My problem with the traditional hot cross bun is that they are filled with currants, raisins and other dried fruits … and I really don’t like raisins.  So I decided to use my tried and tested switch – to replace any raisins with chocolate chips!  Fortunately I have a large bag of chocolate chips on hand at all times for just such emergency ingredient substitutions.

I used a recipe from Delia and also a recipe from River Cottage Bread as inspiration, but this recipe takes off in a different direction – lightly cinnamon spiced rolls filled with citrus peel and chocolate chips, glazed with a little bit of marmalade.   These are hearty yeast rolls which are delicious split, toasted and buttered (in a toaster oven, please!  No one wants melted chocolate chips in a toaster…).

Chocolate Orange Hot Cross Buns

2/3 c. (150 ml.) warm water

1 Tb. dried yeast

1/4 c. (50g.) white sugar

4 c. (450g.) plain flour

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. cinnamon

1/4c. (40 ml.) warm milk

1 egg, lightly beaten

2oz (50g.) butter, melted

1/2c. (75g) chocolate chips (mini chips would be nice if you have them)

1/4c. (50g) mixed citrus peel

Crosses- 1/4c. flour, 3 Tb. water

Glaze – 1 Tb. orange marmalade + 1 Tb. warm water

Mixing: In a mixing bowl, combine sugar, salt, cinnamon, flour, yeast.  Now pour in the liquid ingredients – water, milk, melted butter and egg.  Stir until it comes together into a dough.

Kneading: Turn dough out onto floured countertop or board.  Knead for 5 minutes until dough becomes smooth.  This dough will be a lot softer than your normal bread dough, so don’t add too much flour, let it remain soft.

Press dough into a rectangle shape.  Now sprinkle on the chocolate chips and citrus peel.  Fold the dough in half, press down and stretch to incorporate the chips.  Now fold it over again.  Repeat this process several times until the chocolate chips and peel seem to be evenly distributed through the dough.  Form the dough into a ball.

Rise: Grease the inside of the empty bowl with a little butter or oil.  Place the ball of dough in the bowl, then flip it over (so the top of the ball is now greased).  Cover bowl with a tea towel and leave to rise in a warm location for 1 hour (up to 1 1/2 hours).

Shape: Now we need to shape the dough into buns.  Divide the dough into two equal halves.  Now divide each half, you should have 4 balls of dough.  Now divide them once more – you have 8 balls of dough to form into buns.  Form each piece of dough into a round bun and place on a baking sheet.

Loosely cover the rolls with the tea towel, and leave them to rise for 30 minutes.

Preheat: Preheat your oven to 425F / 220c.

Crosses: In a small bowl, stir together 1/4c. flour and 3 Tb. water to make a paste.  Put this mixture into a zipper-type sandwich bag.  Squeeze it all down into one corner of the bag.  With scissors, clip a small corner off of the bag – making a temporary icing bag!  Use this to pipe crosses onto your buns.

Bake: Bake the buns for 15 minutes until golden brown.

Glaze: In a small bowl, mix marmalade and warm water.  Brush over buns as soon as they come out of the oven.  This glaze gives a shiny, slightly sticky finish to the buns and enhances the orange taste.

Serve warm from the oven or toasted with butter.

Makes 8 buns

Fabulous vintage easter hat photo from George Eastman House on Flickr

I hope you have a wonderful Easter weekend with friends and family!

If you have  some leftover easter chocolate, why don’t you try making Easter Bunny Blondies?

In my opinion, if you want to try coloring easter eggs without chemicals, onion skins are the way to go!  It’s easy to do, and makes really interesting abstract patterns on the egg shells.  Plus, you end up with a bunch pretty hard boiled eggs in your fridge for eating!

I first heard about coloring eggs with onion skins from Zak’s mom, who did this as a child in Scotland.  In Scottish tradition, you bring decorated hard boiled eggs outside on easter, then roll them down a hill until they crack, and then eat them.   This is similar to our easter egg rolls in America, except we do those on flat ground, and roll them with a spoon!  Either way, eggs are a symbol of spring and rebirth, and people have been decorating eggs for easter for centuries.

If you want an inexpensive easter project, I highly recommend trying this!

What you need:

Eggs

Onions

Cheesecloth or pantyhose

Method:

1) Remove brownish onion skin from onions, keeping pieces as big as possible.

2) Soak skins in water for 5 minutes, to soften.

