Start off by making some dough. My mom made this dough in her bread maker (gotta get myself one of those!). If you don’t have the patience or time, you could always try using pizza dough from the store. It will still work, but the buns will be a little harder and won’t rise as much as a regular dinner roll recipe. I recommend using this recipe for the best homemade dinner rolls.
Form the dough into little balls, about 2″ in diameter and put them on a baking sheet. I really love using my Silpat for recipes like this. It really helps keep things from sticking:
Here are my little helpers getting their hands dirty with the dough. It looks like Leah is in the background eating the dough, but I’m pretty sure that she is using a cloth to try to wipe the dough taste out of her mouth. Kids!
Do your best to form the dough into even balls. We struggled with the dough we were using because we couldn’t get it perfectly round. The more round and smooth the dough is, the better results you’ll get.
Here’s the fun part! Take a pair of clean kitchen scissors and snip out the first ear, starting about 2/3 to the back of the ball. Snip all the way through and the ear should pop up a little bit.
Do the same thing for the other ear. You can use the scissors to lift up the ears or use your fingers to shape them if you want, but I didn’t do either of those things. I figured it was all going to rise when I baked it anyway.
Once all the ears are cut, use the flat end of a wooden skewer (or anything else similar in shape) to poke in two eyes on each bunny:
You can see in this next photo that the dough around the little ears really started to expand and rise:
Bake them in the oven according to the directions of your dough or until they are golden brown.
How cute are these guys? After they came out of the oven, I poked the eyes in with the skewer again. They were getting a little subtle after they baked, so I wanted to make sure they were obvious.
I’ve always been a little scared to make my own dough, but if you have a bread maker it’s so easy! And there are all sorts of frozen doughs at the grocery store that you can try too if you don’t want to make the dough yourself.
These really are adorable! Don’t you love projects that don’t take a lot of skill? Two snips and two pokes, and they are ready to go!
Some of our buns turned out better than others, but I would say overall it was a great success. Plus, how can you go wrong with freshly baked bread!? Delicious!
Once you have made your dough, these only take 15 minutes to form and about 20 minutes to bake. They are super simple and don’t require any special tools. Put them on the table for Easter, or make them as a fun side dish to go with a spring time lunch. Wouldn’t they be great with a warm bowl of soup?
