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Holy Easter: 20 Secrets of Delicious Easter Cakes
Holiday baking is more than just cooking, it’s an art. To get an airy delicious cake, it is not enough just to knead the butter dough, which is capricious in itself. Here you need experience, good mood and knowledge of a few small but important secrets. And still no rush and fuss.
And here are the promised secrets of good baking.
1. Easter cakes are baked on the Thursday before Easter. Before you start cooking, tidy up both the kitchen and your thoughts. During the preparation of the dough, it is important to be in a good mood: to think about good things, not to rush anywhere, not to shout or quarrel. Detailed step-by-step cake recipes can be found HERE.
2. Yeast dough is weather dependent: it loves heat and does not tolerate cold and drafts. So make sure your kitchen is at a comfortable temperature, and when it comes to baking, preheat the oven.
3. All products must be taken out of the refrigerator in advance: when kneading, they should be at room temperature.
4. The right yeast is half the battle. For the preparation of Easter cakes, choose live yeast – moist, like a piece of plasticine. With them, the dough will turn out to be soft, saturated with tiny air bubbles. Before you put the dough, make sure the yeast is fresh: it should crumble easily and smell like milk.
5. Before kneading the dough, be sure to sift the flour to saturate it with oxygen: this is another rule of light, airy dough.
6. To make the dough rise well, place the container with it in a bowl of warm (but not hot) water and cover with a clean towel. Hot water kills the yeast, so the temperature should be slightly above room temperature.
7. You need to knead the dough for cakes with your hands. And for quite a long time – until it easily lags behind the table. It is important not to overdo it with flour so that the dough does not turn out too tight and dense.
8. To make the cakes a beautiful golden hue, you need farm eggs with an orange yolk. But if there are none, it doesn’t matter: add a little turmeric to the dough. Some people make saffron tincture: to 1 tsp. ground saffron add 50 ml of vodka, close and insist for a couple of hours. But real saffron is not easy to find in the store: this spice is quite expensive and is often counterfeited.
9. For flavor, you can add vanilla or vanilla extract to the dough, nutmeg, pounded cardamom seeds in a mortar, or 2-3 tbsp. l. golden rum.
10. In addition to raisins, you can add finely chopped dried apricots, citrus zest, any candied fruits or chopped nuts to the dough. Walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts work best.
11. Grease the cake molds with butter and line with baking paper. At the bottom, place a paper circle with a diameter slightly smaller than the form itself: this will make it easier to get the cake after baking.
12. Fill the molds with 1/3 the volume of the dough and leave in a warm place until it doubles in volume. There is no need to wait until the dough reaches the edges of the mold: it will rise again during the baking process.
13. Stick a long wooden skewer into the center of each raw Easter cake. This will help him to rise evenly, and you will know if it is time to turn off the oven. If the cake is ready, then the skewer removed from it will be dry and clean.
14. Place a bowl of water in the bottom of the oven, so the cakes will be more tender. Do not open the oven door during baking: the dough may fall and not rise again.
15. If the skewer is still damp, and the cakes begin to burn on top, cover them with oiled foil.
16. To prevent the glaze from cracking, decorate the cooled cakes with it.
17. For a slight sourness, you can add a little lemon juice to the classic white frosting made from egg whites and powdered sugar.
18. Easter cakes with classic white hats can be decorated with melted chocolate patterns. To get colorful cakes, you can pour a couple of tablespoons of beetroot, carrot juice or juice squeezed from parsley into the white glaze.
19. Instead of banal colored sugar and ready-made sprinkles from the store, use multi-colored candied fruits, marzipan figurines or even fresh flowers to decorate cakes.
20… Cool the finished cakes completely at room temperature and carefully wrap them in baking paper – this way they will remain at their best until Easter.
How to make Easter treats
The basic recipe for Easter cake looks like this:
Milk – 500 ml
Yeast (raw) – 50 g
Wheat flour – 1,3 kg. There is a nuance here: different flour behaves differently. Some take more liquid, some less. Therefore, its amount may vary slightly in one direction or the other.
Chicken egg – 6 pcs.
Butter – 200 g
Sugar – 250 g
Raisins – 300 g You can add dried apricots, nuts – the dough will accept them with gratitude
Vanilla sugar – sachet
Find detailed recipes for making cakes HERE.
Basic recipe for cottage cheese Easter
350 g of cottage cheese
3 raw yolks
30 grams of powdered sugar
1 tbsp. l. fat sour cream (42% fat)
100 g butter
30 g raisins (one handful)
30 g candied fruits (one handful)
vanilla
A step-by-step recipe with a photo can be found HERE.