March 24, 2008

• Easter Sundee

  
  
  My mother always made the best Easter Baskets.  The Easter Basket, usually the same one,  like a tradition, each year, filled with waxy paper easter grass,  those eggs,  you don't see them much any more, they had a hardish marshmellowy inside in a candy colored shell, they got all sticky and melted in your hands and the color got all over everything.

    My favorite, and still are,  are the malted milk ball "speckled eggs",   they used to sell tubs of them at Woolworths,  the ones with the matte, painted shell,  not the waxy shell,  I settle for "Whopper's" "Robin's Eggs" now, the closest thing, I can eat myself sick off of them....  in fact I vomited at 3AM (M&M's peanut and milk). Of course Peeps,  in my day strictly yellow Peeps existed, now they come in all shapes and color for every holiday.

   This year I saw Peep's Tulips have been added.  Also,  I have seen,  the past few years, a Peeps Egg decorating kit that comes with white Peeps eggs you can decorate... I've lost my point...
  
    My mother and my Easter baskets,   full of waxy paper Easter grass,  the big woven basket that came seemingly from nowhere every year, carefully planted with these treats,  the centerpiece usually a large 'fruit and nut' or egg or chocolate bunny,  or often,  she would make a "Sugar Egg",  carefully decorated and filled with a scene you could look inside at.
  
  She learned how to make these in Cake Decorating Class.  There was always an old dullish pink plastic egg mold,  in two halfs,  long ways,  and a clear one with sparkles inmbedded in the plastic. She would color sugar.  Sometimes I could watch.  She would color sugar in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon and drip the food coloring, a drop at a time, carefully in the sugar to get an even pastel pink,  blue,  yellow,  green....   She would pack the colored sugar into the egg mold halves and set them upside down,  cover them with waxed paper and let them dry some.   Don't dare touch them.
  
  Then it was Jack LaLane, the man who inhaled and exhaled to an organ trill while she stretched herself around a long black rubber band exerciser,  exercising and keeping fit,   or continued with the eggs making the insides, the colored sugar icings, getting out the metal tips and paper cones she would use to squeeze icing out to decorate and fill the eggs with tiny Easter scenes.
  
  Semi dry,  she would scrape the centers of the sugar egg shells out and into a Tuperware container and burp the lid,  to keep it moist and refridgerate it for possibly another egg.  Hollowing out the halves left an even suger "shell" half in each side of the mold.  One would be filled with tiny chicks or bunnies, or baskets of tiny jellyeggs "humingbird eggs".

   Flowers or little icing eggs laying in coconut or otherwise green icing grass would fill these tiny egg worlds as well before the shells were glued together with a special icing that didn't taste as good as the rest of the icings and sugar.  These Eggs were not made to be eaten.  
  
  I would gaze through the peephole left at the end after she would slice the tip of the half sugar shell after fully drying and being removed from the mold, filled and decorated.

    She would use a yellow for a chick,  or white for a bunny,  a tiny round metal tip on the icing squeezing tube to from a  dot of yellow for a chick body,  another dot with a pulled upward pointed at the end, like a droplet,  for the tiny chick head and tiny drops with points for wings on each side. 

  These tiny icing easter chicks would get a dot of food coloring with a toothpick on each side of the head for eyes, and a dot of red from a toothpick on their tiny icing beaks.   The white drops would get ears pulled upward with a stripe of toothpick pink for bunny ears and whiskers,  so tiny and delicate.  
  
  ...
  
  A scene completed,  the top of the sugar shell was glued to the bottom of the sugar shell,  then an icing frosty border all around the seam,  then around the eye hole, and flowers, leaves and greenery on top to top it off.
  
  I remember eating this stuff, breaking this stuff,  having this stuff sticking to my hands and all over my face.   I remember being sick enough to vomiting with malted milk ball eggs. 

   I remember being stuffed into painful new shoes and suited, clipped on bowtied choked and whisked off to church only to mourn this Easter basket and only want to be back home,  or going to a cousins' or aunt's or church yards to search out eggs, always always being outsmarted by some bigger kid.  Finding boiled eggs, some broken,  some candy,  milling around kinfolk toddlers and older kids  haphazardly swinging dirty Easter baskets ....
  
  I was blogging about my Mom and how I miss her Easter Baskets.   These would be so proudly wrapped in colored cellophane and appear mysterously at the bedside in the middle of the night.  One time I swore I saw the Easter bunny as a child even though I knew that no such beast existed.

  Thanks again Mom, for giving me the perfect childhood.  Perhaps too perfect.

  I had a meloncholy Easter and didn't do much except shred some old paper work and begin to organize the a 2 drawer file cabinet I bought at Kmart.
  
  
     

  • 7:29 am
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