kennedy cookbook and figured out he probably ate Chiles En Nogada- a very interesting and admittedly somewhat challenging Mexican recipe. I’ve been promising him that I would make it, and when I finally did, it was really rather time-consuming and I wasn’t sure it would be worth it.

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My friends got married on a mountaintop in Israel, and had a little local shindig to celebrate the nuptials stateside. I offered to make a wedding cake for the party, and they gave me absolutely NO guidance. These folks are avid kayakers, backpackers, skiers, and mountaineers- but of all those, kayaking is definitely their #1 love. Furthermore, they met on a kayaking trip. So this was a no-brainer: I had to surprise them with a kayak wedding cake!

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This morning, I received the following email in my inbox from reader Chris:

Dear Karen,

I put your foodgawker entry for lemon raspberry white chocolate cake balls on my “favorites” list.  That is such an ingenious recipe.  I clicked on it tonight because I wanted to make them, and-screeeeeee!!!!!  It was gone! I tried to find out the date that you posted the recipe so that I could look it up in your archives, but was unable to get the date.  May I please have a copy of that recipe, pretty please?

This happens sometimes, because when I switched my site’s web host earlier this year, I didn’t move over all the recipes from my archive site. If you have a recipe you can’t find please let me know via email or Twitter, and I’ll be happy to post it for you too!

Chris: ENJOY  this recipe from the archives, and please let us know how your cake balls turn out!

******************

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These cubes of finger jello from I’ve Gotta Little Space To Fill are so beautiful and mesmerizing! Like food + art + the 50s all rolled (squared?) into one discrete item.

My thoughts: 1) It would make a cool t-shirt pattern. 2) How do you make white jello? 3) mmmmmm delicious jello.

You can get the recipe and see more pictures at I’ve Gotta Little Space To Fill.