Better Budgeting: Frugal Family Recipes: Easter Bunny Cakes

by Michelle Jones

If you like to buy specialty cakes for the holidays save money this Easter by making your own Easter Bunny Cake at home. We originally featured this fun holiday recipe in 2001 and continue to update it often as our readers send us photos of the cakes they make at home. I hope you will try making this easy holiday cake with your family for Easter or maybe later in the spring, it's a lot of fun and absolutely delicious!

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Though Easter is more of a religious celebration for us as Christians, when I saw this cute bunny cake in the newspaper MANY years ago (like, before the Internet) I just had to try it out with our kids. We waited until after church to make the cake and had a lot of fun with it. This cute little bunny cake is not only fun for the children, it's pretty cool for the grown-ups too. Especially if you like coconut... which I DO!

Ingredients:

1 box of white cake mix (water, eggs, and oil, as needed)
1 pkg. of coconut
Red and green food coloring
Jelly beans
2 red Twizzlers® candy ropes

Directions:

Make a regular white cake, using two 9-inch round pans, and bake as directed on the box. When a toothpick comes out clean from the center of the cake, it's done. Remove cake from the oven and cool to room temperature.

Turn one cake layer out onto a large foil covered baking sheet or rectangle platter, this will be the bunny's face. The second layer will become the bunny's ears and bowtie. Just cut two sides of the round cake layer into bunny ears, kind of like this () (), leaving the bowtie shape in the middle.

Now place the two bunny ears at the top of the bunny's head (which is the round cake layer already on the platter), and place the bowtie at the bottom. Frost the cake with white vanilla or cream cheese icing, being sure to cover all the sides.

Place about 1 cup of coconut into a zip plastic bag, and add 2-3 drops of red food coloring. Sprinkle the pink coconut all over the top and sides of the bowtie, and then the middle of the bunny ears.

Cover the rest of the bunny with plain white coconut.

Repeat steps above to make some green coconut for the 'grass' around the cake, but this time with green food coloring. Sprinkle the green coconut all around the platter or baking sheet.

Now it's time to decorate the face. Use jelly beans for the eyes and nose, and a red Twizzler® candy for the mouth. Then cut smaller strips from the second piece of candy rope for the nose whiskers, about 2-3 small pieces on each side.

Sprinkle the leftover jelly beans all around the bunny, and throughout the green coconut grass.

Your Easter Bunny Cake is done, enjoy!

(Be prepared for everyone to fuss over who gets to eat which part, just like the chocolate bunnies we have on Easter morning... before church. ;o)

If you make our Easter Bunny Cake please send us a picture,,,

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"Your recipe for the Bunny Cake was fun to make, and turned out great!!"

- Mildred

Thank you Mildred, this is very much how our Bunny Cake looked so we've placed your photo at the top of this page! :o) Sadly, we took a great photo with me and the kids holding the cake (before we even had a computer) but I still haven't been able to find it. Hopefully it will turn up some day!

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