#72 - Uncovering The Easter Bunny

WHEN I WAS A KID, I had no idea how the Easter Bunny came by all those candied eggs. I was edging into old and wearing my first pair of bifocals when I stumbled onto the truth.

The C Shop of Birch Bay, WA.

December 2006 I moved uphill from Birch Bay's iconoclastic C Shop, housed in the old Birch Bay Resort of 1904. Owned by two retired school teachers, Patricia and Patrick Alesee,  the ShePat and HePat keep busy during Lent to fill the Easter Bunny's baskets, who for years has been hippity-hopping those baskets right to your own front door.

The Pats and I became friends and about the end of January, and the ShePat started making noises about not getting the lead out of her feet. She was officially a week behind the "big start," an intense ten-week, round-the-clock, labor intensive effort to get all her chocolate bunnies, roosters, teddy bears, frogs, and chickies... ready for you know who.

I got in from grocery shopping one day in early February to a phone message: Pat had the lead out of her toes at last and needed to make 25 boxes of mint daisies. Did I want to come down and do the centers?

Patricia's very famous "white chocolate" mint daisies actually go out all over the county and country year round, but first someone has to make the yellow centers where the mint lives and permeates the flower. In 2008, that would be me. So here's the "inside" scooby-doo from The C Shop to you on how to make mint daisies.

First you have to use a lollypop stick--without the lollypop--to transfer very warm "white chocolate" (that's really really yellow and very very minty) into the daisy centers of the dozen-to-a-sheet mold. You work beside a heater to keep your fingers hot, the chocolate smooth, and you make sure to drop a perfectly round circle--no spilling or sloppy stuff. If you twitch? Wait for it to cool, pop it out, and start again. I, just so you know, did not have to do that too often. Just sayin'.

Now someone's go to fill the molds. That would be the ShePat. She has a dispenser that squirts "white chocolate" on top of the yellow centers, filling in the petals in the exact same way teenagers working at Dairy Queen squirt soft ice cream into cones. Squirt, squirt, squirt, very fast, very impressive.

Then she gently whacks the mold against a table top, whack, whack, whack, another whack, turning and jiggling the chocolate down into the flower pattern.

Now into the freezer. Sheet after sheet to harden. Rows upon row. Shelves of them. Centers all made by me. Thank you very much.

Hardened, we pop them out and box. Thirty to a box.

Now here's some really good news if you're hungry. No longer do you have to wait for the Easter Bunny! Today you can order your own box of daisy mints--

--along with all kinds of other Easter candy. 

Click here! Go!

Oh, yea, nearly forgot. Not only is the C Shop where the Easter Bunny gets his haul, the C Shop is where the Easter Bunny lives! See him here with his Honey Bunny? And  now I know, and now you know too!