A Sugar-Free Easter!

Easter is the first big celebration we've had to deal with on the diet. We've had one birthday so far too, but as it was my daughter's and she's 11, it passed off quietly, she was happy enough to have a trip to the cinema and a low-key family party, with banana cake! But Easter is a different story. It's basically the chocolate holiday! So how do you celebrate Easter without ANY chocolate or even any sweets?

Every year since the kids were very small, we've been having an Easter egg hunt during the Easter holidays with two of my good friends and their kids. It's a fun afternoon and the kids usually end up with a nice bucket full of the usual small eggs, kinders, cream eggs etc. I had thought we would skip it this year but my daughter insisted we should do it, as its a tradition! As a happy coincidence, it was our turn to have it at our house. Instead of chocolate eggs, the kids painted hard-boiled eggs and we hid those instead. They had great fun painting the eggs. They painted numbers on some of them and after finding them, these numbered eggs corresponded to little prizes, like balloons, bubbles, paints and little model planes.

I also made some tiny meringues using just egg-whites and honey, and we put these inside some plastic eggs kept from the past few years. We hid these and the painted eggs around the garden and the kids had great fun trying to find them. They all ended up with 4 to 8 eggs in their buckets, much less than they usually would have but the fun part was really in the hunting for them. The best part for us parents was we didn't have to worry about any of them over-doing it and being sick later on!!

On Easter Sunday, instead of chocolate eggs, we had pancakes, lots and lots of banana pancakes. These have been a huge hit in our house, and in many of my friends' houses. I've passed this recipe onto many Mums already. Its such an easy sneaky way to get banana and egg into any fussy kids. They look exactly the same as the usual pancakes, as you'll see from the photo. And they don't need any sweetener as the banana really makes them sweet enough. (Although they do taste even nicer with a little drop of honey, or a small spoon of home-made raspberry jam!)  All you do is put 1 banana (very ripe!) and two eggs into a food processor or blender and whip them up for about a minute until they are well blended. This mixture makes about 3/4 pancakes. I fry ours in coconut oil as my younger son is avoiding dairy at the moment, but they are lovely fried in butter too.  They cook much quicker than normal pancakes so you do have to watch them carefully and cook them on a fairly low heat.

As a special Easter treat for the kids, we got them two Easter bunnies!!