Happy (early) Easter!
I love Easter. I have fond memories from growing up–the eggs, the cellophane grass, the candy, the happy bunnies, the flowers, the pastels, the new dresses with little white gloves and hats. It was fun going with my mum and my Gramsy (yes, the Gramsy who is the original owner of the DiS1972 card set) to get the Easter basket blessed by the priest. It is probably the only time I’ve enjoyed going to church. Also, I’m hard pressed to remember a rainy Easter Sunday (unlike Good Friday, when it rains at least once).
I also love these things:
What the hell even are these things?
Anyway, I wanted to do something really Easter-y this year and settled upon Easter Bread. I don’t remember ever eating Easter Bread, but I’ve always loved how it looked. So colorful! So festive! So full of egg!
I picked a recipe from the Better Homes & Gardens Bread Cook Book (1968 edition):
This is Easter Braid:
Yes, I know that the Easter bread recipe I selected didn’t include dyed eggs, so I tucked in some eggs to make it the Easter Bread that I wanted (I also nixed the raisins. Mr. Sauce isn’t a fan).
RECIPE NOTE: the amount of flour in the recipe was nowhere near enough to achieve a dough that would stay in a ball. At least for this inexperienced baker. So I don’t know how much I ended up putting in. But it was a lot.
When I went to dye my eggs I was dismayed that I only had brown eggs. But wow! This is how brown eggs look tinted with food coloring (none of that PAAAAAS shit):
I had no idea that the result would be so vibrant and rich.
Here they are in my finished Easter braid:
It worked! The eggs didn’t explode! It looks like bakery bread. It smells like bakery bread. It is actually yummy. Slightly sweet and lemony. Perfect for a spring morning. (It’s a little denser than I would have liked–probably because all of the extra flour–but it looks so preeetttyyyyy!)
10 years into this blog and It’s still absolute magic to me when I make something with yeast and it rises.
Just like Jesus.
OK, I gotta motor because I’m dropping off Mr. Sauce at the convention center to get his first COVID shot (I got mine last week)!
Happy Easter everyone!
Please, please. What is the bunny recipe?
It is literally the same bread recipe, just coiled into bunny shapes.
Your bread looks much more appetizing than Betty’s! In the cookbook photo are those rabbit snails?
They say they’re bunnies…which I guess they look like…?
They are more snail-like now that you mention it.
Gorgeous bread! I love the sprinkles, especially, and those eggs are incredibly vibrant. : )
Congrats on getting vaccinated too!
That looks beautiful! I too wonder about whether you eat the baked eggs. But that Jake egg – boy, that takes me back. My mom learned to make these (“sugar eggs” we called them) back in the ’60s when she was also learning cake decorating. She was really good at this sort of thing. I thought the sugar eggs were magical….
The sugar eggs are magic!
Congratulations!!! Looks beautiful and tasty….you did good, kid.
Pretty bread! But since I’ve only seen this in photos… Do you eat the eggs after they are baked into the bread? (I kind of feel like my niece when she was handed a bowl of peanuts in the shell – she just started eating them, shell and all, until she noticed us all staring in horror at her)
you can eat them–they’re basically hard boiled eggs. I tried one and it was fine.