A few years ago, I was invited to a YEASTER party, and had such a good time that I knew one day I would steal this idea for a celebration of my own! I was sort of boycotting all Easter gatherings this year due to a stressful time in my work life, so the timing was right to instead have a few friends over for some low-key YEASTER fun.

Now, as you may recall, YEASTER (always in caps) is a pre-Easter celebration of beer, bread, and Mini Eggs (that’s my special addition). To cover off the beer portion of the afternoon, my friend Heather, a newly certified Beer Sommelier (yes, that’s a thing!) did a guided tasting for us with a theme of “What’s My Style”. This was an interactive tasting where we learned about five styles of beer (Pale Lager, Dark Lager, Wheat Beer, Pale Ale and Dark Ale) and she brought samples of each style for us to try. I’m not really a beer drinker per se, but it was really interesting and fun to learn about the different styles. Now, I know more about why I like what I like, and know what to order when I’m out and about!

Now on to the food! I wanted to have a lot of savoury snacks for us to eat during the afternoon, so I made this snack board, after seeing an example on Jan’s blog earlier this year, plus some white cheddar popcorn (my fave):

For the bread component of the day, I made a batch of Honey Yeast Rolls, to use as a palate cleanser during the beer tasting (Heather said I could also just buy a baguette, but I wanted to make these from scratch….it was YEASTER after all!). I also made Chocolate Babka (separate post coming on that later!) and these Funfetti Cinnamon Rolls, which ended up being a take-home treat for my friends:

Finally, the Mini Eggs. They are the BEST Easter candy in my opinion, and must be celebrated as such! I made two Mini Egg treats; the first was Easter Dollies (Hello Dollies with the addition of crushed Mini Eggs):

The second was cute little Mini Egg Chocolate Cheesecakes. I stole both of these ideas from Cake & Loaf’s Instagram, and I don’t regret it!

We had such a fun afternoon drinking, snacking and laughing, and I think this means YEASTER is going to be a new annual tradition over here! My other favourite thing was that when I first told my friend Krishna about Yeaster, she asked if it had something to do with Kanye West (a.k.a Yeezy) so of course I had his playlist on in the background all day.

Coming up later this week, I’ll write a separate post about my favourite treat of the day: Chocolate Babka!