Hello World! Are you ready for your three-day weekend? I certainly am! In another hour or so I will be free from all school and work duties....except of course the pile of homework that's currently giving me a reproachful look. But Easter is here and I'm ready for it.
I have always loved Easter, since I was a child. Back then I think it was the candy, but it is also deeply ingrained in me as a time of new life. Flowers begin blooming (where I grew up there was a certain bluff where you could stand and look out across an entire valley of daffodil fields), the sun makes its first appearance in months, birds sing constantly and baby animals are born. We lived in the country and there was a certain spot on the side of our long gravel driveway where a trillium came up every year and reminded me of the Trinity. More important than anything else, Easter is the time to celebrate the new life that comes through the resurrected Messiah, Jesus! As I've gotten to know him more, Easter has become more and more exciting.
This year I'm not making any delicious Easter recipes (or if I do, they'll be belated and end up being late May Day foods), but I have a memory of one very special treat which I'd like to share with you. They go by several different names, but I call them Empty Tomb Cookies because it's the simplest and most self-explanatory name for them. We didn't make these every year in my family; as well as I can remember we only made them once. But I couldn't have been any older than seven at the time, and I still remember them very clearly. It all goes to show how awesome my Mom was.
These cookies are basically just fancy meringues, but from ingredients to presentation they are meant to depict the Easter story. You mix all the symbolic foods together, make individual "tomb" cookies, put them in the oven and seal it up with tape, and then leave it overnight. The idea is that on Easter morning you open the oven and bite into these sweet, hollow cookies and remember the he is risen! This is a great thing to do with kids to teach them about Easter, just like my Mom did with me.
Without further ado, here's what you'll need:
1 cup whole pecans (put them in a bag and beat them with a meat hammer, showing how Jesus was beaten)
1 teaspoon vinegar (because Jesus was given vinegar to drink while on the cross)
3 egg whites (eggs represent life, which is what we have because of Jesus)
pinch of salt (to represent Jesus' tears)
1 cup sugar (even though the other ingredients are not so sweet, the story is sweet because it tells about Jesus sacrificing his life to bring us new life)
Before you do ANYTHING, preheat your oven to 300 degrees. I usually wait to preheat the oven, but it needs to have been at the highest temperature for awhile before you put the meringues in. You'll see why later.
Beat the pecans and set them aside. Put all the other ingredients into a mixing bowl, one by one with explanations and taste-tests if you're using this to teach the little ones. Beat the mixture on high for 10-15 minutes, until stiff peaks form.
Now, stiff peaks and soft peaks (and any other peaks that may be called for) have always confused me a little. I find a recipe that calls for soft peaks, and I'm nervous about making them too stiff so I end up erring on the side of caution and get no peaks at all. Then I read in a recipe "beat till stiff peaks form" and in the same paragraph see something like "do not overmix." It terrifies me. So I never get true stiff peaks and the meringues flop.
I decided to conquer this pinnacle (pardon the pun) once and for all. Because you are my friends, and this world (and Easter morning) would be much better with non-flopping meringues, I'm going to let you in on the secret of the peaks. Here it is. Are you ready?
Soft Peaks fold over into themselves. When you stop mixing and pull the beater up, there should be a definite peak that comes up, but it should sort of fold and melt back into itself. It's very important that the mixture isn't foamy anymore at this point, but opaque and shiny.
If you beat a little longer, you'll get the middle stage of Firm Peaks, which have a point that folds back over on itself, but maintains shape (i.e. it doesn't melt and lose its form).
Stiff Peaks, the coveted things we want, rise straight up to the sky and never look back. If you were planning to make a model of a village in the mountains, these are what you're going to use for the mountains. You have to have stiff peaks for meringues because you're shaping them, and you don't want them to melt under heat and turn into shapeless blobs of goo. Get to the stiff peaks stage, and you've mastered it.
Unless.....You overbeat the egg whites. Do this and they get grainy and dull, and collapse back on themselves and you have a useless mess. If you notice graininess and you think you've taken things a little too far, you can try adding another egg white to resuscitate the mix. The added sugar helps though, and you probably won't run into this problem unless you're dying eggs in the other room and forget that you left the mixer running as long as you did.
Which brings me back to the holiday and recipe at hand. Once you've got the stiff peaks covered, you're just about there. Use this opportunity to explain how the white color of the mixture represents purity and the cleansing of our sins through Jesus. Then fold in the pecans and drop by teaspoonfulls onto cookie sheets covered in wax paper (these are individual "tombs"). You won't be baking these in shifts, so use all the cookie sheets you need to make all the cookies at once.
Now comes the fun part. Put the cookies in the oven, close the oven door and turn the oven off. Don't worry, the heat that's been trapped in the oven since you started will bake the meringues completely. Use duct tape or packing tape to seal the oven and explain that Jesus' tomb was sealed. Leave the cookies in the oven and go to bed.
