When it comes to holiday food traditions, the cooking is often just as satisfying as the eating—sometimes more so. No wonder it felt so good to welcome my grandsons into the kitchen and dust off the recipe for Easter Bunny bread.

When my own kids were small, I loved to surprise them with a tray of freshly baked bunnies on a bed of green grass decorated with jelly beans. Ian reliably went straight for the tail, Windsor for the ears. Today, I gathered their boys, Jackson and Sammy—both three—to bake the same orange-flavored breads.

Kids this young are curious and want to smell, touch and play with the dough. They’re excited to help, but might not have the patience for mixing and kneading, so I prepped everything to the assembling point. Both boys watched intently as I rolled the dough into a large rectangular piece, then cut strips for the bodies and heads. Jackson helped form the first strip into a “snake,” then smelled it and exclaimed “orange! It’s orange!” I took a good whiff of the familiar, fruity scent. Sammy tried his hand at a tail, then squished it and asked the inevitable question: “Can I eat it?”

Ian, the original little boy, couldn’t resist the scene any longer and joined us at the table. Soon the bunnies were in the oven and the house filled with the intoxicating scent of baking bread. I opened the oven door and the boys gasped at how much their bunnies had grown.

Once the breads had baked and cooled, we all drizzled on the icing and dug in. Like his daddy, Jackson went for the tail. Sammy bit into an ear, and we all agreed that Easter Bunny Bread is one very fine Adams tradition worth passing on.

Get a printable Easter Bunny Bread recipe and have a hopping good Easter.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 6:29 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.