Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Another kind of craft (or this is not your grandma's baking)

I don't cook often. Bake, even more seldom. But every once in a while, I get into a cooking frenzy in which my monumental enthusiasm is only equalled by my monumental lack of skill. This was the case with Easter Eve.
Every Easter since I returned from NZ, I planned to make hot cross buns. For one reason or another, it never happened. However, I decided that this year would not be bunless.
Being a spur of the moment decision, some ingredients had to be improvised. I also used soy milk instead of cow milk and oil instead of butter, but it looked promising even at dough stage:
Some recipes said cut the tops in a cross shape, others didnt mention cutting at all. I cut. deeply.
Which is why my buns ended up looking nothing like the original ones, but tasting di-vine!

Now on to the egg story. Seeing that I was such an ace in the kitchen, I decided to dye my own eggs too. But not with the easy chemical store bought dyes, oh no! Natural stuff: beet root, spinach, blueberries, onion skins... It went like this:
*upon seeing Brigi's beautiful red eggs, with stickers*: "Bah! Plastic, chemical, consumerist, cheapo lazy-people eggs! I'll dye mine the natural way!"
*After 2 hours,pulling eggs out of the natural dyes and seeing the breathtaking array of colours ranging from beige to stone grey to rotten duck-egg brown*: "Brigiii... can I borrow some stickers?"
These were the liveliest coloured ones:

All in all, Easter was a lot of fun. Look here to see how we spent it.