Here come the creepy, wonky, weird Easter lamb cakes. Why do so many of ewe fail?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- European immigrants brought lamb cakes to U.S.; became a Midwestern tradition.
- Families used two-piece metal molds, frosting, coconut and jelly beans.
- Nordic Ware recently posted a video featuring the lamb-shaped mold online.
Kansas City cookbook author and foodista Judith Fertig grew up in a German-Irish Catholic family in Cincinnati, where every Easter her mother baked a traditional lamb cake.
She poured pound-cake batter into a two-piece, lamb-shaped metal mold, baked it, frosted it with white icing, re-created lamb’s wool with coconut flakes and stuck jelly beans on the face for the eyes and nose.
“She had the lamb cake mold, the whole deal,” said Fertig. “My grandmother didn’t make lamb cakes because they didn’t have the lamb cake mold. But it started with, I’d say in the 50s. Women of that generation kind of got into the whole lamb cake thing.”
European immigrants brought the cake — which symbolizes the Lamb of God — to the United States, where it became a mostly Midwestern tradition.
Nordic Ware, the Minneapolis company that makes lamb-shaped molds and the iconic Bundt cake pans, posted this video in recent days.
Martha Stewart, who introduced her followers to the tradition in 2005, resurrected the dessert a few days ago on Instagram with a photo of a cake expertly decorated with chocolate curls mimicking a lamb’s wooly coat.
Everything’s always perfect in Martha Land. But somewhere along the way, mostly in recent years, the lamb cake took a weird turn as people began posting photos of their scary, creepy, nightmarish lamb cake fails.
But in today’s never-ending thirst for social media content, some of those laughable lambs are quite intentional. Don’t tell Martha.
Case in point: Easter lamb cakes smoking cigarettes.
“There’s only so much you can do to dress up a cake that’s a log with a head,” Jessica Hartshorn wrote in Good Housekeeping this week.
“You can frost it white, you can add coconut ‘fur,’ you can give it a crown (I did one year, a little crown of sage) but it’s still going to... well... barely look like a lamb. Search #lambcake for more proof.”
All those “Silence of the Lambs” photos popping up on Fertig’s social media feed prompted her to ponder the tradition in a recent Substack story.
“Maybe it’s the algorithm on Facebook, I don’t know why I keep seeing them. It seems to have taken on a life of its own this year,” she said. “But I think with everything else going on we need something else to think about.”
‘Creepy instead of festive’
So how does a lamb cake go baaaaaad?
Making a 3D cake that stands up on its own - then expertly piping icing that looks like curly lambs wool - can be tricky for the novice.
This cake poses “lots of opportunities for fails,” said Fertig, who attended cooking school in London and Paris and has been described by Saveur magazine as a “heartland cookbook icon.”
For one thing, the cake sticks to that two-piece mold, full of nooks and crannies, when it’s not prepped correctly. She has seen broken cakes with heads and necks and ears held in place with toothpicks.
“That’s where half the fun comes in,” she laughed. “You could have cosmetic surgery to get your lamb put back together again.”
Some fails stem from people overfilling the molds.
“Then you really have to do some sheep shearing before you put your cake together,” she said. “So it’s better not to fill the lamb cake mold all the way up to the top ... you want to fill it about two-thirds, three-quarters of the way full.”
And clearly, some people frost the cakes while they’re still warm, resulting in what Fertig calls the “creepy instead of festive” ghost cake.
“Some people like to use little jelly beans for eyes. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she laughed. “You could look at the ghost lamb cake and see why you maybe shouldn’t do that.”
Is there anything worse than a lamb without a full coat of frosting?
“You don’t want a thin coat on your lamb because then it looks like the lamb was shorn before it even got to the table,” she said.
Last year Fertig’s second-grade granddaughter, Willow, made her first lamb cake with an assist from her mother.
“They chose strawberry frosting and a minimum of natural coconut, so Little Lambie looks a bit sun-burned, but those are the artistic risks you take. Lambie was, nevertheless, delicious,” Fertig wrote on Substack.
It might not be the easiest Easter dessert to pull off, but Fertig doesn’t want bakers to be discouraged.
“I say go for it,” said Fertig. “I think no matter how your lamb cake turns out it’s going to be a great story that you can tell in your family.
“Remember the year we made the lamb cake and the head fell off?”
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