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. :)

A take on egg salad

Remember how I mentioned I'll try a more challenging crochet design than the one I did on Sunday? Well, I browsed some video tutorials on flower-making with chaining, double and triple crochet. THANK YOU to all the lovely women sharing their knowledge on youtube! It's so easy to follow - stopping, resuming and repeating to suit one's learning best. My needle (0.66 mm) and thread are a lot tinier and thiner than the ones used on the tutorials, though. So, I wasn't particularly excited about the size of the flowers I ended up with... one will have to look at them through glasses just to spot them (I'll make some adjustments and give these designs another try). Instead, I did my own thing again. It's mostly chaining and then applying three layers for achieving volume. I should remember to keep it a little loose. At least, that's what my mom said back when she tried to teach me. But I don't like loose at all. Until my fingers hurt, it's like I haven't worked with it. Crazy, I know. Anyway, this is what I did last night. I know it's a tiny amount of finished work, but I watched a scary movie in the meantime. :O

I'm not sure whether I'm gonna make a dozen of these (or more, depending on what I end up using them for) or mix them with other designs. I'm also having some serious dilemma what I wanna use them for. I thought about embellishing a headband, a bolero, a cushion case, cards, etc. If it's a bolero/cushion I'd wanna do it from scratch though, which means hand-sewing (I'm gonna buy a sewing machine one day!)... scary but possible! :)

Moving on! :) My version of egg salad. I haven't had egg salad before, so I have no idea what the classic version tastes like. I was a bit pressed for time, so I didn't check out a recipe either. I did have eggs in the fridge though and the only food I could think of was boiled eggs, yoghurt and salad, so I guess it worked out the way it should have. I used home made whole grain bread (the same recipe I use for other bread, but with whole grain flour) to make sandwiches with the egg salad. It was yummy!

Ingredients

2 boiled eggs

1/2 leek

1/3 cup maize

80 g. natural yoghurt/ cream fresh

ground black pepper

ground red pepper

salt

Method

Well.... mix it all well and bon appetite! :)

Crochet coaster

Two years ago, while on a holiday in Bulgaria, I asked my mom to show me how to crochet. She's not a woman of much patience though, so every time I stopped trying to get myself out of a situation, she'd just start pointing out the right way or get the needle and thread out of my hands, so she could show me again... and again. At that point, I'd start laughing uncontrollably, which made the whole endeavor so much more time-consuming and ineffective. Eventually, she gave me a book and told me I could learn now on my own. Hmmm... I don't do well with such instructions, so I left the whole project aside. This weekend, I accidentally stumbled on it and I thought I'd give it another chance.

I wasn't particularly excited about the shape though, so I unthreaded the whole thing and started wondering about a small project. I and my sister were watching our favorite BG series, 

so I in no way wanted to also look into patterns. I wanted something simple (just to get used to working faster) but also practical. Since my sister doesn't have a coaster for her coffee glass, I thought I'd make one for her. 

Admittedly, it's as simple as it gets. But I kind of like it, especially the round shape. Most importantly, my sister thought it was cute too. :)

I'm thrilled about trying a more challenging, but still small design now. Some creative project to go with tv-time.