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Happy Catholic Easter!
The recipe is for some absolutely entertaining easter cupcakes topped with homemade chocolate egg with a surprise in it!
Enjoy!
Take a look at the Easter traditions all over the world along with the Easter cupcakes recipe :)
Easter Candy
Every child knows that no Easter egg hunt is complete without candy. Exchanging chocolates and other sweets during Easter gained popularity in Europe during the mid-19th century, as companies developed methods for mass-producing sweets and unveiled confections in fancy holiday shapes and packages, like Cadbury eggs.
Jelly beans likely evolved from early fruit jellies such as Turkish Delight, a Middle Eastern delicacy. They entered the U.S. market sometime in the late-19th century, but didn't gain their Easter association until the 1930s, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.
The Word "Easter"
The celebration of Easter is an international event, but few cultures refer to the holiday by its famous name. Early Christians called Christ's resurrection "Pesach," the Hebrew word for Passover. Today, most languages use a variation of that name: "Pesach" in French, "Pascua" in Spanish, "Pasqua" in Italian, "Pashkë" in Albanian, and "Pask" in Swedish.
Our English word, Easter, comes from a stranger source: an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre (also known as Astarte or Oster). The festival of Eostre always took place around the spring equinox, so early Christian missionaries in Europe gradually melded the festival's name, timing, and some of its symbols, into the Christian celebration.
Easter Bonnets
Purchasing a new holiday outfit may seem like a 20th century commercial invention, but even early Christians followed the practice of wearing new clothes for Easter. "It was the one time of year when, if you had new clothes, you wore them. You dressed in your finest to go to church as a manner of honoring the resurrected savior," says Collins. In America, stores soon latched onto the idea that creating Easter outfits and sales during the season would help them sell fancy bonnets or suits.
City-goers went to New York's Fifth Avenue to show off their new attire, eventually leading to the creation of the famous Easter Parade. The song Easter Parade, written by Irving Berlin in 1933 and popularized by Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn, captured the fanciful mood of this new tradition.
The Easter Bunny
Like many Easter traditions, the Easter Bunny evolved out of ancient fertility and spring celebrations. Rabbits breed like, well, rabbits, and give birth in the spring. So, in places where the fields became overrun with baby bunnies, it was natural to incorporate the rabbit as a symbol for spring and, eventually, Easter.
According to an old German story retold by Pamela Kennedy in her book, An Easter Celebration: Traditions and Customs from Around the World, a poor woman who loved children would hide brightly colored eggs in her garden as Easter treats. One year, while the children searched for them, they noticed a hare hopping past and believed that the animal had left the eggs.
Easter Baskets
Like the tradition of the Easter bunny, the tradition of the Easter basket likely began in Germany. Once children began to think the "Easter Hare" would leave goodies, they started creating small nests of leaves and branches in their gardens where the bunny could place them.
Another interpretation says that the Easter basket tradition began much earlier with farmers in Middle Eastern cultures. They would reportedly bring seedlings in a basket to be blessed, in hopes of having a bountiful harvest.
Stations of the Cross and Passion Plays
As early as the 14th century, the Catholic Church discovered drama and ritual as effective methods for teaching the gospel to those who couldn't read, write, or speak the traditional Latin used in church. The Church developed practices, such as the Stations of the Cross and the Passion Play, to tell the story of Jesus Christ's crucifixion and resurrection in accessible and compelling ways.
According to the Catholic News Service, the Stations of the Cross originally described a physical pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where participants would travel to 14 sacred sites related to Jesus' death and crucifixion, reciting prayers and singing songs. Eventually, Catholic Americans developed a spiritual practice of replicating the pilgrimage in their local churches, reciting the same prayers and songs.
The Passion Play, a dramatic presentation of Christ's trial, sufferings and death, became popular in the Catholic Church in the 15th century. One of the most famous in Oberammergau, Germany, started in the early 1600s, when the town vowed to perform a Passion Play every decade if God would spare the town from the plague. The death rate dropped dramatically after the play was held in the town cemetery, and the play has been performed in Oberammergau to sold-out crowds ever since.
Easter Peeps
Those sugary-sweet marshmallow candies were created in the 1950s by Sam Born, who founded the Just Born candy company. He set up shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, making these treats especially appropriate for Easter. It initially took 27 hours to create a single Peep, but luckily Born's son created a way to make the process more efficient — it now takes only six minutes!