3) Wrap each egg in onion skins.  Then wrap in cheesecloth (or slip into an old pair of pantyhose, and tie off!) – this is just to hold the skins against the eggs during the boiling process, so get creative!

4) Hard boil the eggs with the onion skins on.  (Put eggs in a pan, cover with cold water.  Bring to boil.  Once boiling, turn off heat and cover pan.  Let sit for 15 minutes.  Drain off hot water and fill with cold water. Let sit for another 15 minutes).

5) Once cool, unwrap eggs and allow to dry.

Et voila! Naturally colored easter eggs.  If you try this, please let us know in a comment.

Need some ideas for what to do with all the hard boiled eggs? How about making deviled eggs or Zak’s favorite, Pickled Eggs (recipe coming soon!).

I’m always up for a crafty project, especially one that has a potential to get really messy!  So this year, I decided to investigate how to color easter eggs the natural way, like great-grandma would have done it.  I also like the idea of using fewer chemicals, especially if it’s a project to do with your kids.

I tried to set my expectations that natural dyes wouldn’t be nearly as vibrant as the candy-colored ones the ‘egg coloring kits’ can produce.  I bought a dozen eggs.  Immediately I had a problem: eggs in the UK are all BROWN!  In the US we could purchase brown or white eggs, so when coloring easter eggs, we always bought white.  Hmmm.  I could have splurged on expensive white duck eggs, but that seemed a bit excessive for this potential failure of a project.  Plus, that’s against the British philosophy of “Make Due and Mend!”.  So home I went with my brown eggs.

After a bit of research, I decided to try two traditional methods: making liquid vegetable dyes, and using onion skins.

For the liquid vegetable dyes, I used beets (for a bright pink color), red cabbage (for purple/blue) and turmeric (yellow/orange).  I made a really strong infusion of the vegetables/spices with water, added some vinegar (which is supposed to help the color be more vibrant and long lasting), and immersed some eggs in the liquid.

Using onion skins is an old technique where you wrap eggs in onion skins, then hard boil them.  When you remove the skins, there are pretty golden brownish designs all over the eggs.

Results

For the liquid easter egg dyes, the beets worked best. I got a nice pink color, even on the brown egg.  The red cabbage definitely turned the egg blue’ish, but it was a bit spotty looking.  The turmeric didn’t provide much color at all (which surprised me, since when I cook with turmeric, I get orange stains everywhere!)

By far the best results were using onion skins! These eggs were really pretty and easy to make.  I will definitely do this again.  (Directions coming soon!)

I would suggest using white eggs if they’re available – I think the colors would be much more vibrant!

Coloring Easter Eggs with Vegetable Dyes

Eggs

White Vinegar

Strong colored vegetables (I used beets, purple cabbage and turmeric)

1) Chop up the vegetables and put in a pan.  Just cover all the vegetables with water (to make the dye as strong as possible).  Add 1TB of vinegar.  Bring to a simmer and simmer for 30 minutes.  For the turmeric, I mixed 1 TB dried turmeric with enough water to make a paste, then added 1TB vinegar.  No need to heat/boil the turmeric.

2) Meanwhile, decide whether to use hard-boiled or empty eggs.  I like to empty mine out first by putting a hole in both sides and blowing out the  contents (we used to LOVE doing this as kids!  It makes lots of gross noises.).  Then you have lots of eggs to use in baking/cooking.  You could also use hard-boiled eggs.

3) Strain coloring liquid into a heat-proof glass.

4) Submerge the eggs completely in the liquid (since my eggs were empty, I put a spoon on top of them to hold them down).  Let soak for at least 30 minutes.  For the turmeric eggs, just cover the egg in the turmeric paste, and let sit for 30 minutes.

5) Remove from liquid (rinse off turmeric, if using) and let air dry.  Once dry, you may want to rub with some vegetable oil to make them shiny.

I had tons of leftover egg dye, so I decided to tie-dye a kitchen towel!  The results were … interesting.  But again, it would be a great project to do with kids.  Stay tuned for pictures!

Growing up in the US, we always bought hams that were pre-cooked, and just needed glazing and baking in the oven.  When I arrived in the UK, I found that hams aren’t called ‘hams’, they’re called ‘gammon’, and they’re completely uncooked.   I was a bit intimidated by this at first since it requires boiling and then roasting – but the big benefit is that you can flavor the meat much more than just putting a glaze on a pre-cooked ham.

