Holy Hotmess Easter Cake

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter! (or if you are not a celebrator...a nice weekend)

We had a wonderful holiday, including a full contact Easter Egg hunt, the worlds grossest Polish soup and an egg cake with a cheesecake hidden inside. So this post will deal mostly with some of the highlights of our holiday:

First I have to mention that despite our respective 25 and almost 21 years of age, my sister and I still have an easter egg hunt. (out and proud). FUN! The rules are simple: my aunt hides 18million eggs in the most unbeleivable places possible (inside chicken cavities, frozen into blocks of ice and in a toilet bowls are not off limits) and Lauren and I compete to find the most eggs (or till first blood). We are then awarded 1st and 2nd place prizes...it is awesome! Lauren's boyfriend joined us for the first time and competed....he's ok. We expect him out of the hospital any day now. This battle royal is followed by our Martini Olive Hunt, where 6 olives (in other words green easter eggs with red dots on them) are hidden with clues inside which my mother and aunt have to find in order to get a martini. This year we wanted to mix it up a little and made it into a race. Both my aunt and mother had three eggs hidden and had to be the first to find all of theirs to receive a first prize martini. (the second place person got a "tiny" tini in a miniature martini glass). We made both Absolute Brooklyn Martinis and Sake Tinis and they were sooooo good

I should mention that the full-contact Easter Egg hunt we made Laurens poor boyfirned participate in was of course after we subjected him to Polish Easter Soup. If you have never heard of it, please follow the link. You really should know what we are dealing with to appreciate how mean it is to serve this to anyone. But we love it...especially with horseradish in it to turn in Pepto-Bismol Pink and kill the taste.

And speaking of Polish food, I also have a funny story about our heritages many quirks...Food blessing. See we take our food to a Polish Catholic Church in New Britain every year, and part of this comes from my mothers feelings about a certain church member who shall remain nameless at our local church and some potentially offensive comments about the practice he may or may not have made to her. Well my sister and I had the job on our own this year and unfortunately were both quite bogged down with work so we decided, in the interest of saving time, that we would go to this aforementioned church to get the blessing, while subsequently deciding to not tell our mother about this change of plans so that we would not have to incur her wrath (I'm not saying she's mean but her and the deity whose sons resurrection we celebrated yesterday may have similar feelings about wrath (see Exodus 15:1-7)). So we kept this a secret, and vowed to instead say we made the 40 min trip to New Britain in record time. Well it didn't work, the food burned my mother from the inside. We'll all miss you mom.

Lastly, I want to mention the fabulous dessert I made: Red Velvet Cheesecake.

I'll admit I cheated a little and used boxed Red Velvet cake mix. THEN...I followed this recipe from Paula Dean for the cheese cake center (I needed a recipe without a crust)

The frosting was a cream cheese frosting from The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook.

Ok: so I am too ambitious sometimes and decided I wanted to use the easter egg cake pans Marilou has. I made the cakes in them, then made a regular cheese cake in a spring-form pan. The next day I used one of the tiers to cut out a similarly shaped cheesecake layer, and cut it out....Well here is the problem: this cheese cake has no crust (why would it..it's filling) and when I attempted to pick it up with a spatula a sizable piece of it fell off and my cheesecake layer ended up looking like aborted fetus. Ohhh I was mad...so mad I snapped at Marilou (Soooooory) in a totally un-easter spirit. But thankfully frosting covered a multitude of sins and the cake came out looking ok.

Potential fix: If I attempt to do this again I will put parchment paper (pre cut) into the bottom of the pan so this can more easily be moved.

That being said I will NEVER try this again because while my cake looked adorable, it quickly turned to hotmess when it was cut. We got in a few good slices but then it feel apart completely. My family thought it was very good though so it will likely be made again only this time in normal cake form (ie round and easy to assemble)

I hope everyones holiday was a good as mine and I hope you at least kindof enjoyed Dark Stories From the Niezabitowski Holiday!!!!

Good Night and Good Luck