Dairy Free Easter

So what do you do with your dairy free child at the time of year when chocolate is EVERYWHERE.

Fortunately there are several options with more being added each year.

Celtic Chocolates do a ‘milk chocolate’ dairy free easter egg which is still the most child friendly I’ve found to date. The taste is very close to milk chocolate.

This is my young lad enjoying his last Easter.

In the south east of Ireland I got an egg in Tesco Gorey Easter 2011 and The Health Store in Bridgewater Shopping Centre, Arklow for Easter 2012. Dunnes Gorey also had some dairy free eggs but they sold out a few weeks before Easter.

This year (2013) Tesco and Dunnes in Gorey have none so far but will try to get some in. Mrs. Bee’s health food shop in Clonattin has the Moo free eggs and they are €5.95. Thanks to Bríd and bumblesofrice for helping to source. The Health Store in Blanchardstown were expecting to get in the Celtic eggs but hadn’t them yet last Saturday when I checked.

Last year I found the Caramel Choices egg in The Health Store in Arklow Bridgewater Shopping Centre.

There are many dark chocolate options which are dairy free also, but I find the children much prefer the ‘milk’ chocolate ones.

If you wanted to avoid the chocolate altogether, we found lots of non-eating activities to do last Easter Sunday.

This one is simple, I drew what sort of resembled an oval shape on a few sheets of paper, then drew zigzags across one, circles on another, wavy lines on a third, you get the idea. Then I let him paint away to his heart’s content.

I left some hard boiled eggs soaking in a mixture of water, a few drops of food dye and some vinegar overnight. They did dye but the dye wasn’t very strong. It ended up being more exciting for Oscar to paint the eggs himself anyway. So we had more messing around with paint for a while with that.

My Mum gave us some Easter decorations last year. Just what I needed, more plastic doodads in the house! I searched for ‘Easter tree’ on Pinterest and found something similar to the picture above. So we donned our wellies and the then 3 year old and I went outside to find a suitable branch. Living in the country it wasn’t long before we found one. I then set Oscar up with green paint and a brush and let him at the branch. He did a fairly good job, and I finished some bare bits, and there wasn’t too much green paint all over my kitchen. We let it dry out and then I stuck it into a small vase filled with marbles so the branch would stay upright. Then Oscar hung all the decorations.