Easter Weekend Fun!

I hope everyone had a Happy Easter! I just got back on campus a couple of hours ago after a crazy, fun-filled (but sadly short) trip home for Easter weekend! We were lucky enough to have Thursday and Friday of last week off, so Mary and I headed home early Thursday morning and had such a great time spent with family and friends! We did a bit of shopping, took some classes at our favorite fitness studio with Bailey, had some great food, baked some delicious goodies, and had a great Easter with lots of fun festivities.

In honor of our annual Easter baking project, Mary and I decided to make Easter/spring themed cupcakes to bring to our family's Easter dinner! A few weeks back in Palm Springs, I found the cutest cupcake liners and toppers made from William Sonoma made by Meri Meri, a company that sells adorable baking and party accessories! We used our favorite vanilla bean cupcake mix from Trader Joes and tried a new light and fluffy vanilla bean frosting recipe linked here. We decorated some of the cupcakes with the flower toppers from the Meri Meri kit, and others with Robin's Egg candies!

The beautiful cupcakes!

Easter cupcake cross!

In addition to the cupcakes, Mary and I wanted to try making chick macarons inspired by a couple of pins we had seen on Pinterest. We used this recipe for lemon macarons with a lemon buttercream and the flavors turned out just perfect! When making the macarons we used a macaron mat for the first time, which is a silicon baking mat with raised edges for helping pipe a consistent circle shape. While the macarons turned out alright, they were a little smaller and flatter than we would have liked! Lesson learned- our macarons from the past seemed to turn out better without the mat! We used food markers purchased from a local baking store for the eyes and feet, and turns out it was harder than we thought to draw them on without puncturing the macarons!

We always spend Easter at our grandparent's beautiful house and it was such a nice day with lots of fun and laughter! Here's a silly picture of my Easter getup- dress, sweater, and necklace from J. Crew Factory! 

It is crazy to think that Mary and I only have four more weeks left of school before finals! These next few weeks are jammed packed with activities, assignments, and babysitting and before we know it summer will be here! How crazy fast time seems to fly here at school!

I hope everyone has a great week! 

xo,

Hannah