Carrots for the easter bunny

Where there is an easter bunny there must be carrots.

While this is not a real traditional saying, there is certainly truth to it. During the easter holidays, carrots show up in form of Marzipan treats, as sugary decoration on pies, and, most importantly, in the carrot cake.

My version, as almost any other I've ever seen, has a combination of all, sugary, marzipany, and real veggie carrots to make sure the bunny gets plenty of vitamine A..

The recipe is based on a simple cake batter: equal parts (weights) flour, sugar, butter & eggs are mixed together, with some baking powder. To make it a carrot cake, one essentially replaces the flour with carrots, and, adds typically ground almonds, or, what I like a lot, ground walnuts. Either tastes great. I usually use 300 g each, and instead of 300 g flour I'd use 250 g finely shredded carrots + 50 g flour + 100 g walnuts. I also replace the usual white sugar with brown sugar, and some dark honey.
All that will make a thick flowing batter that is baked at 375 deg F (170-180 deg C) for about an hour.
The decoration, as seen on my cake on top, is easily made by squirting bought colored frosting onto parchment paper. Try to squirt it on in carrot shape to begin with, but it can be formed using a wet finger. Let it dry, and let the cake be cooled down before moving the deco carrots onto the cake..


Only with such a cake to hope for, the easter bunny may be in the mood to lay those nicely colored eggs in the carefully prepared nests which we as a kid still had to build from moss that we collected around the house. A nice, soft, green nest that would be filled the next day with eggs and chocolate and all kinds of cool things a rabbit could carry on his back...


Coloring eggs by the way is real fun, and can be done in very natural & creative ways - for example, onion skin is a good coloring agent - wrap the eggs in several layers of onion skin, tie it up with some thread and boil it - use yellow and red onions for different colors. Wrap the eggs first in textured cloth, then surround that by onion, or blue cabbage, and boil it - the egg will have a nice texture, showing the structure and boundaries of the cloth wrap.
However, buying coloring agents will help you to those very strong colors, of course. Onion peel is not quite that potent.

If there are kids around, I leave a little dough of the carrot cake out before the carrots are added, and bake it as two cookies that are flown together - when it is done, I carve out ears from the one "cookie", paint a face on the treat and glue it into a small nest that I made from green frosting. You can even "glue" some little sugar eggs into the nest, that also helps stabilizing the cookie bunny standing up.

After all that carrot cake, that makes one real happy easterbunny! :)