Easter, my favorite holiday, comes in spring, my favorite season, and my family celebrates it with a feast.
Honestly, we celebrate most holidays by going over the top with food. But we give up desserts for Lent, so for Easter we focus as much on the sweet as on the savory dishes.
Some years we lean into a chocolate theme, making loads of truffles and other cocoa-based goodies. This year, we ended up with more of a cake theme.
My sister and I started cooking Friday and continued through to dinner time Sunday.
We made our family’s staples — a baba au rum and a pasha (a cottage cheese-based pressed dessert with nuts and dried fruit).
A few weeks ago I had visions of making beautiful petit fours, intricately decorated. I’d only made petit fours once before and had given up on making them pretty. I also gave up this year, creating even homelier ones than the first.
They tasted good enough to make up for the mess. I made two flavors: a basic yellow cake with a little added grapefruit zest, homemade grapefruit marmalade and peppercorn buttercream, and a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and raspberry jam.
The chocolate cake was a fail the first time I made it; it came out rubbery and tasted terrible. With a different recipe, the second try came out well (although I wish I had left it in the oven for a few extra minutes because it fell as it cooled).
I decided to skip glazing the tiny cakes, but I did brush melted chocolate onto the chocolate ones. It hardened as it cooled, with a lovely texture when bitten into.
The grapefruit cakes looked particularly sloppy, but I added some buttercream frosting to the top, and they tasted excellent. I tried adding peppercorns on a whim, which worked out really well. The lovely contrasting flavors paired well with the lightness of the grapefruit.
I tried to make shortbread and used a recipe that has worked for me multiple times before. It’s pretty simple — mix 2 cups of butter with 1 cup of powdered sugar, vanilla, salt and 2 cups of flour. Pat into a greased baking dish and pop into the oven for about half an hour.
My plan was to cut the shortbread into squares and dip some of them in chocolate and then sprinkle with toasted (homegrown) hazelnuts.
I tried to make these cookies on Saturday, after I’d made macaroons, both petit four cakes (the chocolate one twice) and other things. I was on autopilot and not thinking too clearly, because I used granulated sugar instead of powdered.
Realizing my mistake, I tried again. The dough didn’t seem right though; it was much too soft. But I’d followed the recipe, so I put it in the oven. A few minutes into baking, I remembered that I’d noticed through other bakes that the flour I have seems much less dense than usual, and I’ve sometimes had to as much double the flour to get my usual results.
But it was too late to amend the recipe. The shortbread came out delicious but with completely the wrong texture, so we didn’t put it on the Easter table.
A pavlova with lemon curd was our last dessert of the evening, and we had to take a break and put up leftovers and wash dishes before we could taste it.
At the end of the evening, I did begin to ponder the difference between feasting and gluttony.
