When I first moved to New York City seven years ago, my mother made me drive to a pasticceria in the East Village—De Robertis on First Avenue—to buy marzipan lambs, the traditional Sicilian Easter treat. On the designated day, my cell phone would ring several times: "The agnelli," she would say, using the Italian word for lambs.

"What's going on with the agnelli?" as if, once I gingerly picked them up in pastry boxes from the 110-year-old store, they would run away, bleating down the street. From New York, I drove the delicate creatures, some as large as a chicken, some as small as an egg, to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where my mom grew up, to be shared around the Pasqua dinner table.