holidays

I love bunnies, and Easter is a great excuse to make something edible in a bunny shape. Last year, I made bunny bao. The year before that, I took a class in making chocolate bunnies. I've also made pastel colored Easter Bunny cupcakes, and given you a diagram for cutting _usagi ringo_ (apple bunnies).

This year I have an urge for the traditional British Easter treat, hot cross buns. But, as bunnies.

Hot Cross buns are soft and light, spicy fruity buns with a sugar glaze. They are called Hot Cross buns because they usually sport a cross on top. I prefer the bunny as my Easter motif.

These bunnies are made using the Hot Cross bun recipe on the BBC Food site, which yields a realy nice, light bun with a wonderful spicy fragrance. I did change two things: I added some orange zest in addition to lemon zest to the dough, and simply pressed some dried fruit into the dough as I'll show below instead of mixing it into the dough. This was done in order to produce bunnies with fairly smooth faces. The drawback is that you don't get fruit in every bite, but I think the cuteness more than makes up for that.

I am suddenly behind on everything - work, holiday tasks, shopping, etc. etc. I was planning to do a lot of Christmas food related thing - you know, make a stollen or six, maybe a Christmas pudding (should have been made a month ago), cookies, etc. I may still have time for the cookies, the rest I'm not sure.

There is one thing that I have done that took me maybe 10 minutes max, and part of that time was spend let's say, sampling the wares.

As I've mentioned her before several times, I'm not a diehard locavore. But I do try to keep an eye on how far my food has travelled to get to me. Admittedly, many of my seasonings and such have travelled a long way, because I need my Japanese food and I'm here in the middle of Europe. For fresh produce and meats and things like that I do try to buy things that haven't travelled too far as much as I can. I think I've fairly typical in that respect these days.

Happy Labor Day to everyone in the U.S.! Labor Day is sort of the unofficial end of summer, which makes me a little sad, but it's also the start of the best season for foodies - fall/autumn. Fall is known as the season of the appetite in Japan - as the hot weather recedes and the fruits of the harvest start to come in, the tummy gets hungrier. In Switzerland we have the hunting season to look forward to, not to mention wild mushrooms in the markets. And the old grape vines in our garden are already yielding dark, small, sweet fruits.

I know things have been a little quiet around Just Hungry lately, but it will get busier as I get out of tomato-salad and cold cucumber soup mode...stay tuned!

If youre in the U.S. or anywhere in the world celebrating the 4th of July tomorrow, I hope you're having better weather than we're having here, where it's cold and rainy! If you're having a party, here are some useful recipes from the archives: Japanese potato salad, which in my opinion is the best kind of potato salad - rich tasting, not too vinegary. With homemade mayonnaise it's heaven - though be careful to refrigerate it properly before serving, and to eat the leftovers (if there are any) as soon as possible. For a much lighter salad (no fat added!), Scandinavian cucumber salad goes very well with the rich flavors of grilled meats. It's sort of like a fresh relish. By saving calories with the salad you can then splurge on the Red, white and blue mess for dessert, which looks quite spectacular and even feels sort of virtuously healthy because of all the fruit. Happy 4th!

Swiss people love cutely formed bread, just as much if not more than Japanese people. Behold, this masterpiece of adorable yet modern design, in the form of an Easter Bunny bread. (click on the image from the web page to see it larger).

The almond slices scattered on top were a bit misleading. I was rather anticipating some kind of sugar-almondy filling, but it was just slightly sweetened white bread all the way through. Perhaps the cuteness is enough sugariness for one small bread.

For more Swiss Easter Bunny goodness, read about the chocolate Easter Bunny making class I took last year.

If you are planning a St. Patrick's Day feast but still haven't decided what to make, European Cuisines has been posting a new real Irish recipe every day since the beginning of the month. There's everything from colcannon to Irish Stew to boxty (potato pancakes) to crubeens, which are "crunchy Irish pig's trotters", and a whole lot more. They also have a rant about how corned beef is definitely not the Irish national dish. I wasn't planning on anything Irish myself this weekend, but those, um, crunchy pig's trotters sound interesting.... [via Diane].

If you will be celebrating St. Patrick's Day this weekend, and are looking for a great dessert to serve, try this one out from the archives: Irish Stout Cake with Whiskey Sour Icing.

It's a light yet very assertive chocolate cake with beer undertones, topped with whiskey flavored lemon icing. How can you go wrong with that? :)