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Sarah Cooks: Happy Easter!
Bread

Happy Easter!

4/10/2009 08:58:00 PM


Hello everybody! Hope you're all enjoying your long weekend. I'm ecstatic to have a couple of sleep-ins and some extra time to bake! But let's start at the beginning.

Most businesses are shut on Good Friday, but Suzuran, our fave Japanese grocery/sushi bar was open, yay. A fab way to get our Easter fish-fix.

"Number 37". (We also got another box of big California rolls/nigiri, some medium California rolls, seaweed salad and chilli squid. YUM!)

After lunch, I got busy making some Hot Cross Buns. I am a very enthusiastic HCB-eater, but have never actually baked them myself before. I can be quite nervous baking with yeast, so I decided to only make half a batch and see how I went. There are heaps of HCB recipes floating around the blogosphere now, so I won't add another one. I'll just let y'all know I used the recipe from my year 9 home economics textbook, "Cookery the Australian Way", because it seemed the simplest. (Ah... I have such fond memories of the chocolate self-saucing pudding from that book).


I wasn't too sure how they'd turn out - the dough was very moist, (I added a few handfuls of flour), it didn't seem to rise very much during the proving, and the buns are only baked for 15 minutes - but as you can see from the top picture in this post, they turned out ok!

They were deliciously soft, and had just the right amount of spice. Next time I'd easily double the fruit though - this recipe had 1/4 c sultanas to 6 hot cross buns. Not nearly enough!

Delicious hot with butter, mmmm....

Phew! They were cooked on the inside... like real bread!

Easter eating is also all about chocolate. I didn't do a lot of Easter eggs this year, but I was lucky to receive some fancy chocolate as a gift on Thursday, so I started sampling them today.

From the fabulous shop Monsieur Truffe - milk chocolate bar (38%); Valrhona Manjari dark couverture (64%); Felchlin milk couverture (38%).

The Felchlin (oh that word makes me laugh so much) milk couverture was very smooth, and had quite a different taste from my beloved Lindt milk. I'm not quite sure exactly how to describe it. Perhaps a few more taste tests would be beneficial, hehe. I thought the Valrhona had a slightly acidic taste - after saying this out loud, I was told that Monsieur Truffe said that it has a distinct raspberry flavour. Lovely!

I'm not entirely sure what to do with my new stash of luxury chocolate... but I'm thinking chocolate mousse!

And... CHOMP!
I *heart* milk chocolate!


And finally, for dinner... fish and chips from the corner shop.

Happy Easter everybody!

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3 comments

  1. Well done with the hot cross buns, and that school cookery book looks like a classic! we had dodgy typed print-outs at our school.

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  2. Mmmmmm I hope there's some HCBs to sample on Monday.

    I think the best way to enjoy the chocolates is just to eat them in small doses. I am currently sampling some Valrhona Ampamakia 64% cocoa chocolates from Madagascar as I'm writing this comment.

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  3. Arista - Thanks! Yeah, it's a pretty good cookbook, lots of good commonsense recipes in there. :)

    Thanh - Haha, I made another batch today (a full batch of 12). I made half regular half choc chip (just little nestle choc bits). Really yum! They might be a bit stale by Monday but we can just toast them. :D

    xox Sarah

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