We bring you some ideas to make this Easter sweet and cheerful, and theydon’t require much baking know-how. Because this Easter more than any other, we’ll want to make our Easter treats at home.
I’m sure our little ones will be happy to receive their mona, and while I encourage you to make a traditional mona to preserve traditions and enjoy a dough with a unique and exquisite flavor at home (you have the recipe for it here), there are other alternatives, easy Easter solutions, bright and cheerful that do not involve any major complications at all.
1. Surprise-filled Bundt cake
The beauty of bundt pans is that, with no extra effort on our part, we get a sponge cake with a very beautiful and elegant look. They’re a very good alternative for making a lovely mona at home.
How do you use bundt pans to celebrate Easter?
- Make your bundt-style cake; you can use any traditional sponge cake recipe or follow any of the recipes we have on the blog (here you’ll find them).
- Let it cool, and decide whether you want to give it a simple look by dusting it with icing sugar, or add a glaze (a simple icing*) or cover it with chocolate, or chocolate with bits of almond or hazelnut.
- Fill the inside of the bundt with candies or chocolate eggs or coins. The kids will love it! You can also choose to buy a chocolate egg or figure (these days you can even find them in nearby supermarkets) and place it in the center.
- You can also add some floral decorations around it (they are 100% Easter, given the link to Palm Sunday), or use candied fruit or glace fruit in its preparation (in the photo you can see the chiffon cake with candied oranges, whose recipe you will find here).
Remember! You’ll find several very interesting ingredients for your Easter monas in our pantry section, such as delicious coconut oil, hazelnut oil, almond oil, and other cold-pressed oils that are wonderfully refined, pearl sugar, authentic Madagascar vanilla extract...
You can find lots of Nordic Ware bundt pans here, or you may prefer the one in the photo, the Le Creuset bundt pan.
2. Use a crown pan
Just as we invited you to use a bundt-style pan to make your mona in a beautiful and easy way, you can use a crown pan (a low pan with a wide circular opening in the center). You can use a crown pan exactly as described above.
Some alternative ideas in this case for presentation, could be:
- Add chocolate sprinkles or colorful chocolate pearls on top of the chocolate coating (Do you know how happy little kids get with those cakes covered in a thousand and one colorful sprinkles?)
- You can apply a zig-zag glaze all over the cake—It looks really beautiful too!
- You can cover half the circle with one kind of icing or coating, and the other half with something else. A good example would be to make half the cake covered with dark chocolate, and the other half with white chocolate (you can decorate each one with sprinkles, or one part with sprinkles and the other with colorful pearls).
- With the help of a piping bag, make little mounds of pastry cream all around the edge, and on top of each one you can put a chocolate egg, a cherry or strawberry, or sprinkles.
In the store we have the De Buyer crown pan and the Le Creuset crown pan, both of which can be used for this purpose.
3. Easter bunnies
The charm is in the mold! Let a shaped pan brighten the table: prepare traditional yogurt batter, or your favorite sponge cake (it can be almond, carrot, cocoa...), and pour the batter into an Easter bunny-shaped pan (or duck-shaped, with the Sweet Tweets pan). You’re almost done! You can finish decorating them with a little chocolate or paste, wrap them in film, surround them with chocolates... Or place them on top of another sponge cake baked on a large tray, and you’ll have a treat-worthy mona.
If you want to make the bunnies with vanilla and lemon, you can see the recipe here.
4. Tall decorated cake
Use a tall pan (a panettone pan or a tall removable one, like the KitchenCraft one) to make a very tall sponge cake. Decorate it in a very simple way, with mascarpone cream cheese (mascarpone whipped with sugar, simply) and add some decoration, such as chocolate sprinkles, Lacasitos, colorful nuts, fresh fruit...). You can also add some decorative Easter chicks!
Bake some bunny-shaped cookies, or oval egg-shaped ones. Just before taking them out of the oven, while still soft, insert a skewer or toothpick and let them cool.
Stick the cookie pops into the cake, and you’ll have an Easter mona that is as delicious as it is beautiful.
5. Decorated muffins
If there’s any sweet treat that’s common in every home, it’s muffins and cupcakes. It’ll be so much fun for the little ones in the house to make and decorate these very homemade treats!
You can make them plain or fill them with cream, chocolate, lemon curd or jam. What will really brighten the table is the decoration you give them, whether more understated (you can decorate them with walnuts and honey) or with chocolates, coins, whipped cream (with fruit or jam on top), fruit, Lacasitos, chocolate shavings... I invite you to look at the photo to get some ideas.
6. Carrot cake with cream cheese
What do you think about making a classic topped with cream cheese? Prepare a delicious carrot sponge cake, moist and fluffy, and cover it with the cream cheese everyone loves.
You can see the recipe here.
Tools for making your monas and decorated muffins
Here are some tools that may be useful for your muffins and other creations:
- Le Creuset muffin pan or the Kaiser muffin pan.
- The mini muffin pan if you want to make the bite-size version.
- Paper muffin cups
- The Birkmann muffin corer
- Piping bag and nozzles
- The De Buyer gun is wonderful for all kinds of creations like this. What if you make them in star shape? This pan makes adorable bites: the Le Creuset stars.
- You may want to use some ingredients for making the muffins, such as coconut oil, vanilla extract, pearl sugar... I invite you to visit our pantry section.
- If you need whisks, bowls, trays, nonstick spray... You’ll find all the baking accessories you could need here.
- If you need a stand mixer because you know it’s your thing, then visit this section -Nothing beats a KitchenAid!
Some simple glazes for your cakes
Orange glaze: melt 20gr of butter together with 20ml of orange juice and, once it is hot, add 60gr of icing sugar. Mix well until the sugar is completely dissolved
Lemon glaze: add the juice of 1 lemon to 120 gr of icing sugar little by little, stirring continuously until you reach the right consistency. If it’s not enough, add a teaspoon of water.
Chocolate glaze: 200gr of 70% baking chocolate, 200gr of 35% cream and 3 tablespoons of liquid glucose (or Golden Syrup). In a thick-bottomed saucepan, mix all the ingredients and heat over medium heat, stirring well until everything has melted and we get a thick cream. Remove from the heat and set aside. (be careful, this glaze hardens as it cools; don’t pour it too hot, as it will tend to spread, and not too thick either, or it won’t spread easily).
I hope all these ideas inspire you to make some very beautiful homemade monas. Don’t forget to tell us in the comments what other easy and lovely alternatives we can make at home at this time of year. Sharing ideas is such a lovely thing!
