Two Easter Desserts Made Easy

Two Easter Desserts Made Easy

Easter time is a wonderful opportunity to think spring and brightness – outside and inside. I wanted to find Easter desserts that had these qualities: appealing, colorful and easy to make. I found two ways to knock out some little dessert ditties that could grace a dessert buffet table and add a little zing to the mix on the big day. 

Thanks to Pinterest, I found Easter blossom cookies and flower pretzel bites. For assistance, I relied on help from the grandkids.

Easter Desserts

Easter Blossom Cookies

If you love classic peanut butter blossoms at Christmas (and who doesn't?), you're going to like this twist on a traditional recipe. Easter blossom cookies do not have peanut butter in them, like their Christmas counterpart, but they each get a Hershey's chocolate kiss on top. Made with butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, eggs, baking soda and salt, these cookies are a breeze to mix up. Break out the Christmas coloring gels, too. Divide the dough and add coloring to each ball. You can even buy colored sugar to roll the cookie balls in before baking, but alas, that's one thing I hadn't thought to buy so we used plain sugar to roll each little ball in before placing it on a baking sheet. Bake the cookies, and press a measuring spoon into each one after it's been baked. We tried imprinting them with my granddaughter's thumbprint before baking, but the indentions didn't hold. I wouldn't waste the time, and just press afterward. 

Then, we took store-bought vanilla frosting, separated it into small batches and dyed all the frosting to match the cookie colors. We placed the frosting into small sandwich bags, snipped one corner of each and bag and pressed the colored frosting into the well of its associated color cookie. (After the cookies had cooled sufficiently, of course.) Then, we added a kiss on top.

I think you'll see that the effect is ... sweet. And delicious!

 Flower Pretzel Bites

Whereas I had the help of my 13-going-on-18-year-old granddaughter for the cookies, I needed to scale the complexity back a bit for the next two kitchen helpers, who are 5 and 4. We made flower pretzel bits, with a diversion. It's a three-ingredient deal: pretzels, frosting (or white chocolate buttons) and Easter colored M&M's. 

For this recipe, you'll need square pretzels to hold the "glue," which in the recipe's case is melted white chocolate buttons. In our variation, we took the leftover vanilla frosting (from the fridge, of course) and put that into a little sandwich bag, snipped off the end and started pressing out a dollop of frosting on top of each pretzel. The children then made flower shapes. At one point, we got a bit funky and broke out the chocolate chips so that we could put a chocolate chip (brown) in the middle of a sunflower (yellow M&M's). You'll see the diversions on the plate.

I did it this way instead of melting the chocolate because I knew my grands might get burned working with melted chocolate on hot little pretzels that had just come out of the oven, and also, I'm frugal. I wanted to use up that frosting, if possible.

We made several flower pretzel bites. Actually, they ate a lot of the ingredients instead of making pretzel bites, and it's a good thing snack time came before outdoor play time to run off the sugar.

Either one of these brightly colored desserts would be a welcome addition to your Easter dessert lineup. Add the experience of working alongside a family member or grandchild, and it's even better.

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