Season’s Greetings

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Sweet carrot

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For Easter we’ll have sweet carrots with marchpane green made from yeast dough. I saw some of them on pinterest but they were filled with some egg salad. Well, I think it will work with a sweet dough as well. So I started to prepare my dough (recipe at the end of the post) and while it rested there to raise I could care for my cones form. Of course you can buy metal cones but I don’t have any at home and had to think about any other way to form cones. That was when I remembered the pinterest pin where the cones were made with aluminium foil.

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Take a 25cm large strip of foil, shuffle it lightly, fold it in half and press the bottom to get a tip. It’s not necessary to form them perfectly. Take your risen dough and press it with your hands to get a 1cm sheet. Cut 1cm wide stripes and roll these lightly getting thinner at the ends. Fix one end to the tip of your foil cone and twis dough stripe around. (I greased half of the cones – it was a bit easier to take these off after cooking). Apply egg wash. I added some drops of food coloring to get the carrot look. 2016_Moehre2Leave the dough carrots on baking tray to rest for about 20 minutes. Then bake them in the preheated oven at 180°C for 15-20 minutes. Remove from the oven and put on a rack to cool. Take off foil cones by twisting them carefully. It’s now ready to be filled. My advanced sample’s filled with lemon cord and whipped cream. Its green is made with colored marchpane. For a carrot you need a 2cm ball to be pressed through the disk of a potato masher to get these thin laces. If you like to make carrots for a salty filling just perpare the dough without sugar and take some more salt. For the carrot’s green take some dill then.

 

 

Easter egg cookies

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Here they are, my delicate shortcrust Easter egg cookies filled with lemon curd. For the foto I unfortunately dusted them with powdered sugar before they had completely cooled. That’s why the sugar has already reduced a bit but that doesn’t have any influence on their taste. They simply are delicious!

The recipe will make about 20 Easter eggs with a size of 4-5cm if you roll out the pastry at 3mm thickness.

Pastry: 150g unsalted butter, 1 bag vanilla sugar, some lemon zest, 75g powdered sugar, 150g flour, 75g corn starch, 1 tbsp milk
Filling: 1 tsp lemon curd

Mix butter, sugar and lemon zest and stir until creamy. Mix flour with corn starch, strain over butter mixture, add milk and knead. Put pastry in some food foil and keep in the fridge for half an hour.

Preheat oven at 200°C and cover baking tray with parchment paper.

Divide pastry in thirds, roll them out successively on a lightly floured working place and cut out Easter eggs with a cookie cutter. Cut an additional hole into half the cookies. It’s best to do it with a shot glass directly on the baking tray because otherwise this half will lose its shape when moved from the working place. Put into the preheated oven and bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly brown. Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack. Then spread 1 tsp of lemon curd on the entire egg halves and dust the others with powdered sugar. Put both parts together then. You can keep them in an airtight container for 2-3 days. If you want to eat them lateron, then just store them blankly and fill them with lemon curd 1-2 hours before serving them.

 

Lemon Curd

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Well, I have to post the recipe for a fresh and fruity lemon curd because I want to use it for some delicate and lightly, tartish Easter egg cookies. Further the curd is perfect for filling cakes or bread rolls.

For two glasses you’ll need:

3 – 4 bio lemons, 3 eggs size M, 220g caster sugar, 75g unsalted butter

Wash lemons carefully, squeeze juice (150ml) and grate zest. Melt butter in a pan at medium heat and stir in sugar, lemon juice and zest. Lightly whisk the eggs in a bowl and pour them into the warm butter through a strainer. Stir continuously until getting a creamy mixture that shouldn’t boil in any case because it would burn then. Pour cream in clean jam jars, close lid and let them cool. Store them in the fridge for several days.
The recipe for my delicious Easter egg cookies will follow shortly and for all who understand German a lovely lemon cake will be shown at lintorfer.eu on Friday.

 

 

Easter butterflies

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A few days ago I had a fb-post from foreverymom.com showing a video instruction for some lovely folded paper butterflies. I had seen them before but simply forgotten to download the video. Quite lucky to read about them again I immediately had several ideas where and how to decorate them. I’ll put lots of them on my Sunday Easter table together with some daffodils and Easter eggs. With the help of some glue dots I placed the butterflies on top of small chocolate eggs. Thus they may stand in different positions.

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They’re looking quite delicate when sitting beside a nice paper napkin. A chocolate egg’s once again giving the right stand. The napkin’s violas were chosen because their color fits very well with my folded butterflies. Thin origami papers with spring designs are best for these little flying artists. I prefer them in 12x12cm squares however 2016_Ostertisch2and couldn’t stop folding. The filigree flower design in a light apricot is quite perfect for my living room buffet. I glued them to a bare branch that held Christmas balls before. The fluttering butterflies make me forget that the leaves are still missing and that the sun outside’s still not shining. Some of the 15x15cm butterflies I glued on top of bigger chocolate Easter eggs to use them as an Easter gift. For every friend I chose papers in my friends’ favorite colors.