A Bunny Day Treat

Last week for our mommy luncheon I decided to make a bunny-day inspired treat. I'd been eyeing these super cute, cream cheese muffins baked in parchment bunnies from eye candy food blog since last year. And although I love the type of cheesecake that she put inside, I had a friend honouring Passover that week, so I decided to try to find a good flour-less cake recipe. I figure you can't go wrong with Nigella's Damp Apple and Almond cake, right?

Here is my virtual army of paper bunnies. Bwahaha! We are posed to take over the world with cuteness! This is only the first wave of adorableness, there were two dozen pint sized pairs of bunny ears in total.  I made each with a piece of parchment that was roughly 9 inches square.

I love the look of peeled apples. They remind me all things good from the kitchen - applesauce, apple pie, apple crisp, the list goes on. I can practically smell the cinnamon and cloves as I type... sigh....

Speaking of applesauce...

And as usual, I had the typical weekend snag of baking without a major ingredient, in this case, ground almonds. Our local supermarket didn't carry them either, so I had to grind some blanched ones myself.

Made it easier to justify making the whole cake in the food processor though, since it was already dirty and all...

I used an empty ketchup bottle (the kind you buy for bbqs and picnics) to fill the bunnies. Was a little disappointed that I couldn't fill the bunnies more than half full, due to the fact that the inflation hole rests halfway up the face of the bunny. So I tried filling the bunnies with the hole up top (standing them on the backs of their heads).

A failed experiment with an alternate bunny orientation

This did not work so well as the bunny's folds and creases are most sturdy when standing upright. I don't have a picture - but these bunnies sort of flattened out during baking, instead of maintaining a nice square shape. They ended up looking a bit like a baby who had been left to sleep on the back of its head for too long!

The original blogger advises you to be careful and neat when filling the bunnies because any spatters or spills will burn and be quite visible on the final product. You can see here that I tried to be pretty careful filling them, but completely neglected filling them slowly. As evidenced by the spatter marks all over the inside of the bunnies' heads caused by my rapid squeezing of the ketchup bottle and the subsequent "farting" of the batter.

Fill them slowly! Don't be a victim of batter farting!

Despite some hiccups and imperfections, the taste of the cake was all apple (would've been better if I'd remembered to add a little more lemon juice as the recipe said!) and cute factor seemed to override any poor aesthetics. The origami took some time, but I found the end result really satisfying and I'll definitely be repeating the process with the original cream cheese muffin recipe in the future.

A lone, uneaten bunny.

Moist and yum.