Hot Cross Buns For Easter

Hot Cross Buns, the traditional Good Friday treat, aren’t that hard to put together. Made from a fairly straightforward yeast dough with added fruits and spices, these tasty rolls are great at any time of the year. There’s a tradition that says that says that if you bake them on Good Friday that they won’t spoil during the following year. Personally, I wonder how you would ever be able to verify this, since they are sure to disappear long before they have a chance to go bad.

Hot Cross Buns For Easter

Eggshell Votives For Easter

So what else do you think you can do with an eggshell? How about a colorful votive? Open the end of an egg or three and remove the contents (it’s omelet time!) and dye the empty shell. Add a length of wire-core candle wick and some melted wax. After your egg votive is cool, trim the wick and light.

Eggshell Votives For Easter

Egg Carton Chicks For Easter

So you’ve just finished dyeing several dozen Easter eggs. What are you going to do with those egg cartons? You don’t want to just throw them in the trash, and it seems like there might be something more interesting to do with them than just throw them into the recycling bin or composting them. How about making them into cute little Easter chicks? Cut your egg carton into individual egg sections, add a paper hinge, a beak, and some wings, and you’re a long way toward answering that age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg (carton)?

Egg Carton Chicks For Easter

Easter Pie For Easter

Looking for something new and different for Easter dinner? Maybe it’s time to try an Easter Pie. Made with a phyllo dough crust and filled with a mix of ricotta cheese, rice, and pine nuts, it’s sure to become a family favorite for Easter, or any other time.

Easter Pie For Easter

Chocolate Easter Eggs on a Stick For Easter

What if you could take the two food items items most closely associated with Easter—eggs and chocolate—and put them together? We’re not suggesting a chocolate omelet here; rather a chocolate Easter egg that you make yourself in a real egg shell. Cut the ends off the shells of several eggs, clean them out, and then fill them with melted colored chocolate morsels (or other tasty melted goodies). Add a lollipop stick before they completely harden, peel the egg shells off, and enjoy!

Chocolate Easter Eggs on a Stick For Easter

Bunny Bingo For Easter

Playing games with your kids is a great way to spend a few minutes or an entire afternoon. Unfortunately, though, there aren’t a lot of Easter-themed games out there. So why not adopt an old standby, BINGO, and make it the Easter Bunny’s new favorite pastime? Print out game cards and start calling numbers. The first player to get five in a row shouts out BUNNY and wins the admiration of his or her follow players.

Bunny Bingo For Easter

Quiz: What's Your Easter IQ? For Easter

How big an Easter fanatic are you? Are your fingers permanently discolored with Easter egg dye? Do you have little bits of shredded Easter grass in your pockets? Do you consider Peeps a food group? Test your Easter knowledge with a springtime holiday quiz.

Quiz: What's Your Easter IQ? For Easter

Easter Coloring Pages For Easter

Probably the biggest art project any household embarks upon for Easter is the traditional dyeing of the Easter eggs. While you’ve got to make sure you’ve got those eggs good and colored up, what do you do when either (1) every egg in the house has already been decorated, and (2) you are at your parental wits’ end with having to supervise the operation for all the little ones gathered around your table. For times like this, there’s nothing like an Easter coloring page. Download and print a couple or a bunch, get out the crayons, colored pencils, markers, or paints (well, maybe not the paints—that kind of defeats the whole no-supervision thing), and let ‘em go to town. It keeps the kids occupied, helps to liven up the place when their best work is prominently displayed, and it gives you a breather before diving headlong into your next project.

Easter Coloring Pages For Easter

Baked Ham with Honey-Apricot Glaze For Easter

While for some of us the food item that is most closely associated with Easter is the chocolate Easter Bunny (bite the ears off first!), there are those who approach holiday eating with a somewhat more mature attitude and think about the holiday dinner. Certainly one of the most popular entrées is the Easter ham. If you’d like to take a new look at the honey glazed ham, why not try adding some apricot to the mix? Along with orange juice, honey, and spices, add add a bit of apricot jam to take your holiday ham to the next level.

