Thankfully Easter was here faster than I knew it so I gathered all of the recipes I wanted to do and got to work. There were two big ones that I wanted to try. The pictures are my first and second baking of easter bread. I got this recipe from keikos-cake.com
I'm on here monthly newsletter, and even though you have to subscribe to her site for most of the recipes, she does send out free ones every now and then.
This bread recipe is fantastic! It turns out nice and fluffy, and is best eaten slightly warm. If you can't eat it right off the cooling rack, you should heat it up for 20-25 seconds.
The next was a hollow chocolate easter egg with candy filling which I will be writing about soon.
On to the bread:
Keiko's-Easter-Bread.pdf
Above is the pdf of the recipe. It has all of the pictures following along with the recipe, which I found very useful when I was kneading the dough. This is the second recipe that I've added the butter post batter creation. The first was puff pastry dough, which is why I think this batter is so fluffy, or at least a contributing factor. It also rises about 3 times which was not as bad as I thought it would be.
It's a pretty simple batter, thought the ingredients are all in ounces and grams I believe, but she's local to Germany so that's why. You will need a food scale for this, but they are pretty cheap at walmart and places like that.
*helpful tip* I found out recently that it's actually better to weigh ingredients out on a scale like that because some things like flour weighs differently depending on how you add it. For instance if you pack it in to a measuring cup, or are you supposed to have it loose in the measuring cup? ect.
Ingredients
Flour 100 g (3.5 oz.)
Bread flour 400 g (14.1 oz.)
Sugar 50 g (1.8 oz.)
Salt 10 g (0.35 oz.)
Dry yeast 8 g (0.28 oz.)
Milk 280 g (9.9 oz.)
Egg 30 g (1.1 oz.)
Butter 80 g (2.8 oz.) - let your butter sit out for some of the day so it can get soft and easy to work with when you start kneading it.
In the beginning to dissolve the yeast you'll want to heat the milk up, but just to body temperature so that you don't kill the yeast. Heat will kill yeast if it's too hot!! Then you use half to dissolve the yeast, and stir it just enough to break up the yeast clumps so that you wont have to dig them out of the bowl with your fingers and maybe lose some of the yeast.
You will be getting your hands 'dirty' on this one so just prepare for a fun food sculpting day. As you can see from the photos there are several different ways to braid or design easter bread, and I've only used two here. The bunny is really cute, but I still haven't mastere the bunny's head. The first batch came out ok, but then the second .. well let's just say they didn't really look like bunnies so much any more.
I also wanted to experiment with the second batch and try to simulate fur on the bunny with almond slices and this is how it came out:
My family let slip something about porcupines but I didn't really listen, it was good with the almonds and it looked pretty cool compared to the other bunnies.*Tip* Some things to serve with the easter bread: I've found that you can eat it plain if you want, especially if there are almond slices or crushed up almonds, also jam and butter are favorites for this type of yeast bread.
BUT the best I've found is a light Icing. The reason I suggest this is it will soak into the bread and keep it moist so you don't have to heat it up for it to be soft. It doesn't even make it too sweet either. It's just a small hint of sugar for the yeast dough.
I just mixed up about 1/4 cup of powdered sugar and a table spoon of milk I believe. It's sort of a 'make it until it looks like you want it too' kind of icing. Be careful! when adding the milk though because a little goes a long way. It takes ALOT of powdered sugar to get it close to icing if you've aded too much milk.
I hope you all enjoy!!
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