Easter | The BraggingCoffee

Happy Easter to everyone!

Late post, but it is better late than never:)

As I am Romanian, well, you guessed right, we have just celebrated the Easter.

I have colored the eggs for the first time using the russet color.You just boil them together, it is simple.

Oh well, I have found out from my dad that the red onions have a pretty toxic pigment(he even knows the name!), so it would be more recommendable for health to use beetroot.

If you want to have money for the rest of the year, put a red egg in the water and a coin and then wash your face.;)

I usually get ambitious during Easter, so I decided to make the traditional Sweet Easter Bread called Cozonac, a pretty difficult kind of sweet, if you ask my true opinion;)

Ingredients:

1 kilo of flour

500ml of milk

50g of yeast

100g of butter

3 drops of vanilla

a bit of rum

3/4 cup superfine sugar

100g of sunflower oil

5 egg yolks

3 egg whites

2 pinches of salt

the peel of an orange and of a lemon

200g of walnuts

3 spoons of cacao

Above you have the image of the prepared yeast. You need to heat a half cup of milk(it must be warm, but do not boil it) and mix it with the yeast. Afterwards you put it over the flour and leave it covered in a warm place(like the heater)for around 20 minutes until you will see some cracks. Meanwhile, heat the remaning milk(again, do not boil it). In a bowl mix the egg yolks, the peel of the orange and of the lemon and the vanilla and rum.

Pour all this mixture over the flour and yeast. Add the milk.

Looking proud before seeing the result…always a bad calculation;) Do you have enough muscles? Not really?(mine are pretty weak, must admit it).

Now it is time to make good use of them: you need to knead all this mixture for about 30 minutes!

You will sweat, I can gurantee you! Your hands need to be buttered in oil and heated butter. And you keep on adding oil on your hands and you keep on kneading(Gosh, it drove me crazy!) and that for 30 minutes…or even more if you have those so needed muscles for this complicated Sweet Easter Bread.

Faux pas: do not add oil and butter in the mixture like in the picture, just butter your hands(pfff, I told you I was too sure of my own forces and forgot to look up the recipe).

It should become a sort of non sticky, pliable ball of dough….it was not the case of mine:(

Now that the 30 minutes of kneading are over, you may put the dough to “rest” in avery warm place for another 90 minutes. It actually has to double the initial volume.

For the filling I have mixed the egg whites, the sugar, the peel of a lemon, walnuts, cacao, dry red cherries and dry papaya and mango.