Peeps are available in a variety of seasonal shapes and flavors, but Easter chicks remain the most popular, according to the maker.
Hot Cross Buns
These Easter-famous breads trace back to ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece, where they served as symbols of honor toward their goddesses, according to the Oxford Companion to Food. Later, these sweet breads became popular at Easter, especially in England where bakers were forbidden to sell spice breads except on special holidays, like the Friday before Easter.
Many English believed hot cross buns baked on Good Friday would never grow moldy; they were kept as good luck charms hanging in windows, accompanied sailors on a voyage, or buried in piles of grain to ward off rodents. Today, they're mostly representations of the Christian symbol of the cross, as well as a sweet, buttery addition to an elegant Easter meal.
Easter Egg Hunts
The first egg hunt can be traced back to Martin Luther, a central figure during the Protestant Reformation — men hid the eggs for women and children to find. The happy act of finding an Easter egg during the hunt is supposed to remind us of the joy that the women (believed to be Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome) felt when they came to Jesus's cave and found it empty.
Chocolate Bunnies
It's hard to know exactly who created the first chocolate bunny, but it was probably someone of German descent, in either Germany or America. By 19th century Germany, pastry and sugar bunnies (some had hard boiled eggs inside of them!) were in production and bunny-shaped tins, used for chocolate molds, have been traced back to Munich in the 1850s.
Jury's still out, though, because around the same time, Robert L. Strohecker, a business man in Pennsylvania, placed a 5-foot-tall chocolate rabbit in his drugstore's window. By 1925, people in the U.S. could order chocolate bunnies, a special Easter treat, from a catalog. The rest is history.
Egg Tapping Game
Egg tapping, a common Easter game, goes by lots of different names — egg fighting, egg knocking, egg pacqueing, egg boxing, egg picking, or egg jarping, just to name a few — and involves two people knocking the pointed ends of the eggs together until one cracks. The winner is the person whose egg has cracked the most eggs.
Egg tapping has origins in Medieval times, where it was practiced during the Easter festival in Poland. To this day, egg-tapping competitions are held in many areas of the world, including England, and Louisiana takes the event very seriously — every year Marksville, Louisiana hosts an official egg tapping competition, complete with strict rules and regulations. Winners must prove their eggs are not fake by breaking and eating them at the end of the event.*source
Go ahead and grab this easy recipe :)
Prep: 25 min
Cook time: 20 min
Level: easy, medium
Servings: 12 portions
Calories per serving: 177 kcal
Find the recipe & nutrition facts below :
Ingredients:
1/2 cup non-dairy milk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 cup flour
1 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1/4 cup oil
1/3 cup sugar/maple syrup or any other sweetener
1 tablespoon flax meal + 3 tbsp water
1 shredded carrot
For the cream:
1 cup coconut cream (200 gr.) (room temp)
2 tbsp maple syrup
toasted coconut
For the chocolate eggs:
melted chocolate
silicone mold with an egg shape
brush
sugar pearls (or anything else for the filling)
Method:
Step 1: Preheat the oven to 180° C.
Step 2: In a small bowl, combine the milk and apple cider vinegar and set aside. In a small cup mix flax meal and water. Set aside.
Step 3: In another large bowl, stir the flour with baking powder, then add mix in sugar, then whisk until thoroughly combined.
Step 4: Add in milk&vinegar mixture, oil, flax egg. Stir until combined. Add the shredded carrot.
Step 5: Transfer the batter to a 12-cup muffin tin. *if your tin is not a silicone one make sure to grease it well with vegetable oil.
Step 6: Bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick from the center comes out clean.
Step 7: Prepare your frosting by mixing with a fork coconut cream with maple syrup.
Step 8: Transfer the frosting into a piping bag and decorate your completely cooled down muffins. Sprinkle with toasted coconut flakes.
Step 9: Make the chocolate eggs by brushing the silicone mold with chocolate, let it cool down, and repeat with the second layer of chocolate. Let it cool down and remove it from the silicone mold. Stuff the one shell with sugar pearls (or anything else), with a hot knife slightly touch the edges of the other shell (it should melt), and immediately press this side to the stuffed one, let it cool down. Place on top of the cupcake.
