The Easter Bunny and The Silence Of The Lamb

It had already been a busy weekend celebrating Monica's birthday and Easter would be no different. We had plans to go to Monica's sister's house and that always means a great time. We offered to make dessert for Easter and we knew that we had some baking to do on Sunday. This would be our first attempt at baking cakes but we had a vision, we had each other and we had vintage bunny and lamb cake pans! How could anything go wrong? Well, more on that later.

Not all of our Easter preparations were done on Easter. Right after St. Patrick's Day, we started to decorate the house for Easter.

We have had this shadow box sitting in front of the bar/turntable set in our Living Room ever since we picked this up at a sale a few months ago. We have been trying to decide where to hang it.  In the meantime, we decided to decorate it as well. (we have since decided where it will hang but that will be part of a post next week). 

We tried to decorate the Living Room wherever space was available

We also had to dye the Easter eggs and that would not wait until Sunday either! 

Six different colors were prepared. We have some old PAAS decorating kits but we never use those. We always buy a new package every year just after Easter to use the following year (at a 50-75% discount over its original price)

Twelve eggs freshly dyed. The one in the front middle cracked during hard boiling. It was easy to figure out what design we would make on that one!

We were all ready for Easter Sunday...except for the baking. What concern could we possibly have. We were prepared and there was plenty of time. Although neither of us have actually baked a cake before, we did our research, made sure we had everything we would need and we figured we were ready.

We planned to make two cakes, one bunny and one lamb, using these vintage cake molds. We had a pretty good idea of how we wanted them to turn out. We did decide that a white bunny and white lamb would be boring so we decided on a purple bunny and a yellow lamb. Both were Easter pastel colors and we had food coloring to mix into the vanilla frosting we bought.

The baking of the cake went really well. We had no problem, whatsoever, mixing the ingredients, pouring the batter into the molds and baking them. Aside from a little weakness in one of the bunny's feet, the cakes could not have possibly have turned out better! We were bakers! The final challenge would be frosting them. Were we cake decorators? We would soon find out.

This is a picture of what we were visualized for the lamb except that it would be yellow. We removed the cakes carefully from their molds and stood them up on separate plates so we could frost them. Monica decided that she would frost the bunny while Rob frosted the lamb. The food coloring in the frosting worked really well and things were moving along very nicely...and then things started to fall apart...rapidly.

First, the weak foot on Monica's bunny was getting weaker and would not stand at all. She had to lay him down on his side. On the bright side, that would save frosting time. The next problem was Rob was attempting to "scallop" his lamb (like the one pictured above) but came to the unfortunate realization that we did not have enough frosting for that. The lamb would have to be a smooth lamb. We worked feverishly at working through the unexpected obstacles that we suddenly encountered. Our attitude was good. Our work ethic was good. Our frosting skills...well, not so much.

Monica's bunny...the finished product and, truthfully, not too bad at all. 

Rob's lamb was not really very close to what he had visualized. In a moment of sheer brilliance (or momentary lack of judgment or maybe just panic), he decided to make it  a clown lamb to mask its obvious flaws.

Once again, here was what we were visualizing when we first set out to make this lamb...

...and here was the finished product.  Nailed it! 

By the way, the mouth that Rob made on the cake dripped after he drew it (as if that was its biggest flaw). Rob thought it looked like a Dr. Seuss character when finished! We placed some friendly Peeps around the "lamb" so everyone would remain calm when first seeing him.

We brought the cakes to Monica's sister's house. The kids were a little horrified, at first, but they loved the cake! 

So what we discovered, after this first foray into baking, is that we can bake pretty well but that our cake decorating skills need a lot of work. However, we were not scared off by this first attempt (which speaks volumes about our fortitude and perseverance) and we will definitely try baking again soon! And, truth be told, we really had a lot of fun and laughs doing this together.

In the end, we delivered the desserts we promised, they tasted good and no one had any nightmares!

We would eat this in a house

We would eat this with a mouse

It is cake, it is not spam

And we like it, Lamb-I-Am