It’s easy for children to associate Easter treats with chocolate bunnies, jelly beans and brightly colored hard-boiled eggs. But, resurrection cookies turn a simple morsel of meringue into a powerful teaching tool by blending verses from Scripture with the five ingredients throughout the preparation phase. While these tidbits can be made at any time, the process coincides ideally with the Easter story if they are made during the evening of Holy Saturday.
Sheila (Brannan) Veach, a 1983 St. Cloud (Minn.) Cathedral High School graduate now living in Chapin, S.C., started making the cookies five Easters ago with her sons Erik and Christopher after her mother Judy Brannan, a member of St. Joseph Parish in Waite Park (Minn.), mailed the recipe to her.
“I put it in my grandmother Olivia Brannan’s Bible for safekeeping,” Veach recalled. “Later my oldest son, Erik, and I looked through the readings and marked the pages in the Bible. It made the whole process easier.
“Erik was 5 at that time and Christopher was 3. Erik acted like a TV food personality as each ingredient was added to the mixture,” said Veach, a private caterer and a former executive chef and culinary instructor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “When the cookies were in the oven, Christopher ran into another room and returned with a roll of duct tape, shouting, ‘I’ve got the tape. I’ve got the tape.’
“The hardest part was when we ‘sealed the tomb.’ They both got excited about the surprise,” she continued. “They knew what it was going to be, but they enjoyed the anticipation.
“The boys kept getting out of bed to look at the cookies in the oven that night — they almost got caught by the Easter bunny,” she remembered. “On Easter morning the duct tape was peeled back from the oven, we read the last reading and they ate their resurrection cookies for breakfast — they called them ‘empty cookies.’ ”
Everyone’s favorite verse, she said, is from Matthew 28 when the angel rolls back the stone and announces to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary that Jesus is no longer in the tomb. Craig Veach, Sheila’s husband of 16 years, a project manager in the woodworking industry, usually reads that part with the family.
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Photo courtesy of Dianne Towalski |
Veach feels that children ages 3 to 4 aren’t too young to prepare the recipe with an adult’s assistance.
“They can crack eggs into little bowls and measure,” she suggested. “Put some vinegar in a cereal bowl and pour some salt into a little cup for them to measure from. Take the measuring spoons and cups off the ring to make it easier. Pre-measure everything and set it out in the order it will be used before starting with the readings. Allow at least an hour for the whole process.
“Reading a recipe is one thing but baking while reading Bible verses is different,” Veach concluded.
Once you’ve made the resurrection cookies — reading the Scripture and symbolically experiencing Jesus’ resurrection with your family or other youngsters — chocolate bunnies and jelly beans may never taste quite as sweet. CJK
Look for the Resurrection Cookies recipe tomorrow on Food, Faith and Fellowship.
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