Easter Preparations and Zopf Bunnies

Giulia Doyle — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 13:30:06 +0000

We’ve been looking forward to Easter. It’s been a long wait and I think all of us need a couple of days off from our regular routine. I am really hoping we’ll be able to do the Easter Egg Hunt outdoors, so fingers crossed on our end.

In the meantime we made some bunny shaped Zopf, which is a Swiss sweet bread, very similar to Challah. It was a fun little project with the kids. I’m not an expert bread baker, so next time I think I’d be able to improve on some of my bunny shapes – but I thought I’d share it with you here, because they are kind of cute and very tasty.
We also decorated a bunch of eggs and I shared them last week on Clementine Daily. Instead of regular dye, we decided to use paint pens and temporary tattoos. I love how they turned out. We made a couple more with blown-out eggs so we could hang them on our forsythia branches. Even with coloured eggs, the paint pens and tattoos can add a little bit of extra decoration.

Bunny Bread (Zopf)

Ingredients

500 g flour
1.5 tablespoons of salt
2 tablespoons of sugar
60 g butter at room temperature
15 g instant yeast
3 dl milk (about 1.25 cups)
raisins
1 egg, whisked

Instructions

Combine flour, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Add butter, cut into small pieces.
Dissolve yeast with milk. Add liquid to the dry ingredients by stirring it from the middle, like a well.
Knead dough until smooth. Cover and let rise to about double it's size in a warm area of the kitchen.
Cut dough into as many pieces as you need for your bunnies.
Option 1: Knead dough into a long rope, flip once and twist into bunny ears. Add small tail on looped end.
Option 2: Form dough into smooth oval. Use scissors and cut into dough to shape ears. Pull apart dough ears and add two raisins as eyes.
Brush egg mixture on all the bunnies and set them on greased cookie sheet.
Heat oven to 400 F and put buns into cold oven. Let bake about 20 - 25 minutes, until golden brown.
You'll know the buns are done, when you knock on the bottom of them and it sounds hollow.

Notes

You can also make this with any challah recipe that you like.

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zopf – Audrey's 74

Easter Preparations and Zopf Bunnies