Trying to keep up

Has it been two weeks already? I am really not doing good at posting once a week. I will try harder I promise! I know Easter has passed but…Happy Easter! Christ has risen!

For me Easter or “Pas’ha” is a great celebration in my church, celebrating Christ rising from the dead. And a little side note, Adventure Christian  Church of Rocklin, Ca had an amazing and beautiful service. After the church service my dad’s side of the family gathered together for a potluck lunch at my parents house. I think we celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter with such amazing food! My aunt Alla made her amazing sweet peiroshki again and I made the Gorka cake. It was a great time to spend with family.

One food that stands out for me when it’s Easter time is “Pasachka”. That’s what my family calls the traditional Russian/Ukrainian Easter bread. That is also what my husbands family calls it. When I did more research on the bread I learned that the “proper” name is Koolitch or Kulich bread. Whatever you call it, it’s delicious. I have never made one before so of course I go to my mother for her recipe. She tells me that she doesn’t really have a recipe and that she always experimented with different ingredients. Without a recipe I turn to my Russian cook book “Russian Cooking”. Their recipe had too many ingredients and looked so complicated to make I turned to Google instead. I found a great recipe on RecipeJoint.com. It was super simple and super easy, and super DELICIOUS! I love everything sweet and it had the perfect amount of sweetness. Original recipe is here. I changed up the ingredients a little, to what I had in my kitchen at the time.

Ingredients:

4 Cups plain flour

1 Tbsp dried yeast

1 Cup milk

1/2 Cup sugar

3 Eggs

1 Stick butter (1/2 cup)

1 Cup dried cranberries (recipe called for raisins and dried fruit, all I had were dried cranberries, they turned out great!)

1/2 Tsp salt

1/2 Tsp cinnamon

1 Tsp vanilla extract

Icing (taken from “Russian Cooking”):

2 Cups confectioners sugar

1/4 cup cold water

2 Tsp fresh, strained lemon juice

Warm the milk to about 96*F. Sprinkle in the yeast and one teaspoonful of sugar. Add half of the flour. Mix well. At this point the mixture should be allowed to go frothy. I never felt that my mixture was “frothy”. I just let it sit for a while.

Cream the butter and sugar and then beat in the eggs one at a time.

Add the yeast mixture and the rest of the ingredients.

Knead well until the dough is smooth and elastic. Cover and allow to rise until doubled in size.

Traditionally this bread is baked in tall cans to give then that tall base and muffin top look. I used two medium size ceramic ramekins and a couple muffin tins. Bake in oven 375*F for 20-30 minutes. Cool on cooking rack then decorate with icing.

For icing just mix the ingredients together and slowly pour over the pasachka. I did not have enough confectioners sugar so my icing was more like a glaze.

I little sister Mary came over the day I was making these and did a great job helping me out. We baked a few different things in about 3 hours time. Thanks Mary!

Easter Sunday my little guy actually posed for me instead of running away to hide!

My little family at my parents home

Til next week!