The Promise of Easter Dinner

The Large Running Rabbit from Jacques Torres Chocolate (mrchocolate.com) is going to be tearing down the middle of my dinner table on Easter. He costs $35, is hollow and 18 inches long (plenty to send home with guests), but has to be ordered and picked up at one of the four Jacques Torres locations (in Manhattan and Brooklyn); he’s too delicate to ship (available in milk chocolate on dark and dark on milk). An alternative might be a whole passel of big and little standing and sitting bunnies hanging around the middle of the table waiting for their shot at being dessert. And for “place cards,” I got tiny individual bunnies and am busy learning how to write the names of my guests with Cake Mate gel-icing pens I found in the cake-decorating section of my local supermarket (I thank all my guests for having relatively short names, especially you, Ed!).

By Nancy McKeon

I’M GOING TO have guests for dinner! Easter dinner! Around a real table, with real knives and forks and, um, people and all.

Then I remembered my visit a few weeks ago, to drop something off. Sis-in-law was doing a major basement clean-out, and the living room was filled with taped-up cardboard boxes . The dining-room table was covered with same.

I also love tchotchkes. I’m no Martha Stewart (gorgeous centerpieces) or Charlotte Moss, but that’s what I’m thinking about now. Such as? Such as . . .

These oh-so-fresh-looking glazed-stoneware Dalila bowls and pitchers would look great on an Easter table and then could sail right on into summer. Dalila bowls are 4 inches tall, 5¼ inches wide, in five luscious colors, $11.20 each for a limited time. The Dalila pitcher is available now in green/grass (second from right) and pink/yellow (the colors shown on the small pitcher, far right). The pitchers are 7.5 inches high and currently $22.40 each (otherwise $28). The Dalila bowls and pitchers are at Anthropologie.

Last year, when lockdown had us all frozen in place, I sent these chocolate baskets filled with foil-covered eggs to various familial “pods” as a nod to normalcy. Would it be overkill to have one on the dinner table this year? Hmmm, maybe with all those place-setting bunnies and the giant hare running down the table, it’s a bit too much chocolate. But you could do it: The baskets are 5½ inches long—choose milk chocolate or dark—and $26 at Li-Lac Chocolates‘s six New York locations and online at li-lacchocolates.com.

This Vucchini oil and vinegar dispenser (right) looks more like a crested cockatoo than an Easter chick, but it is cute (though I’d use it for soy sauce, not delicate olive oil, which really wants a dark-glass bottle to protect it from the light). It’s $11.99 at Amazon.
The stuff on the left is apple-flavor edible grass, made from potato starch in Germany (it tastes just the tiniest bit sweet). Maybe I’ll let the Running Rabbit run through a nest of it, instead of the typical cellophane stuff from my childhood. I found my 1-ounce bag for $1.99 at Walgreens, but I think it’s selling out there as well as at Target. I see it online but at much higher prices (but now you know about it for next year).

These Fia Luster Coupe Cocktail Glasses can add a festive touch to the table, in amber or green (or both). They’re $10.95  each at CB2.com—but I would argue they should be filled with ice cream.