hi, Hivers! this is my first blog here, but no doubts I am well acquainted with some of you. There happened today some nice pre-Easter family activities that I thought SilverBloggers would be a good place to share.
In our family, we keep the traditions -- bake Easter cakes, decorate Easter eggs, and visit the Church to sanctify them. My wife is no Faberge of course, but she has solid amounts of creativity and some tricky techniques accumulated with years. And she is a skilled home-made bread baker as well. So the results are beautiful, each year.
Maybe it looks too good, too 'PRO' to be true and even lended from a photobank, you may think? Nope! 😜 Done with my wife's caring and warm hands. Last night she put a full pan in the oven twice. And we got 15 Easter cakes in full -- to share with parents and all our beloved friends.
An Easter cupcake needs to be tall - a store-bought pre-made paper mold was used to support and make them so "slim".
Among the main properties, of course, is the festive taste and texture of baking. Our dough involved spices: cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, vanilla, turmeric - and of course raisins.
We have an old brass mortar (dates back to very beginning of 20th century). It's nice to have some 'heirlooms with a story' - but no, unfortunately this mortar did not come from our parents, I bought it at a flea market, one of the purposes was exactly this: to have it as our family future heirloom. I hope my daughter will pass it on, and the short story over time will become a long :)
By the way, it was our daughter who crushed cardamom grains in this mortar.
She was also involved in the process - not fully, but at some favorite steps, the main of which, of course, was the preparation of the icing sugar, and decorating Easter cakes.
When water is added, an ordinary white powder turns into a thick mass of an unusual pistachio color. Magic! And besides, it's a very tasty magic :))) we used to make make more glaze than necessary, cause my babygirl always love to consume it as is, "in its raw form" :) We bought two different packages, to have white and green glaze.
Funny extra frame!
At this photo you cant see the tongue... but I guess you imagined where the excess glaze went :)
Voyla! The final product. Aren't they charming? 'A joint production', as I love to put it.
The next deal was decorating eggs. We have three know-how in use.
First one is coloring by boiling eggs in onion skins. Thats an easy recipe that gives a quick and beautiful result that - most importantly for me - looks "natural", analogue ... giving each egg some unique texture/look. The colour is the same brown (of course it can be varied, to some extent). This recipe we keep from our parents and their parents.
The next recipe my wife developed herself. I believe that previous generations would hardly have choose this method, rather they would have called it "waste", as a valuable resource is consumed for painting: threads! Once upon a time, in the pre-industrial era, good colored threads were ... noticeably expensive.
Well, now we have a surplus of thread, a huge supply that cannot be used for something useful. Of course, we didn't throw them in the trash!
The principle is that each egg is wrapped with threads of the same or different colors, then the eggs are lowered into boiling water and the threads shed (lose their color), after which the eggs are colored -
Next step, the threads are being removed...
...and in certain spots where they covered the egg from water, there appear the traces ... moreover, -- the traces are quite varied, depending on the threads itself. Some threads willingly give back their dye, such as the blue threads in the photo below, others do not shed at all, in this case the egg will receive dye from the general solute, and we will see the pattern in the form of white lines - where the threads covered the egg from water.
The results are always different, spectacular or not, it is impossible to predict the result in advance. And this also provides part of the pleasure of the process, oddly enough.
In the photo above you see our results from the year of 2022.
The colours and overall result look pretty different, isnt it?
The by-product - used dyed threads - looks even more attractive and amazing than the eggs themselves, it's even a pity to throw them away. We have not yet found a use for them. I suspect they would be useful for making hand-made dolls? ..
Ok, and here goes the end of my story. Thanks for your visit, and I wish
Happy Bright Easter to all of you, my friends!
| location: | St.Petersburg, Russia | April 2023 | natural light |
| camera/lens: | Canon 5D | 16-35mm | raw-conv |