On Easter morning, take your cookies out and enjoy the empty tomb and the true meaning of the holiday!
I have always loved Easter, since I was a child. Back then I think it was the candy, but it is also deeply ingrained in me as a time of new life. Flowers begin blooming (where I grew up there was a certain bluff where you could stand and look out across an entire valley of daffodil fields), the sun makes its first appearance in months, birds sing constantly and baby animals are born. We lived in the country and there was a certain spot on the side of our long gravel driveway where a trillium came up every year and reminded me of the Trinity. More important than anything else, Easter is the time to celebrate the new life that comes through the resurrected Messiah, Jesus! As I've gotten to know him more, Easter has become more and more exciting.
This year I'm not making any delicious Easter recipes (or if I do, they'll be belated and end up being late May Day foods), but I have a memory of one very special treat which I'd like to share with you. They go by several different names, but I call them Empty Tomb Cookies because it's the simplest and most self-explanatory name for them. We didn't make these every year in my family; as well as I can remember we only made them once. But I couldn't have been any older than seven at the time, and I still remember them very clearly. It all goes to show how awesome my Mom was.
These cookies are basically just fancy meringues, but from ingredients to presentation they are meant to depict the Easter story. You mix all the symbolic foods together, make individual "tomb" cookies, put them in the oven and seal it up with tape, and then leave it overnight. The idea is that on Easter morning you open the oven and bite into these sweet, hollow cookies and remember the he is risen! This is a great thing to do with kids to teach them about Easter, just like my Mom did with me.
Without further ado, here's what you'll need:
1 cup whole pecans (put them in a bag and beat them with a meat hammer, showing how Jesus was beaten)
1 teaspoon vinegar (because Jesus was given vinegar to drink while on the cross)
3 egg whites (eggs represent life, which is what we have because of Jesus)
pinch of salt (to represent Jesus' tears)
1 cup sugar (even though the other ingredients are not so sweet, the story is sweet because it tells about Jesus sacrificing his life to bring us new life)
Before you do ANYTHING, preheat your oven to 300 degrees. I usually wait to preheat the oven, but it needs to have been at the highest temperature for awhile before you put the meringues in. You'll see why later.
Beat the pecans and set them aside. Put all the other ingredients into a mixing bowl, one by one with explanations and taste-tests if you're using this to teach the little ones. Beat the mixture on high for 10-15 minutes, until stiff peaks form.
Now, stiff peaks and soft peaks (and any other peaks that may be called for) have always confused me a little. I find a recipe that calls for soft peaks, and I'm nervous about making them too stiff so I end up erring on the side of caution and get no peaks at all. Then I read in a recipe "beat till stiff peaks form" and in the same paragraph see something like "do not overmix." It terrifies me. So I never get true stiff peaks and the meringues flop.
I decided to conquer this pinnacle (pardon the pun) once and for all. Because you are my friends, and this world (and Easter morning) would be much better with non-flopping meringues, I'm going to let you in on the secret of the peaks. Here it is. Are you ready?
Soft Peaks fold over into themselves. When you stop mixing and pull the beater up, there should be a definite peak that comes up, but it should sort of fold and melt back into itself. It's very important that the mixture isn't foamy anymore at this point, but opaque and shiny.
If you beat a little longer, you'll get the middle stage of Firm Peaks, which have a point that folds back over on itself, but maintains shape (i.e. it doesn't melt and lose its form).
Stiff Peaks, the coveted things we want, rise straight up to the sky and never look back. If you were planning to make a model of a village in the mountains, these are what you're going to use for the mountains. You have to have stiff peaks for meringues because you're shaping them, and you don't want them to melt under heat and turn into shapeless blobs of goo. Get to the stiff peaks stage, and you've mastered it.
Unless.....You overbeat the egg whites. Do this and they get grainy and dull, and collapse back on themselves and you have a useless mess. If you notice graininess and you think you've taken things a little too far, you can try adding another egg white to resuscitate the mix. The added sugar helps though, and you probably won't run into this problem unless you're dying eggs in the other room and forget that you left the mixer running as long as you did.
Which brings me back to the holiday and recipe at hand. Once you've got the stiff peaks covered, you're just about there. Use this opportunity to explain how the white color of the mixture represents purity and the cleansing of our sins through Jesus. Then fold in the pecans and drop by teaspoonfulls onto cookie sheets covered in wax paper (these are individual "tombs"). You won't be baking these in shifts, so use all the cookie sheets you need to make all the cookies at once.
Now comes the fun part. Put the cookies in the oven, close the oven door and turn the oven off. Don't worry, the heat that's been trapped in the oven since you started will bake the meringues completely. Use duct tape or packing tape to seal the oven and explain that Jesus' tomb was sealed. Leave the cookies in the oven and go to bed.
On Easter morning, take your cookies out and enjoy the empty tomb and the true meaning of the holiday!
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