resurrection cake.

i love traditions.

i know i've written about this before, but i grew up in a family that was ALL about them.  and i loved it.  now it's so important to me to build traditions of our own with the girls... it's such a special part of childhood and family life in general.

naturally, holidays are the perfect time to develop these traditions and sweet family moments.  however, in my best efforts, i find a few things that are difficult in the task to do so: number one, our girls are still small and while doing special things is super fun, it can also make me want to poke my eyes out.  seriously.  and sometimes--well, most of the time--things don't go the way i have imagined in this idealistic brain of mine.  number two, it's an ongoing task for nick&i to try to teach our girls the reasons why our family celebrates holidays like christmas and easter.  for us, easter is far more than bunnies and eggs... but to them right now, cute fluffy animals, pretty decorated eggs and easter candy are what's most exciting.  so we are constantly trying to find ways to teach them more and more about our faith and our savior's love for us.  which can be a huge challenge.  ever tried to explain death and resurrection to a two and four year old?  geesh.

so while scrolling the internet one day, i found a few different ideas for "resurrection cakes", and i thought they were so cute, and a great (and delicious!) way for teaching the girls more about easter.

here's what we did...

resurrection cake

materials needed (besides recipe ingredients):
* cardboard
* tinfoil
* coconut
* green food coloring
* candy eggs
* oreos
* chocolate sticks
* glue
* biscuit cutter

- preheat oven to 350.
- we used this chocolate cake recipe from the pioneer woman, but we halved it.
- grease and dust a pampered chef batter bowl with cocoa.  fill bowl with batter and bake for 1 hr, or until knife is clean when inserted into cake.  allow to cool.
- wrap a good sized piece of cardboard with tin foil.
- take several oreo cookies and remove the white filling.  finely crush the chocolate wafer parts in a ziploc bag.
- in a mixing bowl, mix a bag of shredded coconut with a few drops of green food coloring until coconut is evenly colored.
- once cake is cooled, take a biscuit cutter and carve out a portion of the cake to be the "stone".
- we used this super yummy chocolate buttercream frosting recipe from mel's kitchen cafe; highly recommend.
- using a spreader, frost cake and "stone".  dust cake with some of the oreo crumbs to resemble dirt; save a good portion for later.
- add coconut "grass" to cover the tinfoil, leaving a section by the opening of the tomb uncovered.  add a few pastel colored egg candies; i used reeses peanut butter eggs just because they're my fav and we had them on hand for filling the girls easter eggs tomorrow.
- fill the tomb opening section with the rest of your oreo cookie crumbs for "dirt".
- cut a few chocolate sticks to make three crosses.  glue together.  when glue has dried, top cake with crosses.

voila!  this is going to be one of our new family traditions.  the girls loved it; they helped me mix it up and bake it this morning, and then they were so excited to wake up from their naps and see the decorated cake!

 

happy easter everyone!  i can still hear my dad's booming voice excitedly say: HE IS RISEN; HE IS RISEN INDEED!

so grateful.