We are having a quiet Easter this year. Stephen and Hannia went up to spend the weekend with Erica, so I don't have any of the kids around for this holiday. It seemed ridiculous to cook for just the 2 of us, so Bruce and I have made reservations for the Easter brunch buffet at Chef's 505. This place is amazing, but there is generally no buffet. I hope its as delicious as their usual fare.
Anyway, I always remember this one Easter in particular, back when the kids were really little. Probably somewhere around the ages of 3 and 5. Every year the Easter Bunny would hide their baskets and they had to find them. When they were really young it would be someplace relatively easy (that's why I KNOW they were not much older than that when this incident happened). But as they got older and developed reading skills, the Easter Bunny would leave a plastic egg on their bed that contained a clue....which led to a whole treasure hunt all over the place. As they found their clue, it would lead to yet another one, and the whole hunt was much more elaborate. Fun times, I tell you.
But that year the children were too young to decipher clues so the Easter Bunny had hidden their baskets behind the sofa. The thing was that I had gotten all creative that year. I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning making these beautiful chocolate lollipops in Wilton chocolate molds. It wasn't hard so much as time consuming and tedious. I used all of these pretty colors of chocolate like green, yellow, pink and blue. There were molds of cute little bunnies, and chicks, and all kinds of springtime fun stuff. The chocolate had to be melted, and painted into the molds in layers to have the colors in the right spots. Then it had to be refrigerated for a while until the chocolate set...and then another layer had to be painted on, and so forth and so on. It took a really long time. But the end result was worth it. The candies were absolutely beautiful. I wrapped them in colored cellophane, tied them off with colorful ribbons, and placed them artfully in the Easter Baskets amongst the peeps and the chocolate bunnies and all the other Easter goodies I had bought at the store.
Morning came. I got up early, before the children, and the first thing that I saw was Rufus (the full-sized Collie that we had way back then), licking a piece of crumpled cellophane that he was holding between his paws. That dog had found the baskets, and he didn't touch a single thing in them except for the hand-made chocolate lollipops. I wanted to sit in the middle of the floor and cry. Honestly, it was enough chocolate that it should have killed him....chocolate being poisonous to dogs and all. But he lived through it. The Easter baskets were looking a little sparse though, so my husband headed out to the only thing open at 7am on Easter Sunday morning....a convenience store/gas station and bought whatever he could find.
Mainly stuff like M&M's, and skittles, and regular candy that you can find anywhere.
It wasn't exactly the presentation that I was going for......
Funny thing is that the kids absolutely did NOT notice or care. Candy was candy, and it was all good. They were too busy having sugary treats before breakfast (one of the only 2 days of the year that would be allowed. The other day being Christmas with the candies in their stockings). And the Easter Bunny always left some little trinkets and toys in the baskets, too. The dog didn't bother any of that. Noone got to see the efforts of my labor but me. And the whole experience traumatized me to the point that I never attempted to make those candies again. But IF they had survived, the lollipops would have looked something like this:
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