Mary Diefendorf’s Easter Dessert-Art

Each holiday season, Mary Diefendorf wakes up thinking: What dessert can I surprise Margo’s group with this holiday? (“Margo’s group” is a collection of single, senior women who meet each week in a potluck gabfest.) This Easter season at Margo’s gathering, I quickly snapped pictures of Mary and her Easter dessert-art before they could be gobbled up: cookies with grass-like coconut icing, adorned with tiny sugar bunnies and valentine hearts. “Have you always been a dessert-artist?” I asked. It all started when I was little,” she said, with that faraway, “remembering” expression so familiar to women at our age. I spent a lot of time alone, in my sandbox, making mudpies and wishing I had playmates to serve them to. I sampled one of her cookies. Yum! As always, Mary’s dessert-art was creative, thoughtful, sweet—and made with love for us, the grateful playmates Mary wished for in her sandbox.