5 Fun Easter Desserts

We love making sophisticated meals and desserts, but sometimes it’s fun to make goodies that our kids will love. We’ve featured cool ideas like homemade gummies and cookie cakes, and now it’s time to highlight fun Easter desserts. These treats will rival the ones left by the Easter Bunny.

Skillet S’mores With Peeps

Peeps are marshmallows covered in colored sugar. They may be excessively sweet to eat on their own, but try using them as you would use plain marshmallows. One of our favorite ways to eat Peeps is in a batch of skillet s’mores. We featured this treat in our post on skillet desserts, and it’s one of our favorites for special occasions.

Preheat your oven to 400ºF and spread chocolate chips evenly across the bottom of your skillet. Set the Peeps on top. You can use a rainbow array of Peep colors, or keep it monochromatic. Slide the skillet into the oven and keep an eye on it. Start checking at five minutes, and monitor closely until the Peeps are toasted just the way you like them. Be sure to have graham crackers at the ready for dipping once your s’mores have cooled down slightly.

Carrot and Easter Egg Meringue Cookies

Another dessert we’ve covered before is meringue, with five key tips to help ensure your meringue turns out perfect. We’ll list them here, but check out our post on meringue for all the details.

• Use less fresh eggs
• Make sure bowls and tools are free of oil or egg yolk
• Separate the egg whites from yolks while cold
• Whip the egg whites at room temperature
• Add cream of tartar for stability

Before baking, separate the meringue into two bowls, with approximately one-third in one bowl and two-thirds in the other bowl. Add green food coloring to the smaller portion, and orange food coloring to the larger portion. Use pastry bags and piping tips to create meringue cookies in the shape of carrots and leaves. You can also use blue, yellow, pink, and lavender food coloring, and make cookies in the shape of Easter eggs. We recommend baking according to the directions on this meringue cookie recipe from King Arthur Flour.

Jelly Bean Sugar Cookies

Another way to use classic Easter candy in a kid-friendly dessert are these Jelly Bean Sugar Cookies from Sally’s Baking Addiction. They’re so easy to make. Use Sally’s sugar cookie recipe, or if you already have one you rely on, it will work too. All you need to do is press a few jelly beans into the top of each cookie as they come out of the oven. You can let them cool slightly, but don’t wait more than a couple minutes or the jelly beans won’t stay in place.

Fondant Carrots for Carrot Cake

Carrot cake is a quintessential spring dessert. Make it even more fun for Easter with fondant carrots to decorate your layer cake or carrot cake cupcakes. You can use pre-made fondant or make your own. If you buy fondant, get some orange and some green, and then refer to Janel’s tutorial on Nellie Bellie for making the carrots. She likens working with fondant to playing with Play-Doh, and we think it’s an apt comparison.

If you want to make your own fondant, try this recipe from The Spruce Eats. It’s really simple, and all you need are mini marshmallows, powdered sugar, water, and food coloring. Fondant can dry out easily, so wrap up what you’re not using and store it in the refrigerator. You might also put on some disposable gloves when you’re adding food coloring to your fondant. They’ll help you avoid ending up with orange or green hands.

Cake Decorations

Make any flavor cake you like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sheet cake or a layer cake either. Then use some creative cake decorating ideas to make into an Easter dessert.

Try adding Kit-Kat sections or Pirouette cookies around the outside of your frosted layer cake to make it look like an Easter basket. Then add crumbled chocolate wafers on top to look like dirt, or pipe blades of grass with buttercream frosting (colored green with food coloring or gel). Place Peeps or unwrapped chocolate bunnies on top. You can also toast shredded coconut and pile it on top to look like a bird’s nest, with some chocolate eggs with speckled pastel shells in the nest. Of course, these are just a few ideas. Stock up on whatever Easter goodies you like, and find a way to use them in your cake decorations!