Bunny Butts

            This is not a post about how to get kicked out of WinCo Supermarket, so keep reading.  First, I think we can all agree that traditions are a good thing in life, bind families together, and even keep society from coming apart at the seams, right?  These are the things that confirm our values, give us hope for the future, and tell us who we are.

And I, my friend, am bunny butts.  Every Easter I not only make Italian Easter Egg Bread (Google it—it’s so cool—the colored eggs cook while they bake, tucked into a braided wreath of dough), but I also make not one, but TWO bunny cakes.  Okay, the reason I make two is that this is what you get when you slice a frosted cake in half.

Here’s the deal: You make two circular cakes using any recipe you like.  Carrot cake seems especially rabbity.  But instead of stacking them and frosting them like a standard round cake, you cut each cake crosswise, in half, to make two semi-circles.  You frost the bottom sides together, place them cut-side-down on two plates, and voila! Bunny bodies.  I usually scatter green-tinted coconut around them for the grass, give them pink card stock ears, jellybean eyes and noses, and then (wait for it) a pink Hostess Snowball for the tail. 

 

Here is a picture of a similar bunny cake I found online, on Natscorner.com.  Except it doesn’t show the tail, and this is where the bunny—and the plot—thickens.  Maybe you’ve noticed the recent news that Hostess, an American institution and the maker of Twinkies and Cupcakes, is shutting down.  As in NO MORE SNOWBALLS.  Which means NO MORE BUNNY CAKES.  Which means NO MORE HILTON FAMILY EASTER TRADITIONS.  Which mean JONI GOES BALLISTIC IN WINCO.

Okay, not entirely ballistic.  But I did shout, “You mean the government can step in to save Chrysler but not Hostess?  What kind of country is this?” when I learned they had no Hostess Snowballs.  I went on a teensy bit more about this essential part of our Easter dinner and maybe some things about Communism, I can’t really remember,  then I marched over to the muffin section of their bakery to try to improvise, thinking maybe I could slice off a muffin top, cover it with frosting and coconut, and make do.  But what a sorry selection of fluffy tails those were!  Knobby little mounds of nuts and bran?  Are you kidding?

And I was standing there with my lower lip sticking out enough to be a bunny tail itself, trying to wrap my brain around the loss of Pluto as a planet, phones you could work without an instruction book, and now Hostess!—when the kind clerk I had just accost—uh, enlightened—came up to me with a veritable treasure trove of bunny tails!  Did I hear a heavenly choir, singing?  (Well, probably rolling their eyes at my completely ignoring the real meaning of Easter, but back to my story).  Here was a box of knock-off snowballs!   They’re called BOMBOLINS and they’re even pink—look!

 

Across the top it says, “El Mexicano,” so Thank You, Mexico for saving the day.  And if the photo on the box is any indication, this box must hold about 16 tails—why, I could make bunny cakes for the whole neighborhood, right?  I’m not going to, but I could.

My heart lightened, I eagerly bought the Bombolins and brought them home.  But then I opened the box.  Uh oh.  These cookies are nowhere near the size of the photo.  They’re the size of Susan B. Anthony dollars!  WHICH YOU CAN’T FIND ANYMORE, EITHER. I know people with bigger thumb prints than this.

 

To make bunnies the right size for these tails, I’ll have to use cupcakes and cut them in half.  Hey—stay with me here—this means I could have a whole litter of baby bunnies!  Be still my heart-- I think I’ve launched a new tradition.

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