Easter baking - Cake thirty-eight

Hot Cross Buns

"Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny hot cross buns. If you have no daughters give it to your sons, one a penny two a penny hot cross buns.." You know this refrain, don’t you? It’s a famous British lullaby and it’s ones of the many I sang with my children when they were little. I remember I used to play the tape recorder every morning and wake them up to the sound of a lullaby and sang together when getting ready. I also prepared some games to memorize the songs and once a week we spent an afternoon playing in English. It was a way to overcome the barrier of learning another language: through singing dancing and playing they connected sounds to gestures or pics automatically. 

And still now that they’re grown up one word is enough to recall a lullaby or a rhyme and there we all go...... we sing or say the rhyme and laugh a lot! We simply can’t help it! It’s like being one of those animals - I think they were monkeys - the behaviourists

used in their experiments to prove that we all react the same way after a repeated stimulus. 

Song: P.S. I Love you

I'm sure we all have some words to treasure  

See recipe: http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2014/05/easter-baking-cake-thirty-eight-hot.html

Easter baking - Cake thirty-seven

Smart Bunnies

Bunnies don’t belong to the Italian Easter tradition, we have sheep and doves instead which derive from Christian symbology. Our Easter national cake, ‘Colomba’, is, in fact, in the shape of a dove and it’s a cake, like ‘Panettone’, which we don’t bake at home, they’re mostly industrially produced. I did try to make a ‘Colomba’ a few years ago, but I can't say it was a success: the cake I made tasted very different... Was it the recipe which wasn’t good or was it me? I don’t know, maybe the two of them, but I was so disappointed that I've never tried again.

In Sicily they make marzipan sheep for Easter and there’s always been one on my table on Easter day, my aunt sends us one every year. Anyway since I like to borrow recipes

from other countries’ traditions you’ll find bunnies in all shapes on my Easter table. We don’t see hopping bunnies in Spring in Italy, they don’t live in the wild, but they’re usually bred in cages to be sold and eaten, a rather prosaic vision of this sweet and docile animal! I’d rather picture it through Beatrix Potter’s stories and drawings and love to identify them with Peter Rabbit and his little siblings. The colourful ribbon around these rabbits’ necks is my homage to Peter Rabbit in fact!

Song: Piggies

Have you seen the little.... rabbits hopping in the park?

See recipe: 

http://time-for-cakemaking.blogspot.it/2014/05/cake-thirty-seven-easter-baking-smart.html