easter special! chocolate bunny cake w/ cream cheese frosting
This is an Easter tradition of ours… super-fun and super-cute. The perfect dessert to our massive Easter feast: garlic and red pepper pork tenderloin, brussels sprouts, sweet potato casserole, no-knead bread, and sweet tea. Needless to say, we’re all stuffed. The only complaint I have about this cake is the texture… it turned out rather spongy, which I’m not a fan of. Our internet was down, so I wasn’t able to access the recipe I normally use haha, so I busted this recipe out of one of my mom’s old cookbooks. It was good, just a really unappealing texture.
Easy Easter Bunny Cake
about 12 servings
1. Bake two cakes in 9 in. round pans. Make sure to grease the pans really well or use parchment paper, because it will be really hard to work with the cakes if they’re crumbly and stuck to the pan. Here‘s a great chocolate cake recipe that would work well for this cake. A box mix would work great as well.
2. After the cakes come out of the oven, flatten them with paper towels and stack them one on top of the other. Place them in the freezer for about 5 minutes. This will speed up cooling, and flatten the cakes to make them easier to decorate. After removing them from the freezer, take them out of the pans and allow them to cool completely on a cooling rack.
3. While the cakes are cooling, throw together a quick frosting. I used a cream cheese frosting for this cake, recipe here. Store-bought icing, of course, is fine too.
4. Once this cake is assembled, it takes up a lot of space, so prepare a large workspace on which to decorate and serve the cake. I had to layer two thin plastic cutting boards on top of one another.
5. Using a serrated knife, cut two football shaped “ears” off of opposite ends of one of the cakes. The middle portion of this cake will be the bunny’s “bowtie.” If you need to, trim up the ears and bowtie to make them look neater.
6. Place the whole cake in the center of your workspace, and then place the ears on top and the bowtie on bottom, leaving space between the cakes so you can frost each side.
7. Frost the cakes evenly on each side. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect; your bunny will be precious even if the icing is kinda messy.
8. Decorate! You can use whatever you want: candy, chocolate, icing, etc. We used store-bought royal icing to draw the bunny’s eyes, nose, mouth, bowtie buttons, and the inside of his ears.
9. Enjoy!
He was a tasty little guy… and we felt bad after chomping on his ears, so we drew him some more. He’s a cat now, I guess.
