Sunday, April 15, 2012

Sweet bread and painted eggs for Easter

Eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter today. I officially celebrate with them, even though I also took advantage of last week's celebrations. It's both exciting to have two holidays and a bit confusing, as it also steals from the uniqueness of the celebration. I myself am much happier when the holiday coincides and I can celebrate it together with my family and my Bulgarian and international friends. But it's a rare occurrence.

When I think of Easter, the picture that comes to mind is sweet bread (kozunak) and painted eggs. We don't have them at any other time of the year, so I'm always looking forward to eating a slice of warm sweet bread with yoghurt drink for breakfast on Easter Sunday and to paint eggs and later have egg fights with my family and friends.

This year, for the second time in my life I made my own sweet bread. Unconventional as it is, I opted for an Italian recipe that I had just discovered and here is the video, where you can learn to make this beautiful bread with cacao and raisin.


Mine turned out pretty nicely, although I was too overzealous with the cacao. Lesson learned! :)


I also managed to paint a couple of eggs in different styles and now I'm heading off to a bbq where possibly none of them will survive. At least I'll have a picture to remember them by. :)


2 comments:

  1. Those eggs are beautiful... how did you make the one between the red and blue print ones (second from bottom)? That one is particularly cool. That sweet bread too... holy cow, that looks amazing... I love the "random" rustic nature of it... just delicious. I want to rip it up and eat it all :D

    Charles @ FiveEuroFood.com

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  2. Thank you, Charles! :) That one is actually one of the easiest to make and you always get different results. You just need cotton and egg dye (food dye should work as well). First, you need to boil the eggs and paint them while they're relatively warm.

    You take some cotton and spread it on your hand. Then you put drops of different paint on it with a tea spoon or a syringe (the second is more precise). Once you cover the cotton with paint, you cover with it the whole egg. You let it rest like that for about 5-10 min. To get a glazed look, gently dry the egg with a tissue or let it dry on its own and then rub it over with a cotton with vegetable oil.

    When I mix the colors on the cotton, I think about how yellow and blue overlap to make green, red and blue make purple, etc. It makes a lot of difference where the colors go and how they mix - some of the eggs may turn too light or weird dark colored. But it's a lot of fun.

    If you want to make a galaxy egg, you can first make dots on the egg with a candle. Wherever the candle touches (because of the wax), the egg doesn't get painted. This way you get the stars. Then you use darker colors or make some with mixing red an blue, for example and you should get a galaxy egg. ;)

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