Take our Ham Trivia Quizzes. We’ve got two of them.

After you’ve mastered the answers, bring them to the Easter Dinner and test ask your fellow celebrants.

They’ll have fun learning the difference between city ham and country ham, why you’d want a bone-in ham over a boneless ham and the most expensive ham in the world.

The person who gets the most correct answer deserves an extra chocolate bunny! (Or perhaps a chocolate pig, available at VosgesChocolate.com.)

• Ham Trivia Quiz # 1
• Ham Trivia Quiz # 2

What kind of ham am I? Photo courtesy
Cherry Marketing Institute. Answer:
a spiral-cut ham.

We’ll have to get married in Seattle, just so
we can have one of Mike’s Amazing Cakes.
Did Rick & Ilse live happily ever after, after
all? Here’s looking at you, kid. Photo
courtesy Mike’s Amazing Cakes.

As you may have gathered from the parade of wedding cake programs and segments like “The TODAY Show Plans A Wedding,” the cake design is secondary only to the wedding dress.

No longer content to have an elegant white cake with frosting flowers, brides are looking for fashionable cakes. Here are wedding cake trends for 2010 as reported by Stratford University, a Virginia-based school that offers culinary arts degrees (along with a traditional university curriculum).

Slightly Different Cakes

• Initials. Couples are opting to have their entwined initials monogrammed on the side of the cake.
• Height. Many people are opting for taller cakes—up to seven tiers high.
• Nature. Nature themes are popular as cake toppings. These can range from fresh flowers and leaves or fresh fruits to pine cones, seashells and other decor.
• Being Green. Many guests don’t like classic wedding cake, covered in fondant (to be fair, homemade fondant can be delicious, but some cakemakers purchase premade fondant, which is less so). So why waste the cake: Order something people will eat (see next bullet).

• More Than Cake. Lose the cake and opt for favorite treats: a tiered “cake” of cupcakes or a tree of mini desserts, such as cheesecake, tarts and brownies. If you must have a cake to display, see Rent A Cake, below.
• Matching Dresses. A big trend matches the cake decoration to the bridesmaids’ dresses. Another option is to decorate the cake with real lace and ruffles.
• Bold Colors. Who says the cake has to be white…or even chocolate? If your favorite color is red, go for it!

Really Different Cakes

• Artistic. Choose your favorite famous painting and have the wedding cake decorated with it, using edible paints. (It’s probably best to avoid Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and Picasso’s “Guernica.”)
• 3-D. Another hot trend in wedding cakes is for 3-D accents as part of the cake’s decoration and design. For the ultimate in 3D masterpieces (and an absolutely gorgeous gallery of wedding cakes), check out Mike’s Amazing Cakes in Seattle (designer/baker of the cake in the photo).

Saving Money

• Rent A Cake. In this economy, many people are looking for ways to save on their wedding. A new trend for budget-cutting is to rent a mock wedding cake for display (it’s been decorated with real fondant, rosetts, etc., and looks real, but you can’t eat it—instead of cake underneath the frosting, there’s styrofoam). Then, serve a budget-friendly sheet cake that is cut and plated in the kitchen.
• Go Faux. Another trend for saving money on the wedding cake, which can typically cost from $600 to thousands of dollars, is to have a faux bottom one or two tiers (frosted and decorated styrofoam, as above). This will allow the cake to look impressive to guests and for pictures, but can help bring the cost of the cake down quite a bit.
• Cupcakes. Tiers of cupcake-style wedding cakes continue to grow in popularity. They also allow for vegan and gluten-free versions so those on special diets can join in.

And now, we’ve got to go find a piece of cake to eat!

1. Soften a pint of vanilla or chocolate ice cream (or frozen yogurt) and put the ice cream in a mixing bowl.

2. Add 4 tablespoons PB (creamy or crunchy) and mix well.

3. Add an optional swirl of strawberry or raspberry jam or preserves.

4. Return to the pint and return to freezer to let harden for an hour; or enjoy it immediately as “soft serve.”

TIPS:

• To serve as a dessert, top with chopped honey-roasted peanuts or a dab of preserves; or use strawberry sauce or preserves to create a parfait.
• If you don’t want to make an entire pint, mix 1 tablespoon of PB and 1/2 teaspoon jam into a 1/2 cup of ice cream.

Make PB ice cream in minutes! Photo
courtesy Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.

• You can make this treat lower calorie/healthier by choosing No Sugar Added or Fat-Free ice cream or frozen yogurt.

Find our favorite peanut butter and jelly products and more recipes in our Jam, Jelly & Nut Butters section.

Turn this bottle-decanter combo on its
side and it turns into a long-neck decanter
that oxygenates the wine. Photo courtesy
Cantine Ceci.

This “evolution of the species” is the first combination wine bottle-decanter: useful to decant wine with sophistication in design. Decanta 68.2 can serve as a gift, a table decanter and a tabletop objet d’arte.

When set on its side, the degree of tilt enables perfect oxygenation. The label side is placed down on the table, so the line of the design is not interrupted. The cork is made from silicone so you it can be easily recorked (and reused with other wine!).

In addition to Decanta 68.2, Cantine Ceci is introducing Rock Otello Dry², the first sparkling wine in a square bottle. Now the practical question: Can smaller retailers easily fit these larger-footprint bottles on the shelves?

The gauntlet has been thrown.* It’s no longer good enough to create a wine with a nifty name and label design. The challenge now is to out-bottle-design your competitors. Winemakers of the world, take heed!

*If you don’t know what a gauntlet is: It’s a knight’s glove, made of mail or plate, worn to protect the hand in combat (hopefully, it matched one’s armor!). When one knight wanted to challenge another, he threw down his gauntlet, which landed at the feet of the prospective combatant. If the second knight accepted the challenge (and he was generally honor-bound to do so), he picked up the gauntlet. Now for the big question for Medieval historians: Did the challenger get his gauntlet back when his challenge was accepted, or did the challenged knight get to keep it?

At first glance it seems to be a spaghetti package from a supermarket shelf. If you hand it to someone, they’ll think you’re giving them a box of spaghetti.

But look again: It’s a spaghetti cookbook with more than 130 ways to prepare a plain box of spaghetti. The recipes are divided into five separate sections, each one named for the main ingredients:

• Fresh Herbs, Flowers and Fruit
• Vegetables
• Eggs, Cheese and Cream
• Seafood
• Meat

The recipes are creative and generally easy; the photos are tempting. The pasta is varied—not just spaghetti but bucatini, linguine and ziti. The gimmick is cuter-than-cute.

*If you didn’t see the episode, Kramer authors a book on coffee tables that looks like a coffee table. The “table legs” pull out of the four corners of the book, and the book can stand on its legs. He showed this as a guest on “Regis and Kelly” (who were fascinated).

April Fool’s: It’s a book about spaghetti.

But, the incentive might be recipes such as spaghetti with fried meatballs in a sauce of onions and chopped tomatoes, or an exotic spaghetti with red rose and sunflower petals in a basil-wine sauce. A red ribbon place marker is bound into the spine, but perhaps the publishers should have taken a tip from Kramer and made the covers bend back into a cookbook stand.

Still, the book sold out on Amazon. You can place an order for the new shipment, arriving soon, or head to your nearest bookstore.

• Find our favorite pasta recipes, reviews and our Pasta Glossary (it explains a lot!).