Quick and easy cute little edible bird nests perfect for Easter!

Do you hate Easter basket “grass” as much as I do? I mean, it gets everywhere! The candy gets buried in it in the basket, so the kids start digging and next thing you know you have that grass all over the house! And, worse yet, it CLINGS! To everything!

Last year I tried the paper version, but that wasn’t much better than the cellophane kind. Maybe not as clingy, but still very messy and it broke into even tinier pieces.

So this year I had two ideas to solve this. First, I decided to use white pom poms as the Easter basket fill. Looks just like bunny tails! You could substitute cotton balls if you don’t find a bag of all white pom poms.

One advantage of the pom poms is that it isn’t as messy. They are much easier to pick up around the house. Secondly, after Easter has come and gone, you have something useful for making crafts! Kids love pom poms and the white is pretty versatile. They could turn them into bunnies, snowmen, birds… you could probably even color them with markers or watered down paints!

So, one problem solved. But while looking through the Easter section at Hobby Lobby, I found this product:

It is edible Easter grass, by Galerie. I found it at Hobby Lobby, and looking online, I see it available at Walmart, Target, and Amazon. I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael’s or others like that might have it too.

While you could line an Easter basket with this as an eco-friendly alternative, it could still be messy. It is make with potato starch. The texture is sort of like rice noodles. This one is green apple flavored. Taste-wise, it’s kinda bleh. Okay, but not something I’d choose to eat, especially with all the other candy around it. But passable. 

To make the nests, I tore off a chunk of the grass, LIGHTLY dipped a couple of fingers in a bowl of water, and formed the shape of the nests. I did it freehand, but you could use a muffin tin, little bowl, or some other item to form the shape around.

The key is just to have enough moisture to barely wet a bit of it to stick together but if you use too much the stuff gets soggy and disintegrates. You might have to experiment to get it right.

Set it aside to dry (on something not paper, or it might stick). You can use a hair dryer to speed it up, but be careful you don’t blow it across the room (like I did). You’ll want to make sure it is not soggy before you use it.

When dry, you can load it up with jelly beans or chocolate eggs, or if you make them bigger, even hard-boiled decorated eggs.

Isn’t this adorbs?! (I’m learning the lingo from my 8-year-old daughter.)

What else can this be used for? You could use it instead of colored coconut on cakes or cupcakes. Anything you want to make look like grass.

Here’s an example of it on a cake over at The Cake Blog.

Or over here at Meatloaf and Melodrama, on some cupcakes.

If you really felt creative, you could make the nests a bit deeper and then once dry, fill with jelly beans and put two halves together carefully to make an egg!

Even if it doesn’t taste great, I just think it makes for such a nice presentation, don’t you agree?

If you try this, I’d love to hear about it!