Easter Lemon Brunch

Easter to me always brings back memories of bright colors and frilly dresses. We would always be up SUPER early to get ready and bundled up with our cute dresses underneath layers of coats, mittens and blankets and head out to a field somewhere for our traditional sunrise service. Now as a child, and not a morning person, these days always were dreaded by me. It was dark when we woke up, dark when we got to the chosen location for that year, and still dark as the service started. But now, I look back with fondness on these memories. There is something so sweet about celebrating the resurrection of Christ first thing in the morning. On top of that, I don't know how my mom did it!! There was ALWAYS breakfast waiting when we got home and a yummy ham ready to be put in the oven. How she prepped all of this food, got 3 kids ready & still always looked beautiful on Easter morning, I will NEVER know. =) But I thank you Mom & Dad for that time & those memories. Sorry for all the complaining at the time!

This year we decided to host an Easter brunch at our house with 2 other couples. We attended the Easter service at our church the night before, but I was still up bright and early preparing for our guests. None of us had family in town, so this year, we were each other's family. I throughly enjoy hosting people at our house and wanted to make this an extra special occasion... starting with the table.

A good friend of mine owns a flower shop and had taught a course on making Bird Cage arrangements. I missed the course, but headed up to her place the Friday before Easter to make one for my Easter table. It was really fun & the finished product turned out better than I expected. Karen taught me a valuable lesson that day... when it comes to flower arranging, you cannot be a perfectionist. Each flower has a mind of it's own and will lean whatever way it wants to. You can try, but eventually you have to just let it do it's thing.


The pink lilies were GORGEOUS. Combined with the orange gerber daises and snapdragons, it really gave off the bright Easter theme I was going for!
Lemon Ricotta Cookies with a lemon glaze served as the little take-away gift. Wrapped in cellophane and tied with pink or purple ribbons, they really helped complete the table setting. Because of the ricotta cheese in the dough, these cookies were SO soft & moist. They are really only "same-day" cookies however as the amount of moisture in them tends to make them sticky and kind of chewy after a couple days.

Another addition of mine was the Easy Cheese Danish that I have blogged about before. I made one normal by the recipe and with the other half of the filling, I added thawed blueberries. When I mixed them in, they burst and turned the filling a wonderful shade of purple. I placed them on the platter & powdered them with sugar... mmmm, SO GOOD!

Here is a close-up...

I also made 2 quiches... unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of either of them. I was so excited to make them & we were so excited to eat them when they came out of the oven, that I totally forgot to take any pictures.

One was the Hash Brown Quiche by Paula Deen. C'mon kids... it is Paula, of course it was wonderful! Here is the picture from the website. It was so cool too b/c you use hashbrowns for the crust. Yummy!

The other one I made was from bonappetit.com. It was a Corn & Bacon Pie. I also added the picture from the website below. This one was good, but the unanimous decision around the table was for the Hashbrown Quiche. Needless to say, there were no leftovers of either.

Overall, Easter turned out wonderfully! Other than the earthquake that shook us all out of our food comas after brunch, we all had a splendid time.