Baked Ham with Honey-Apricot Glaze For Easter

Palm Leaf Cross For Easter

In lots of churches, palm fronds are handed out during the Palm Sunday service. While it’s fun to wave this greenery around, and maybe even participate in the march out and around the church to reenact the entry into Jerusalem, what do you do with this after you go home? Sure, you can save it to use when you need ashes for next Ash Wednesday, but maybe there’s something artistic you can do with it in the meantime. How about a bit of vegetative origami, folding that bit of palm into a cross? It’s not that complicated to do, and like with paper origami, it doesn’t require any tape or scissors.

Palm Leaf Cross For Easter

Chocolate Covered Jelly Beans For Easter

Little Easter goodies of the candy variety tend to run in two different directions: chocolate and jelly beans. So what about combining these, ending up with chocolate covered jelly beans? No doubt your dentist will be a big fan (we’re getting a new boat!), but your taste buds may enjoy the experience as well.

Grab some chocolate chips of your favorite variety--milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate--and melt ‘em. Take a jelly bean and skewer it on a toothpick. Dip it in the melted chocolatey goodness, let cool, and enjoy. If you pick the right flavors of jelly beans, you can duplicate some your favorites: cherry jelly bean plus milk chocolate gives you a cordial cherry; coconut jelly bean and dark chocolate gives you your very own bite-sized version of a Mounds bar. The sky’s the limit, as long as you remember to brush afterwards.

Chocolate Covered Jelly Beans For Easter

Homemade Easter Grass For Easter

If you’ve got an Easter basket or three to fill, your first step is probably to head off for the store to buy that green plastic fakey-grass stuff to serve as a bed for all the goodies to follow. Along with the general messiness of having it fly everywhere (and yes, your cat will eat it, making for a not-so-pleasant Easter when you have to help her, umm, get rid of it later), it’s probably not the best use of money or resources. So how about making some of your own?

All it takes is some leftover wrapping paper or other colorful paper scraps and your paper shredder. Feed the paper through the shredder, rescue the shredded bits from the receptacle, and crinkle them up to fill your basket.

Homemade Easter Grass For Easter

Easy Yarn Easter Egg For Easter

If you’re a chicken and you need an egg, I guess you just go lay one. If you’re a bunny, I suppose you do the same thing--or maybe if you’re good friends with a chicken, you go and ask her to give you a hand. But what if you’re a kid? Not too many egg-laying children out there. No, you’re going to have to build your own, which it turns out isn’t that tough to do.

Start with a piece of cardboard or stiff paper. Cut it into an egg shape the size that you want your finished egg to be. Glue lines of yarn, string, bias tape, or what-have-you to the surface of the egg. When everything’s in place, use a pair of scissors to snip of the excess (egg-cess?), and you’ve got a nifty egg that would make you the envy of all the bunnies, and several of the chickens as well.

Easy Yarn Easter Egg For Easter

Surprise Marbled Easter Eggs For Easter

We’re all familiar with the colorful eggs that the Easter Bunny brings to us. The problem is, though, that once you’ve peeled that colorful shell off of the egg, you’re left with just another hard boiled egg. If you’d like the fun to continue, you ought to think about adding a bit of color to the insides as well.

Go ahead and follow your favorite recipe for hard cooked eggs. Once they’re cool, carefully crack the shells all around, but be sure to leave the shell on the egg. Dye your egg the way you normally do, and let it dry. Now carefully peel the already-cracked shell of of the egg, and you’ll see a bunch of spider web-like lines all over the usually all white egg.

Surprise Marbled Easter Eggs For Easter

Chocolate Nests For Easter

So if a chocolate Easter Bunny laid a bunch of chocolate eggs (do the bunnies lay eggs, or do they just distribute them--I’ve never been too clear on that), where do you think they’d put them? Seems to me a chocolate nest might be the best candidate for this job.

So how does one make a chocolate nest anyway? Turns out all you need are some of those crunchy brown chow mein noodles and some chocolate chips (and add peanut butter if you want to create a deluxe nest). Melt the goodies, combine with the crispy noodles, and form into nest shapes. Add chocolate eggs and you’ll be the envy of all the other bunnies on the block.

Chocolate Nests For Easter