Last weekend I made a cake for Easter.  Not a fruit or Simnel cake (simple tastes abound in our household), but instead a rainbow cake, frosted and decorated festively with a carrot, which soon attracted these hares…

It’s one of those cakes that is far simpler to make than it may look;

• The rainbow cake recipe and technique is on the blog here, and for the frosting I used Betty Crocker’s own trusted recipe (so simple, but so good).
• To make the shards around the side, I melted a pack of these and smoothed the mixture out between two sheets of greaseproof paper, before rolling it up quickly like a swiss roll.  The Candy Melts harden quickly, and when unrolled again break into shards which I gently pressed into the frosting around the sides of the cake.  You can find them in Lakeland and Hobbycraft in the UK, and in craft stores and supermarkets in the US and Canada.
• The carrot is a paper-and-raffia Easter decoration that I simply pierced with a wooden skewer, then pushed the skewer down into the cake to hold it in place (remove before serving!).  If you made an actual carrot cake, this would look even better.
• The mischievous hares?  Again, they were Easter decorations designed to be hung up; I snipped off the hanging threads and let them loose on the cake…

After two days, this was all I managed to rescue for a photo

p.s.  On a related subject; a campaign has been launched by the youngest member of the family who is adamant that what our family needs is a pet rabbit.  Have you ever had a rabbit, and do they make easy pets?  Perhaps we won’t start with one of these…