Easter Treats!

During Spring Break this week, we have had all sorts of Easter fun. We've done different art projects, went on an egg hunt, took pictures with real bunnies, and baked some yummy Easter goodies. We had originally planned a play date with my friend Kristen and her kids but Emmy had some sort of stomach bug that morning so we had to cancel and bake all by ourselves. I had seen this idea here and was excited to try it with the kids. It is so easy to do. I even cheated and used a Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix. After you mix up the cookie dough, you just dye the dough with the gel dyes. If you try make these cookies the only tip I have would be to divide your cookie dough and put into Ziploc bags and add the color gel. That way you can seal the bag and mix the dough without dying your hands. I learned this the hard way, my hands are still purple. You could also use rubber gloves if you have them but I didn't have any. I thought it was cute that when I told Emmy that we were going to do this, she said, "But mom I don't want to dye!". I then had to explain to her that die and dye meant two different things.

This is what some of our cookies turned out like.

Kaden had such a great time playing with the cookie dough and making cookies. He was very creative coming up with lots of his own ideas. He decided that we didn't have enough cookie cutters (I have a whole cabinet full) so he was making shapes w/o the cookie cutters. Here he is working on a tree. It was a little too difficult for Emmy to roll out the cookies and use the cookie cutters but she still had fun playing with the cookie dough like it was playdough.

Here are the cookies that the kids plan on leaving for the Easter bunny, if we still have any left on Saturday night.

I had also made these little baskets for the egg hunt with my moms group. They turned out to be way more difficult then I thought they would be. You basically make the rice crispy treat recipe (I used fruit pebbles to be more colorful) and you shape them into baskets in muffin cups or mini muffin cups. You put the twizzler in the rice crispy treat and then place jelly beans in the basket. You could also dye coconut green for grass and add it under the jelly beans. I haven't met very many kids that like coconut though so I just skipped that step. I made the mistake of taking mine out of the muffin cups and covering them and they melted!! I had to redo all of them and I left them sitting out overnight which made them too hard. The only way I would make these again would be if you could make them on the morning that you would be serving them, so that they would stay fresh.