If you’re looking for vintage cooking skills, a ham roast is another easy, impressive main course.  And much like the classic roast chicken, gives you a lot of options for leftovers!

The process for preparing an uncooked ham is:  Boil once to remove salt,  second boil to cook the ham, glaze & finish in the oven to brown and crisp the exterior.

The first time I made a ham, I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe for Ham in Coca Cola.  Yes, you read that right.  You boil the ham in a pot of cola.   The ham actually ends up with a slightly sweet, caramel taste – it was really delicious.

For this springtime Easter ham, I decided to try a ginger-infused flavor instead, and substituted Ginger Beer and a sweet/spicy ginger molasses glaze.  This ham was absolutely delicious – tender with a crispy, sweet outside, and light gingery flavor throughout.   Choose a big ham so you have enough for leftovers the next day (served cold in sandwiches with mustard) or to make into a big pot of split pea and ham soup.  Perfect for fending off those last few chilly days!

If you can’t find a raw ham, then you might just try using the glaze, and baking per the instructions on the ham.

Ginger Ham

1 uncooked ham (gammon joint)

1 2L bottle of Ginger Beer (or Ginger Ale, although the Beer is less sweet)

1 onion

Glaze:

1 Tb. Molasses (Black Treacle)

1/2 tsp. ground ginger

2-3 TB. cooking liquid from above (or ginger beer or ginger ale)

Method:

1) De-salt ham: Put ham in big stock pot with lid.  Cover with water.  Bring to a boil, then drain.  It might be all foamy at the top, just pour/rinse all of this off.

2) Cook ham: With ham in stock pot, cover in ginger beer.  If you don’t have enough ginger beer, top with water.  Cut onion in half, and add to stock pot.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer.  Cover, and cook for approximately 20 minutes per pound, plus an additional 20 minutes.   (Check the packaging on your ham to be sure, or use a meat thermometer).

3)   Preheat oven to 400F.  Place ham in roasting pan.  Reserve 3 TB cooking liquid.  (NB: Apparently you can use this sweet stock to make a bean soup etc, although I haven’t tried that yet.)

4) For glaze, mix molasses, ginger and cooking liquid (feel free to add up to 1 tsp ginger to make it more spicy).  Pour glaze on top of ham.

5) Roast ham in oven for 20-30 minutes.

6) Carve and serve.  Delicious with a little tangy mustard for dipping.  Save leftovers for sandwiches and soup (recipes to follow shortly!)

Going through my pantry the other day (full disclosure: My pantry is really one small kitchen cabinet crammed to the brim – ahh the joys of apartment living!) I found unopened dark chocolate Easter bunny that I had stashed away last year.  Since Easter is just around the corner, I figured I should really use this one up before the new season of chocolate bunnies appear on my doorstep.

OK, I could just eat the chocolate bunny.  But it was the weekend and I was feeling more adventurous.  I’ve been having a wicked craving for 7-layer bars recently, but haven’t quite made the effort to figure out substitutes for graham crackers etc. here in England.  These blondie brownies have that toffee-coconutty goodness of the 7 layer bar, with a very dense chewy consistency.  Don’t be discouraged by the super thick batter (mine was basically a dough) of this recipe, just press it into the pan like a cookie dough.

Plus, you get the added enjoyment of chopping up an easter bunny, if you have a little pent-up frustration to get out

Long-lost chocolate easter bunny

Chopping in progress

Voila! Chocolate chunks.

Easter Bunny Blondies

Adapted from http://southernfood.about.com/od/browniesbars/r/r90510k.htm

1 c. flour

1/2 tsp. salt

4 oz. melted unsalted butter, cooled

1c. brown sugar

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla

1 c. dried shredded coconut

1 chopped up chocolate easter bunny (I used a dark chocolate Dove easter bunny) – about 1c. of chocolate chunks.

Method:

Preheat oven to 350F.  Grease & flour 8×8 baking pan.  In a mixing bowl, combine melted butter and sugar, then mix in one egg, stir well.  Add vanilla.  Stir in flour and salt until all combined.  Stir in coconut until combined.  Then, add chocolate chunks and stir until evenly distributed throughout dough.  Normally blondies are a batter, mine turned out very stiff like a dough – don’t worry about this.  Pour/press into prepared pan.  Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Glaze (optional): Once cooled, I melted a little extra chocolate and 1 TB butter together and drizzled over the top of the blondies.