Easter

Monas de Pascua are edible Easter treats

Monas de Pascua are edible Easter treats

We both grew up with the American tradition of Easter baskets—baskets with cellophane “grass” that were filled—ostensibly, by the Easter bunny—with candy. Easter after church was always the time for kids to spoil their appetites by gorging on jelly beans, chocolate eggs, and marshmallow peeps. (For our European readers, “peeps” are small yellow chicks made of marshmallow.) Here in Valencia, the tradition is a little different. The mona de Pascua is a baked Easter sweet bread with a decorated hard-boiled egg on top. Some sources call it a cake, but the texture is very much like a sweet brioche. In recent years, the hard-boiled egg has been widely replaced by a Kinder chocolate egg, and many bakeries (like the one at the bottom of this...Read More

King Cake for Easter

If Mardi Gras has a signature food, it has to be the king cake, which is actually more like a big, braided cinnamon roll than a cake. It's topped with white icing and dusted with colored sugar, usually in the traditional Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold. The cake was originally served at Epiphany, but was so tasty that cooks kept making it through Mardi Gras. I found a knockout version this year at Sweet Olive Bakery (251-990-8883; sweetolive.org), a European-style artisanal bakery in Fairhope, Alabama. It's located in the Windmill Market (85 N. Bancroft St.), an old car dealership and service garage that has found new life as a foodie destination (other occupants include a great barbecue joint and a locavore market)....Read More