Sweet recipes for Easter

I'm thinking about what I could maybe bake for Easter and I'm digging through my notebook for old recipes...

I just realized that my blog will be 10 years old in July, 10 years since I collected and tried out Icelandic cooking and baking recipes and shared and posted them here... I think I'm getting sentimental.. .

So it’s better to quickly get back to meal planning for Easter!

By the way, the very first recipe I posted here was Gulrótarkaka, Icelandic carrot cake , my daughter's declared favorite cake. I think we were able to lure her to Iceland for the first time with the prospect of carrot cake at Café Loki. So carrot cake is always an option when I'm thinking about what cake to bake for a special occasion.

A few years ago, especially for Easter, I baked this Páskakaka (= Easter cake), a sponge cake with two layers and yellow and orange butter-sugar-chocolate cream, because yellow is the typical color for Easter here in Iceland.

I decorated the cake with Easter eggs and bunnies, even though you rarely get small eggs in Iceland and especially not small Easter bunnies. Icelandic Easter sweets are big, literally.

I baked this Appelsínukaka (= orange cake ) here for Easter two years ago, for a cozy coffee hour - thanks to the good weather, even on the terrace. A nice, quick recipe for a fruity sponge cake that can be prepared quickly even at short notice. Even my youngest, who isn't really a big cake fan, wanted a second helping of the cake...

8 years ago, when my mother was still alive and my sister was able to visit at Easter, I made a small peppermint ice cream cake with Oreo cookies and licorice as a dessert for the big family feast on Easter Sunday. It was also delicious, but I haven't made it in a long time...

This Húsfreyjuterta , the "housewife's cake", is also a very tasty but somewhat complex dessert cake. To be honest, I have no idea how the cake got its name, but I definitely like it and it looks good too, with the cream filling and the caramel icing. And you can have fun with the decoration on the cake if you like.

Or I'll just make the raspberry licorice cake that I baked recently...? With the mixture of fruit, chocolate and licorice, I found the cake wonderfully refreshing, fruity and really interesting with the licorice balls!

A classic option is of course Kransakaka . Such a "wreath cake" is a special specialty for festive occasions in many parts of Scandinavia and here in Iceland you can often find it on the cake buffet, especially at baptisms and confirmations. A cake like this actually has 15 to 18 stacked cake rings.

The cake consists of a lot of marzipan and sugar and is really delicious, but I don't like eating large portions of it in one go. That's why I only limited myself to 6 wreaths when baking - we're not such a big company and, to be honest, marzipan is pretty expensive here in Iceland...

Very important for an Icelandic Easter are of course these huge chocolate Easter eggs, filled with sweets and a note with a good wish or advice - either homemade Easter eggs ...

... or one of the many eggs in different sizes that you can buy everywhere in the supermarket. A huge Easter egg like these two, which a dear friend gave to our youngest and our grandchild, weighs an impressive 520 g!

Well, I still have two or three days until I have to decide what I want to bake for Easter this year...

Happy Easter, happy birthday!

[Translated from here.]