SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Today is Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. And across the country, people will be coloring eggs, attending Easter vigils and baking lamb cakes. Not cakes made of lamb, but, you know, cakes baked in lamb-shaped molds. They have a long history in Europe, and as Deena Prichep reports, they are also growing fans in America.
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DEENA PRICHEP: For nearly 40 Easters, Alona Steinke has baked a lamb-shaped cake at her home in Camas, Washington.
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ALONA STEINKE: Now you get it nice and fluffy.
PRICHEP: The batter itself is basic pound cake - butter beaten with sugar and eggs, a dash of rum, some flour and ground hazelnuts. But then there are two pans, each composing half a lamb. Steinke coats them with nonstick spray.
STEINKE: Otherwise, it will stick, and he will lose body parts when we unmold him.
PRICHEP: She then fastens the two sides together very securely.
I am clocking two big clips, four small clips and a couple paper clips.
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STEINKE: Some people also tie string around them.
PRICHEP: When early Christians connected Jesus' death on Good Friday with the tradition of the sacrificial Passover lamb, lambs became a symbol of Easter. Add in a return to buttery, eggy pastries after Lent, and you've got a tradition. It's not clear exactly when lambs started surfacing in cake form, but in central Europe, there are lamb-shaped pans that date back centuries.
CECILIA ROKUSEK: I remember my grandmother. She had this old, old form. You know, it was heavy. It was iron.
PRICHEP: Cecilia Rokusek heads the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Iowa. Growing up in a small town in South Dakota, her family would actually bring their Easter lamb cake to church.
ROKUSEK: We'd be standing in line, and the priest - he would, you know, bless it. And then we would put it back in the car, have the Mass and go home.
PRICHEP: In the 1940s, the company now known as Nordic Ware began mass-producing aluminum versions of the lamb pan. And thanks to social media, lambs have now spread even further. New Orleans baker Bronwen Wyatt posted a tutorial on Instagram a few years ago showing how you can make a lamb cake even without a specialized pan. It calls for a loaf cake, a couple of artfully trimmed muffins and plenty of frosting.
BRONWEN WYATT: Because the way the head is affixed, they always have this kind of, like, jaunty, attentive bent.
PRICHEP: The cakes people bake using her tutorial have been delightfully unhinged. Some have lopsided licorice eyes. Some are covered with magnolia petals and gold dust.
WYATT: They are just as joyful to look at when somebody makes them with a lot of skill or if somebody makes them who is an amateur baker.
PRICHEP: This year, Wyatt is hosting what she calls a Gay Easter Lamb Cake Bake-Along as a fundraiser for LGBTQ rights organizations. Back in Camas, Washington, Alona Steinke gives her lamb a traditional shower of powdered sugar and a red ribbon and some American additions.
STEINKE: So here's his grass, which is green coconut. And then we can put some jelly bean eggs around him.
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PRICHEP: Steinke did not actually grow up with lamb cakes. She adopted the tradition when her family hosted a German exchange student the year the Berlin Wall came down. She says that as a Christian, she thinks of the lamb as representing Christ's resurrection and the new life of spring.
STEINKE: It also is a reminder that God loves us and we need to love our neighbors, and that's so important right now. Man, people are forgetting about love. Yep. We need a little sweetness.
PRICHEP: Even if that sweetness is a little lopsided or sticks to the side of the pan, the message is the same.
For NPR News, I'm Deena Prichep.
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