Eight Sweet Favourites for Easter

Easter is coming and the Easter Bunny, with his basket full of goodies, will soon be on his way! And why not add to the fun this year by making some of your own mouth-watering sweets? There’s always room for that extra Easter treat, wouldn’t you agree? 

In this blog, we bring you a curation of eight of our favourite Easter sweets that you can whip up at home. We begin with a delicious rocky road creation and then some other chocolate-lovers’ delights, including the indispensable hot cross bun. If chocolate’s not your thing, how about giving Ahead of Thyme’s Butterscotch and Peanut Butter Cookies a try? And assembling the cutest-ever Easter cupcakes is bound to be fun for the young and young-at-heart!

So step aside Easter Bunny with your truckloads of chocolate eggs, the sweet challenge is on …!

Easter Egg Rocky Road

You guessed it – chocolate eggs are the hero of this rocky road taste sensation! It’s a great way to use up leftover Easter eggs but, in the most likely event that there won’t be any, we suggest the more proactive approach of making it ahead of time. Using only four ingredients, it’s easy and made in a jiffy, with no baking required!

Created by Jessica Holmes at Sweetest Menu, the end product brings together all the best taste and textual rocky road qualities in chunky, chewy servings. 

All you’ll need is some chocolate, peanuts, marshmallows and Easter eggs. Substitutions are also fine – you can use other types of nuts, like almonds or macadamia, or leave them out altogether and include more marshmallows. As for the chocolate, try a good-quality block variety (Aldi has some tasty, cost-effective ranges) and opt for your preferred type – milk, dark, white or a combination of a few of these. Mini marshmallows and the mini variety of chocolate eggs work best and you can choose any chocolate varieties that tickle your taste buds (caramel, Crunchie, cookies ‘n’ cream … ). 

The only cooking involved is melting the chocolate, and you might like to cut up any larger nuts. Then it’s a matter of combining the ingredients, spreading the mixture in a prepared pan and popping it into the fridge to set. 

Head over to Jessica’s recipe at Sweetest Menu for the full run-down. And while you’re at it, how about making an extra batch to give away as Easter gifts to some special people in your life? 

Easter Brownies

Another, similar favourite using mini chocolate eggs comes from Lucy at the Bake Play Smile kitchen. Taking just ten minutes to prepare, this melt, mix and bake recipe produces a guaranteed crowd pleaser with its rich, gooey centre and flaky top. 

All you’ll need are some fridge and pantry staples – butter, caster sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, eggs and plain flour – to make the basic brownie mixture. Then simply add 125g of solid mini chocolate eggs of any flavour you choose (Ferrero Rocher work a treat!). 

An interesting touch to this recipe is that there is no rising agent, such as baking powder or self-raising flour. As the brownie mixture cooks, it stays flat and deliciously moist. Also, if you’re after a gluten-free option, Lucy provides a delicious and equally straightforward alternative recipe.

You can make this recipe the conventional way (we do) or use the Thermomix method. Either way, there are seven easy steps from prep to storage. Our main tips, learned from experience, are to go lightly on melting the butter (follow the steps closely here) and to use high-quality cocoa powder (beware some home brands!).

Chocolate lovers out there, this one’s for you! It’s also quite budget-friendly (look for some of the discounted chocolate eggs close to Easter) and you can freeze the brownies for up to three months. We’ve enjoyed defrosting a batch, warming it up (just a little) and eating it with icecream – divine!

Chocolate Egg Baked Tart

Over at the BBC’s Good Food, cookery writer Sophie Godwin provides easy steps to create this show-stopping, five-star tart. And we love the one-minute video as a perfect fail-safe measure for the less experienced cook! 

A most fitting end to a celebratory Easter meal, the tart comprises three everyday ingredients for the shortbread base (butter, caster sugar, self-raising flour) and six for the filling (butter, dark chocolate, caster sugar, plain flour, eggs and chocolate eggs). The recipe calls for Galaxy Golden Eggs, which have great visual appeal but can be hard to find. Try opting instead for white chocolate eggs or, in fact, any flavour of solid eggs will do. 

While it doesn’t necessarily attract a very high healthy eating score, any dish with dark chocolate has to be of benefit – no? 

So, what do we like most about this dish? Well, there’s the deliciously smooth chocolate taste, of course! Plus the tart serves up to 12 people and can be made a day ahead, so perfect for a crowd. Served with crème fraîche, double cream or vanilla icecream, this one is hard to go past!

Chocolate Hot Cross Buns

It’s quite puzzling to me that the traditional hot cross bun always gets passed over for the chocolate variety (in our house, at least!). A case of chocolate triumphing over spicy sweet, I’m told …

There are so many twists on the traditional bun to buy or cook these days, such as rum and raisin, butterscotch and sticky date. There are also plenty of savoury versions but we won’t go there (see para above!). Aldi even produced a giant version ‘as big as your head’ in the UK last year, which, alas (or not!), didn’t make it to Australia. And we love the imagination of the cooks at Delicious with their many culinary innovations, including the Hot Cross Buffin – a fuss-free hybrid of a bun and a muffin.  

The recipe we’ve chosen for this year’s list of our favourites is by Marie Roffey at Sugar Salt Magic. Her promise of a tasty and fool-proof recipe doesn’t disappoint and, despite taking a little bit of time to make (you know, making the dough and all that …), we love the fluffy, fresh buns that emerge from the oven! Just mouth-watering!

What you’ll need for this treat are ten mostly everyday ingredients for the bun: butter, milk, plain flour, cocoa, yeast, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, egg and chocolate chips. And for the topping – egg yolk, cocoa, plain flour and water. 

