Let’s hope for a sunny Easter this year! Dry enough to hide the Easter eggs in the garden and warm enough to go hunting for them.
This seemingly modern tradition goes back to the early days of Christianity, eggs having symbolised new life and rebirth. Eggs were also forbidden during Lent, so colouring and gifting them for Easter was a symbol of the end of austerity.
Chocolate eggs started to replace real ones in 19th century, and now the array of them available to buy is dazzling.
But apart from stuffing our faces with chocolate, we should have a proper, spring-like feast. With a Colomba cake for breakfast, roast lamb or pork for lunch, hopefully accompanied by the harbingers of spring: new potatoes and asparagus! Plus something for afters and how to make crème eggs at home. Happy Easter!
Colomba di Pasqua, Easter Dove is the traditional Italian cake baked for Easter in cases shaped like a dove. A gorgeous, almond studded and orange flavoured colomba is perfect for Easter Sunday breakfast.
Hot cross buns were traditionally eaten up till or even only on Good Friday. But my recipe is too good to restrict these goodies to one day only: wholemeal, with tons of raisins, piped crosses and delicious sticky honey glaze.
Roast leg of lamb on the bone, cooked medium, pinkish in the middle and with a crispy skin, is the perfect Easter Sunday lunch. Half a leg will serve four people and a whole leg a crowd, just adjust the cooking time per pound of weight.
If you don’t want lamb, here’s an excellent (and cheaper!) alternative: braised pork shoulder with chillies and cumin, Mexican style flavours. Beer braised pork shoulder joint takes four hours to cook in the oven and the result is pork so tender it can be pulled or shredded.
Sunday lunch side dish of these unusually cooked new potatoes will be just the ticket. Garlic, lemon and thyme new potatoes gently poached in oil are incredibly flavoursome and super easy to prepare: oven baked in a covered casserole dish.
Garlic and lemon poached potatoes
RECIPE
If they have turned up by now, go on and splash for a couple of bunches as an Easter treat. Grilled asparagus with flaked almonds and Parmesan are an exquisite side dish ready in 10 minutes. It can be cooked in oven grill or on a barbecue.
For a vegetarian Easter Sunday lunch option you could do much worse than tomato and spinach butter beans, a delicious vegetarian casserole and a satisfying nutritional powerhouse. Plus a supremely frugal budget recipe especially when using dry beans soaked and cooked from scratch.
Tomato and spinach butter beans
RECIPE
A respite from all that chocolate, and blood oranges are still in season. Blood orange posset is the easiest, three ingredient dessert which is also a traditional English classic. Blood orange season is long enough to make this gorgeous pudding several times.
A sumptuous dessert centrepiece which is also silly easy to make. Easter chocolate egg nest cake with soft chocolate sponge, apricot jam and silky ganache, topped with Cadbury mini eggs, that’s a dessert for chocolate lovers.
And finally, a DIY project for the little ones: homemade Easter creme eggs with filling made from buttery icing. Just like Cadbury's mini creme eggs, with white and yellow filling, made from milk chocolate melted into egg moulds.