March 30th, 2012
Tag Archives: Eastern
April 26th, 2011
Little Easter nests
I did not only bake something for Breakfast at Good Friday, I also wanted to have something nice for our Easter Breakfast, of course. And so I decided to bake little nest of sweet yeasted dough this year. In the past I filled them with a hard boilde egg before baking, but the natural dyes seem to loose their colour when baking in the oven. ‘That’s why I make the nest a little bit bigger, and place the egg in the middle of the nest after baking.
The dough is made with sour cream, which adds a nice taste to the bread and makes the crumb fluffy. To make the baking day more relaxed I decided to let the dough rise in the fridge, the cold and long fermentation together with the Pâte fermentée adds a complex taste to the bread.
I liked the taste of this little easter nests very much and I am sure that soon I will try this dough for sweet buns, too. Continue reading
April 23rd, 2011
Easter eggs coloured with natural dyes
I love to test different natural dyes for Easter eggs. And so I try each year different dyes which I extract from plants and spices.
This year I decided to use tumeric, red cabbage and red beets. I started to collect peels from red beets when cooking already some weeks ago and keep them in the freezer until now. With the red cabbage I use the fact that the anthocyanin which gave the colour to the leaves is pH sensitive and change colour depending on the pH. A high pH gave a green-blue colour, while a low pH change the colour to red.
I used the red cabbage dye at a neutral pH for staining dark blue-green eggs, while increasing the pH with soda leads to light green eggs. The most suprising fact is that the red solution which had a low pH because of the vinegar resulted in bright blue egg. I never expected such a bright colour because I used brown eggs. Continue reading
April 22nd, 2011
Pani di cena
This week Petra baked a delicious looking Sicilian Easter buns: Pani di cena. It is a bread that is traditionally baked on Good Friday and which is often glazed with icing and topped with sugar sprinkels. I fell in love with this buns directly and decided to serve them for breakfast on Good Friday.
I changed the recipe a little bit depending on my personal habits – I used the pulp of a vanilla bean instead of vanilla extract and because of the high amount of sugar and butter I decided to add them at the end of kneading, so they couldn’t interfere with the gluten development. After forming the buns I placed them in the fridge, but they didn’t rise so much here because the butter in the dough get stiff in the cold.
The next morning I preheat the oven to 30°C and let the buns rise there for 1 hour, in this time they doubled their volume!
During baking the smell of the buns was seductively: a scent of butter and vanilla filled the kitchen. And tasting them after they cooled down proofed that their scent did not promise to much. A very rich sweet bread, that reminds me of brioche, incredible soft, buttery and luxurious. Continue reading
April 20th, 2011
Ideas for Eastern
At the moment I’m still busy in the lab but eastern already knock on the door and so I take a look in the archive to see what I bake in the last years. Until I tell you what I will bake for this year I share the sweet easter bunnies and the delicious Colombinas from the last two years with you.
April 3rd, 2010
Osterhäschen
In March I had to work a lot. There were many things I had to do in Lab and there was a Talk I had to prepare for a meeting. Coming back from this meeting last week I feel a little bit dizzy. This dizziness was the first sign of a bad viral infection I catch. So I stay in bed most of the week, sleeping or watching TV. I did not cook or bake and I was even to tiered to bring the blog up to date.
But now I am feeling better again. I sound still like Darth Vader (Anyone want to guess what I was watching the last days?) but when I do things slowly I feel fit enough to bake little Easter bunnies for Sunday. Some are for our breakfast but most of them are small Easter presents for family and friends.
To bake buns shaped as Easter bunnies is a family tradition and for me as essential for Easter as Easter eggs! Continue reading