We hosted some family and friends for Easter brunch, and I thought I would try to make a dessert that was Easter specific. I didn't want to make the ubiquitous braided bread with hard-boiled eggs, so I picked a recipe for Italian Easter Bread -- with no braiding and no hard-boiled eggs -- from epicurious.com. The yeasted bread is enriched with a lot of egg yolks and butter, studded with candied orange peel, and topped with a sweet almond glaze.
You have to start this recipe a day in advance -- there are several rising steps that include a lot of waiting time. Because the recipe is sort of involved, I'm not going to rehash all of the steps here (since you can read the recipe for yourself at epicurious.com). But let me just say that I timed my baking schedule so that I finished with step four late in the evening, so that the required 8-10 hours of rising time before step 5 could take place overnight.
I didn't have any dove-shaped paper molds handy, so I used 9-inch diameter cake pans that were 3-inches high (and this recipe yields two loaves of bread, so I needed two). When I got to step five, where you put the dough into the pan, each of my loaves was quite small -- even after a three-hour rise, the balls of dough did not come close to touching the edges of the pan.
This posed a small problem when I got to step 6, where you spoon over a glaze made from sugar, ground almonds, egg whites, and almond extract. I had a lot of glaze, but I could only use a small portion of it. It kept rolling of the top of the balls of dough, and falling onto exposed bottom of the pan, since the dough didn't meet the edge of the pan. If the dough had filled the bottom of the pan, I would have just poured on more glaze and let it pool on top. I sprinkled on more sliced almonds and some powdered sugar, and put the loaves in the oven to bake.
During baking, the loaves rose and expanded quite a bit, filling the cake pans and reaching to the sides. The bread had a lot of heft. When I sliced the cooled bread, it was dense, and you could see the bits of candied orange peel (I had made my own) throughout. Given all of the butter (almost three sticks) and egg yolks (10!) in this bread, I was expecting it to have a soft, rich texture like brioche. It didn't.
Surprisingly, the bread was a touch dry and it did not have as much flavor as I would have hoped. However, the orange peel helped, and the almond topping was fantastic. I wish that the shape of the loaf had been flatter, so that there would have been a higher ratio of almond glaze to cake. In the end, I thought that the bread wasn't bad, but I don't think it was worth all of the prep time, and it was a little disappointing for a special occasion.
Recipe: "Italian Easter Bread" from Epicurious.com.
You have to start this recipe a day in advance -- there are several rising steps that include a lot of waiting time. Because the recipe is sort of involved, I'm not going to rehash all of the steps here (since you can read the recipe for yourself at epicurious.com). But let me just say that I timed my baking schedule so that I finished with step four late in the evening, so that the required 8-10 hours of rising time before step 5 could take place overnight.
I didn't have any dove-shaped paper molds handy, so I used 9-inch diameter cake pans that were 3-inches high (and this recipe yields two loaves of bread, so I needed two). When I got to step five, where you put the dough into the pan, each of my loaves was quite small -- even after a three-hour rise, the balls of dough did not come close to touching the edges of the pan.
This posed a small problem when I got to step 6, where you spoon over a glaze made from sugar, ground almonds, egg whites, and almond extract. I had a lot of glaze, but I could only use a small portion of it. It kept rolling of the top of the balls of dough, and falling onto exposed bottom of the pan, since the dough didn't meet the edge of the pan. If the dough had filled the bottom of the pan, I would have just poured on more glaze and let it pool on top. I sprinkled on more sliced almonds and some powdered sugar, and put the loaves in the oven to bake.
Surprisingly, the bread was a touch dry and it did not have as much flavor as I would have hoped. However, the orange peel helped, and the almond topping was fantastic. I wish that the shape of the loaf had been flatter, so that there would have been a higher ratio of almond glaze to cake. In the end, I thought that the bread wasn't bad, but I don't think it was worth all of the prep time, and it was a little disappointing for a special occasion.
Recipe: "Italian Easter Bread" from Epicurious.com.
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