Just be sure to be on the lookout for good-quality cocoa and chocolate chips – the quality makes the difference between delicious and sublime! Cadbury’s a personal favourite!

There are 14 steps from prep start to serving. A nice, take-your-time method, with the kneading of the dough at Step 6 really quite restorative 😊. We’re sure you’ll have fun with this one - although do try to resist the one for me, one for the dish technique when folding in the choc chips! 

And now onto some favourites where chocolate gets bumped off pride of place!

Easter Vegan Lemon Sponge Cake

First up, Aimee at Wallflower Kitchen has created this wonderfully light and zesty lemon sponge cake as a vegan, dairy free option. It takes about an hour to prepare and cook and serves ten. It’s such a delicious looking cake, too, that you can be confident that other non-vegan diners will be clamouring for a slice!

The sponge cake recipe, adapted from the Cake Merchant, uses pantry staples, such as caster sugar, sunflower oil, self-raising flour, cornstarch and bicarb of soda. You’ll also need a fresh lemon, unsweetened dairy-free milk and the all-important vanilla bean paste (vanilla extract is also OK). The six-step method is easy to follow and pretty fail-safe! Just make sure you have two 20 cm cake tins at hand to ensure the batter rises to the correct height on cooking (avoid substitute sizes!). 

Once cooked and cooled, the sponges are ready for a very tasty lemon buttercream frosting. This requires some brisk whisking and four basic ingredients – dairy-free butter, vanilla paste or extract, icing sugar and lemon juice. 

The frosting is an integral part of the final stage of the recipe – decorating the cake. Aimee gives a clear, step-by step process of layering the cakes and spreading / smoothing the frosting between and over the layers. Then there’s the final optional touch of melting some dark chocolate and flicking it over the top for a speckled effect. You can also add vegan mini eggs or chocolates, although skipping these final two steps works perfectly well. Enjoy!

Simple Simnel Cake

A relatively recent discovery for us, Good Food’s Simple Simnel Cake is a perfect sweet dish for Easter and a worthy alternative to our usual carrot cake. It might take a little time to prepare and cook – about an hour 20 prep and an hour 50 cooking – but it’s an easier version than the traditional simnel cake and worth every minute taken!

And did you know that the simnel cake has a long history as an Easter dish in some countries, such as the UK? Traditionally packed with dried fruit and marzipan, the cake is decorated with 11 marzipan balls on top to represent Jesus’ 11 disciples (Judas is excluded). 

This reimagined version of the cake is topped with caramel almonds instead of marzipan balls and uses package instead of home-made marzipan in the body of the cake (an acceptable cooking hack, in our opinion!). In addition to the marzipan, the cake recipe calls for a wealth of rich ingredients: oranges, Cointreau, mixed dried fruit, glacé cherries, butter, caster sugar, eggs and milk. And then onto the topping of caramel almonds (blanched almonds and caster sugar) and icing sugar (made with orange zest and juice).

The four-step method is relatively foolproof. Just be sure to have an electric mixer, rolling pin and loaf tin at hand! We can guarantee that the beautiful aroma of the cake in the oven will soon be coming your way! 

Butterscotch and Peanut Butter Bird’s Nest Cookies

The Ahead of Thyme creators of the delightful Butterscotch and Peanut Butter Bird’s Nest Cookies call them aesthetically pleasing - and we couldn’t agree more! The cookies are also fun and easy to produce, making them perfect for the kids to be involved. They take just 17 minutes to make (including ten minutes’ cooling time) and yield six cookies (a double batch comes highly recommended!).

There’s also no baking required, just some melting, assembling and cooling. Plus, you’ll only need four ingredients, including the surprise entry of chow mein noodles. In our house, instant mi goreng noodles are a staple and we’ve really enjoyed bringing the chow mein variety into the mix!

Together with the noodles, you’ll need peanut butter and butterscotch chips. The latter can be tricky to locate and we tend to use caramel (try Cadbury’s Caramilk Baking chips) as a worthy substitute. The recipe also calls for mini chocolate eggs to line the bird’s nest but, in our view, these are optional. The cookies taste great by themselves!

And they’re done in five quick steps: melt the chips and peanut butter, stir this mix into the noodles, divide into a muffin tray, cool and gently remove, and add chocolate eggs, if desired. Visit the Ahead of Thyme website for full details!

Easter Cupcakes

Our final favourite for this year are the fun and very cute vanilla cupcakes over at the Taste website. They’re topped with goodies such as coconut, mini marshmallows and black icing to produce heads and tails of baby bunnies – how much more Easter-y can you get?!

A timesaving quality of this recipe is that it uses a packet mix for the cupcakes, allowing you to focus on the delightful topping. (Of course, you can always DIY - try this beauty!)

The recipe has an easy-to-follow four-step method. First, make the cupcakes (packet mix + butter, eggs and milk). Then, at Step 2, make the buttercream as a pre-decoration coating. For this step, you’ll need an electric mixer (or alternative) to mix butter, icing sugar, milk and vanilla. Taking things gradually is the name of the game here!

Steps 3 and 4 involve spreading the buttercream over each cupcake, dipping each one in coconut, and then decorating with sliced pink and white marshmallows, sprinkles, sugar coated chocolates or lollies and writing icing to produce irresistible edible bunnies, complete with whiskers! 

All up, it takes about an hour to make 12 cupcakes – approx. 30 minutes prep and 25 minutes cooking time. They make a great table centrepiece and kids will love them! Head over to Taste for all the instructions!

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As many readers know, here at Bonbon Fusion, we’re all about shared experiences, so why not enlist some help in the kitchen and make your Easter cooking a family and friends affair? There’s lots of fun ahead, to be sure!