Oh so later Easter post

Jeez, is it really a whole week since Easter? According to my calendar it is. So it really is time to round up our Easter activities.

For Easter sunday our family invited some friends and relatives. In the end we expected about 13 persons for brunch. With this in mind I started to knit egg cozies. Inspired by fresh spring colors, I knitted seven pompom head egg cozies. They came out really great on white eggs. I couldn't resist to draw little faces on the eggs. Here is the result:

With seven eggs not being enough for 13 persons, Birgit dyed some more eggs by hand:

On saturday before Easter sunday we spent pretty much the entire day with cooking, baking and crafting for the brunch. Luckily our mom has a big kitchen with a looooooong table to work on:

Not Martha had this really great post on chocolate Easter surprise eggs. Birgit gave them a try. Had some troubles the top of the eggs without causing too much damage. After some "eager discussing" among Birgit, our mom and me (since everybody believed to know how to do it best) all eggs were opened, cleaned, sterilized and dyed. With lots of patience the inside of the eggs were coated with dark chocolate. Somehow something went wrong with coating all eggs with white chocolate so only a couple of them got a layer of white chocolate. The eggs on Not Martha were filled with small bits of candy. Ours were not. Cracking these eggs reminded us on fortune cookies. So I sat down and googled a bit and in the end found enough quotes to put in our eggs. Instead of chocolate Easter surprise eggs we had chocolate Easter fortune eggs! Before they could be enjoyed, they had to be put together again. And here the trouble really started. The top of the eggs did not really match the bottom of the eggs anymore. On most of the shells small bits cracked off. I think it was our mom who suggested to prepare a little bit of icing to glue together both parts of the eggs. Still it was quite difficult and Birgit got pretty frustrated. 

When I saw the half-finished results I suggested to make a virtue out of the little mess. None of our guests knew what the eggs are supposed to look like. So I handed Birgit sprinkles to attach to the icing and thus "decorate" the eggs.

In the end they did not look bad at all! Everybody enjoyed them and we had a lot of fun reading the quotes to each other. 

The sprinkles you see on the eggs were meant for my cupcakes in the first place. And there we are: the cupcakes! Ever since I traveled to New York City last year and had those really great cupcakes from around the corner of our hotel I wanted to try to make some myself. An Easter brunch seemed to be to the perfect occasion. I found the blog HowToEatACupcake some time ago and looked forward to try out one of the recipes. I decided to go for the Vanilla Cupcakes with Mint by Amy Sedaris. Except that I did not want any mint. For the frosting I decided to use the Vanilla Buttercream frosting of Karen's cookies cakes & more. I divided the frosting into three batches and added green, pink and blue food coloring. That was fun. I love colorful food. 

I finished them with some sprinkles and it took me all my strength not to sample them immediately. When I finally got to try them on Sunday morning I knew these recipes would go into my personal recipe collection. I mean, THEY ROCK! In fact, they taste as great as they look:

Apparently I cannot upload more photos to this post so I gotta stop here. I'll try to write an additional (late) Easter post since I definitely want to talk about Birgit's Easter gift!