12 Apr 2025
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, is already thinking of ways to tackle her Easter excesses…
A lovely friend of mine, Claire, has renamed the school Easter holidays ‘the chocolate holibobs’. Walking through the shops, with their rows upon rows of chocolate eggs, bunnies and chicks (not to mention the slightly less traditional dinosaurs, dogs and cows), Claire’s pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Were it not for the somewhat horrifying fact that Easter confection went on sale between Christmas and New Year, I would feel far more embracing of the chocolate onslaught, but it turns out there really can be too much of a good thing.
Indeed, the chocolate overload can be a bit full-on (even for me) and I find myself searching for an Easter dessert to make for the family meal that includes no chocolate at all, or at least one that efficiently uses up some of the chocolate shrapnel left strewn all over the place.
I have two such recipes for you here, the first of which is an Easter no-bake cheesecake, which is as easy as it is delicious to make and, in terms of effort, requires only the foresight to leave a good six hours’ setting time in the fridge. That’s as tricky as it gets.
You can follow any basic vanilla cheesecake recipe you like, really. Before getting started, gather up the less attractive bits of your chocolate paraphernalia. Save the prettier items for decorating the top. I used mini eggs for the top of mine, which look very Easter-y indeed with their soft, pastel colours. Relegate any chipped or broken eggs to the ugly-pile along with other less attractive chocolate bits and bobs.
Give the ugly-pile a blitz in the food processor or pop it all in a plastic food bag and bash it about with a rolling pin. In terms of quantity, there’s no ‘correct’ amount, but you want the rubble to make up roughly a quarter of the main cream cheese and cream mixture. You can do this by estimation or use the weights in the recipe.
It’s quite nice to leave some chunkier bits among the rubble and, if some end up being blitzed down to a sandy texture, just make sure you reduce the amount of icing sugar the recipe asks for, as the very fine chocolate dust will dissolve into the creamy mixture and act like sugar. You don’t want a dessert so sweet that your teeth retreat in terror and your blood sugar puts on a helmet in preparation for the roller coaster.
Use the pretty-pile of Easter confection to decorate the top, which is where kids often like to get creative. One year a veritable farmyard adorned the cheesecake, which was quite fun, though half of it was plastic and not actually edible. You can even smarten things up and shave your chocolate onto the cheesecake, but give it a spell in the fridge first or you’ll end up looking like you’ve been in a chocolate massacre of sorts.
The second recipe today is based on one of my favourite things to eat – hot cross buns – which make me neither hot nor cross, just happy. If you, like me, have eyes bigger than your stomach and buy far more hot cross buns than your family can eat, then this recipe is perfect for you, especially as the staler the buns, the better.
The concept is very similar to a regular bread and butter pudding so, much like with the cheesecake recipe, you can use any basic recipe you like (I don’t see the point in re-inventing the wheel at a time of year when culinary pressures on those hosting family are already high). As hot cross buns are considerably sweeter than regular bread, reduce the amount of sugar in the custard mixture.
This is especially important if you’re going to ‘Easterfy’ your bun-and-butter-pudding by hiding some Easter treats among the buns – cut a creme egg into quarters and, before the filling oozes everywhere, swiftly tuck the pieces amongst the buns, or dot some smaller eggs here and there.
The photo you can see here is one I made a couple of years ago and doesn’t have any visible adornments, I’m afraid, but more recent versions (of which no photos seem to have been taken, of course) look rather tempting, take my word for it.
One of the reasons I am so partial to hot cross buns is that, in spite of their sticky sweetness, if it all gets too saccharine, they provide an excellent base for a savoury sandwich. Think chilli-grilled halloumi and rocket stuffed between two halves of a hot cross bun spread with black garlic ketchup, or perhaps feta and spinach leaves with sundried tomato paste. You can create any number of sugar-antidotes to help you through the chocolate holibobs. See you on the other side!
