Easter-over bakes! I’m Jewish (with an emphasis on the ish), and my wife and the rest of the family are varying flavors and levels of Christian. This year Easter and Passover happened to overlap, so of course I needed to bake for both. The first of the Easter-over bakes is the Passover one. I went with the traditional macaroon. Not to be confused with macarons or Macron.
There are lots of recipes out there for kosher for Passover cakes that are made with matzoh meal or some other flour substitute, but I’ve never liked any of them. My two Passover go-to’s as a kid were always the macaroons or the fake fruit slices, and well, I’ll just buy those. Fot any Jewish cooking or baking my go-to for recipes is Tori Avey and I followed this one. The only slight change was that I substituted arrowroot for the potato starch since I didn’t have any on hand.
Easter
The next of the Easter-over bakes was the Easter one. The most iconic choices are some sort of lamb-shaped cake or hot cross buns. I’m not a huge fan of either. I’d gotten Giuseppe’s Italian Bakes cookbook recently and had been looking for an excuse to bake something out of it. This was the perfect opportunity. Maritozzi seemed perfect. They are a bit hot cross bun like to me, replacing a spiced bun with a fruity enriched dough, and of course, delicious fresh whipped cream in the center.
These were really good. It’s a fairly simple, but time-consuming process. You start with a pre-ferment and do assorted different rises to get the delicious final bun. I won’t share the recipe – you should buy the book! – but I will point you to this free one from King Arthur to get an idea of it.
