I am looking forward to making this year’s Easter lamb cake later this week and sharing it with my family and friends on Easter Sunday. For me, baking and sharing an Easter lamb cake has become a special and much-loved Easter tradition, although it’s a relatively new tradition for me and my family.

The Easter lamb cake tradition

The Easter lamb cake (Osterlammkuchen) is one of southern Germany’s special Easter symbols. Baking or purchasing a lamb cake and serving it on Easter Sunday morning is a tradition many southern German families have passed down from generation to generation. The Easter lamb cake is a small but rich madeira cake in the shape of a lamb.

I made my first Easter lamb cake in 2013, after purchasing a lamb cake mold during a visit to southern Germany in March-April 2012. Our visit to Germany that year included several weeks leading up to Easter and the Easter weekend. I’ve written previously about that experience in Easter in Germany: Bavaria (March 18, 2016).

Before this visit, I had never heard of an Easter lamb cake. It was not something my Australian family (or any other Australian family I knew) baked or purchased for sharing at Eastertime.

Although most southern German families who celebrate Easter with a lamb cake wait until Easter Sunday to serve the cake, our host broke with tradition and served our Easter lamb cake during Holy Week (the week leading up to Easter, according to the Christian Church calendar).

It was not a home-baked lamb cake, but a purchased one. But what a beautiful, quirky little lamb it was! We all laughed as the cake was cut, because our family’s lamb had a little accident in transit, a bump on its nose!

The lamb symbolism

I loved the lamb cake. It was delicious. But more importantly, I was rapt that the German people used the lamb as a symbol of Easter. It’s so appropriate. After all, Easter is a Christian festival that commemorates the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the “Lamb of God” (John 1:29, Isaiah 53:7, Revelation 7:17).

I was so impressed by the Easter lamb cake that I wanted to make it myself at Eastertime. Of course, I needed a lamb cake mold (Lammform). Fortunately, when we visited Regensburg on Holy Saturday, I spied one in a shop window. It didn’t matter how much it cost, I was going to buy it. And I’m so glad I did.

You too can make your own Easter lamb cake. You can purchase a lamb cake mold online, on Amazon (for example). Click on this link to check.

Perhaps you are wondering why I added the banner to my Easter lamb cake. The miniature embroidered banner came with the German lamb cake mold I purchased. It displays the Chi-Rho, a symbol comprising two overlapping capital Greek letters, Chi (X) and Rho (P), the first two letters of the word “Christ” in Greek (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, Christos). The banner reinforces the lamb cake’s Christian significance and symbolism.

EASTER LAMB CAKE

Ingredients

100 g soft butter

100 g (½ cup) sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla sugar (or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract + sugar)

pinch salt

2 eggs

1 tablespoon rum
60 g (½ cup) ground almonds

60 g (½ cup) plain flour

60 g (½ cup) corn flour (or arrowroot)

1 teaspoon baking powder

For dusting: sifted icing sugar

Method

1. Prepare the lamb mold by greasing the two parts liberally with butter and dusting with flour.
2. Clip the two parts of the mold together. Add a border of thick paper at the opening (to prevent the cake mixture overflowing). Set mold aside.
3. Beat the butter until light and creamy.
4. Add sugar, vanilla sugar and salt. Beat until the mixture comes together.
5. Add egg and rum and beat until evenly mixed.
6. Finally, add the dry ingredients. Combine by hand mixing or by electric mixer on low speed.
7. Fill the upside-down mold with the prepared cake mixture.
8. Place the upside-down mold on a tray at the lowest level of the oven.
9. Bake at 180 degrees Celcius (or 160 degrees Celcius if fan-forced) for about 40 minutes.
10. When cooked, allow the cake to stand for at least 15 minutes before carefully removing the mold.
11. When cool, dust the cake with sifted icing sugar and decorate as desired.

FOR REFLECTION

If you are a music-lover, you may like to listen to “Behold the Lamb of God”, one of the best-known arias and choruses from George Frederick Handel’s Messiah (1741). Click on the following YouTube link to listen to a recording of this magnificent work.