Columnists
Chocolate Cotton Tails
Easter is, simply, a long weekend with our family. It’s a good time to get together, enjoy some out-of-doors time, eat a bit too much, laugh a lot and indulge in some sweet treats. We aren’t a religious bunch, although I was raised as part of great big Catholic family. When I was a kid, we did all of the holy-days things, with attending Mass being central to all of the celebrations. I was never too sure if I understood how the Easter Bunny fit into the celebration of a miraculous resurrection, but there seemed to be some kind of connection. I’m sure if I asked (and I’m sure I asked) how a cartoon character represented Easter a plausible explanation would have been given. As far as I was concerned, the Easter Bunny had absolutely nothing to do with the whole Easter thing. But there we were heading off to Mass on Easter Sunday with nothing but jelly beans, those gag-inducing panned “eggs”, a homemade chocolate egg and a great big family dinner. Of course it would have been the first time since the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday we had enjoyed desserts or treats. Let me tell you, I was as normal as the next kid, oh yes I was, and couldn’t wait until the Easter Sunday Mass had ended. Those church doors would burst open and dozens of cookie and cake deprived kids took off like a shot out of cannon. It was the end of the drought for most of us. Mercifully, our parents usually refrained from the usual, neighbourly chit-chat after the Easter Sunday service. I can’t even imagine how my dear old dad patiently maneuvered the Rolls- Can-Hardly home with all of the excitement and chatter going on about our Easter Baskets!
Of course all of us Durning kids were outfitted in our brand new (or newly handeddown) Easter outfits. We had sworn, on the Palm Sunday cross hanging in the kitchen, we’d make sure we didn’t spill, throw-up or mush stuff into our freshly starched and ironed Sunday best. The trip from the church in town to our house might have taken about fifteen minutes. It was fifteen minutes of absolute torture because we knew once we got home we still had to eat breakfast before we went hunting for those Farewell-to-Lent baskets. Oh, the pain of being a little kid in the good old days. After eating a massive Easter Sunday breakfast (the most important meal of the day, dontcha know), our parents let us go wild, not ever telling us to pace ourselves with the Easter candies the Holy Bunny had left. I am pretty sure some of us suffered from aching bellies before the day was out. The most important item in our festively decorated, six-quart fruit baskets was shredded paper, aka nesting material, and those amazing chocolate eggs my Mom made each spring for Easter! I’m fairly certain if there were to be an occasion to explode from too much sweetness it would have been after eating one of Mom’s confections.
Over the years I’ve thought a lot about those homemade Easter eggs! And two years ago I had a lightbulb moment and hauled out my late mom’s cookbook. The book was printed in 1931 and had been given to her before she and Dad got married in 1944. I’m fairly sure the book wasn’t new when Mom received it, which just makes in more charming and special to me. I thumbed through those familiar pages and there it was in the Candies and Confections section. The recipe for the chocolates. Actually it was the recipe for the filling and Mom’s notes about how to coat the filling. Mom gave me that book several years before she passed away. She knew I collected cookbooks and I think she was worried someone might not appreciate it and give it away after she passed. As many times as I followed recipes in that book when cooking or baking with Mom it never occurred to me the candy recipe was in that old, linen-covered book. Fast forward to Christmas in 2022, several attempts, ingredient substitutes and volume adjustments a very reasonable facsimile of those delightful treats made their debut with my family. This week, the recipe will be pressed to use as Mom had intended and Easter Eggs will be made.
I’m fairly certain the Easter Bunny didn’t make an appearance at Golgotha, but if he did, now that would have been a story!
Comments (0)