Easterbread

Happy easter!
As you can see, the easter bunny dropped in for a visit!
..and, no, this is not my cat but some poor kitty that could not fend of his/her can-opener's silliness and ended up engraved as feline easter bunny in the net.


Eastern in Germany is still a big holiday, actually the most important one after christmas. People visit family, children receive gifts, there is a lot of cooking and eating, and most of this is still somewhat traditional, at least there is a common framework to it all.

And it starts with breakfast (let me skip Karfreitag etc. which is not commonly observed, unless church is involved, and go straight for the good food..)
Besides the religious aspects of it, Eastern is a holiday that revolves around symbols for renewal, fertility and spring. Easter sunday starts in that spirit with a special breakfast, sporting more eggs and presenting them much nicer than usual.

Traditional easterbread dough is braided around hardboiled eggs and then baked - so your first food will be fresh, warm bread, from white flour, sometimes with raisins, very light and fluffy, typically with a crunchy crust - but also an egg, perfectly held in place by the bread like in a little basket, sometimes painted before baking.

German breakfast typically consists of bread, butter, sweet spreads such as marmelades and honey, boiled eggs, and sometimes sliced sausages/salami/ham and cheeses. Thus, while the general notion of bread, egg and things for a sunday breakfast is not out of the normal, the specialty about this breakfast is the presentation as well as the recipe for easter bread itself.

From the above bread version one makes typically one for each person at the table; but the larger part of the breakfast bread will be coming from this:


In my case, this is the same dough recipe as the egg-basket, only that this bread is braided and bigger. It is a yeast & white flour dough, with milk as the main liquid, some molten butter & eggs (about 3 eggs for 700 g flour). Typically it has a little bit sugar in it as well, and sometimes raisins; I added flax and sunflower seeds. The proportions of liquid to flour depend on how your flour behaves and on the size of the eggs - start with 1 cup or ~ 250 ml liquid, but be prepared to double that as you need it to be able to shape the dough but not have it stick to your hands like wet clay.. I typically warm up the milk with some sugar (~ 100g) and butter (about a stick, i.e. about 125 g) and then stir in my dried yeast and let it go for a little while. Dry yeast does not need that treatment, but it smells awesome..
Treat it like a normal yeast dough - let it rise, knead it, and give it some warmth and time before shaping it into the braids.
Brush it with egg yolk mixed with a little bit water, and bake it at 350 deg F for 50 minutes.

And then: have a wonderful breakfast!