Easter poses some pesky but easily overcome challenges for vegans.
Traditional Easter celebrations involve animals and animal products everywhere you look. You’ve got Easter bunnies, Easter chicks, Easter eggs and Easter ham. All these things entail a lot of needless suffering, so let’s look at how to veganize your family’s Easter celebration.
Vegan Easter Brunches and Dinners
Since a massive brunch is the quintessential way to ring in Easter, check my brunch page for the most delicious dishes. There’s also an excellent cookbook devoted entirely to the topic: Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch.
Alternatively, if you want to cook a special vegan Easter dinner, grab a copy of Isa’s The Superfun Times Vegan Holiday Cookbook.
Easter Egg Hunts
If you’re going to hold an Easter egg hunt, you have a couple of options to bypass chicken eggs. Here are some wooden eggs that children can paint prior to their hunt. Or you can buy or make some of the vegan chocolate eggs featured below.
Vegan Chocolate Easter Eggs & Bunnies
These are specialty seasonal items available for only a few weeks a year. Since the offerings change every year, you’ll doubtless encounter some brand-new products if you search online for vegan Easter eggs and vegan Easter bunnies.
Most chocolate Easter bunnies contain dairy products. But with a little looking you can find a vegan alternative. As Easter approaches, Lake Champlain Chocolates features dark chocolate Easter bunnies on its website.
Cadbury still doesn’t make vegan chocolate eggs, but an online search will turn up all sorts of vegan copycat recipes. Melanie McDonald’s vegan creme eggs are a good place to start. Note that as kitchen projects go, this one is definitely on the tricky side.
Easter Bunnies and Chicks
Easter celebrations unfortunately create a great deal of needless animal suffering. Many parents purchase bunnies or chicks for their children without thinking ahead about how they will care for these animals. Predictably, a few weeks after Easter, animal rescue centers get flooded with abandoned rabbits.
With that in mind, adopting an unwanted adult rabbit may be the best Easter celebration of all.
