Easter is a great time for baking – Spring is in the air, early gardening efforts are starting to bear fruit and there are lots of lovely seasonal baking ideas to play with. Hot cross buns are the traditional Easter treat in the UK. However, I’m not a huge fan of their fruit-heavy doughs and usually like to bake Easter breads containing nuts. Here is one of my favourite recipes for Easter, a traditional Austrian Easter bread wreath. The bread is enriched with milk and butter, spiced with vanilla, cardamom and lemon zest and glazed with honey and rum.
Austrian Easter Bread Wreath Recipe
Ingredients (makes 1 small wreath)
For the dough
- 250g plain flour
- 130g milk, lukewarm
- 4g dried yeast
- 40g butter, melted
- 40g caster sugar
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 pinch of salt
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar
- 2 cardamom pods, seeds taken out and crushed with pestle and mortar
- Zest of ½ lemon
- 1 tbsp pistachios, ground or finely chopped
- 2 tbsp hazelnuts, ground or finely chopped
- 1 tbsp brown sugar
For the topping
- 1 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp rum
- 1 tbsp pistachios, roughly chopped
How to bake it
- In a medium bowl, combine the melted butter, caster sugar, egg yolk, salt, vanilla sugar, crushed cardamom seeds and lemon zest and mix until it reaches an even consistency
- Add the flour, yeast and milk to the butter-sugar mixture and form a smooth dough; knead for approximately 10 minutes
- Cover the dough with the bowl and leave to rest in a warm place for 1 hour
- Combine the ground or finely chopped nuts with the brown sugar
- Divide the dough into two equal parts
- Knead the nuts-and-sugar mix into one of the dough parts
- Lightly flour your work surface if the dough is prone to stick
- Use your hands and form each dough part into a long sausage form, 40 cm in length
- Form a rope with the two dough rolls by winding the rolls around each other
- Then bring the ends together to form a wreath, sealing the ends together to avoid them coming apart during the baking process
- Place the wreath on a baking tray lined with baking paper and cover with a clean kitchen towel for 30 minutes to 1 hour to prove
- Preheat the oven to 180°C
- Bake for 30 minutes
- Warm up the honey in a small pot and add the rum
- Brush the baked wreath with the mixture and sprinkle the roughly chopped pistachios on top
Great with a cup of tea or coffee, served for breakfast or afternoon tea!
