Dilute the mature starter with water and combine with flour. Stir until smooth and leave to ferment at room temperature for 8–10 hours.
Brew saffron in cognac in advance.
Pour milk into the dough and mix well. Grind the yolks with butter and sugar, and beat the whites into a thick foam. Add the dough with milk and all other ingredients, except raisins and candied fruits, to the sifted flour. Knead the dough for 1 minute until smooth and leave for 20–40 minutes for autolysis (gluten development). Then knead with your hands for 15 minutes or 8 minutes with a mixer. At the end of kneading, add raisins or candied fruits. The dough should be soft and elastic.
Place the kneaded dough in a bowl and place it to proof in the microwave or oven with the light on for 3 hours (desirable temperature 25–28°C). During proofing, every hour (2 times in total) stretch and fold the dough using the method.
Divide the dough into parts depending on the number and size of the molds. Form the dough into balls and place in the pans, seam side down. Fill out the form no more than 1/3 full. Leave the future Easter cakes to proof for 2–2.5 hours, covered with film, until the volume of the dough doubles.
Bake the cakes at 180°C for 30–40 minutes depending on the size of the pan.
Cool the cakes on a wire rack and, if desired, cover with icing or other confectionery delicacies.
Step-by-step preparation of Easter cake without yeast using kefir:
- Sift the flour through a sieve to make the cakes airy.
- Pour granulated sugar into kefir, stir and leave for 2 minutes.
- Wash the lemon and grate the peel on a fine grater.
- Steam the raisins with boiling water for 15 minutes, then dry with a paper towel and sprinkle with flour.
- Melt the butter in a water bath, add sugar, salt, vanillin and lemon zest. Stir and pour kefir and soda.
- Combine flour with liquid mixture and raisins. The consistency of the dough should be very liquid.
- Grease baking pans with butter and pour in the dough. If you fill them 1/2 of the way, the cake will be light and airy, and 3/4 - dense and tight.
- Heat the oven to 180 °C Celsius and place the cakes on the bottom shelf to bake for an hour and a half. If the baked goods are larger, they will take longer to bake. You can check readiness by piercing a dry toothpick - if it is dry, Easter is ready.
- Remove the baked holiday cake without yeast from the oven, cool well, remove from the molds and cover with any glaze.
Recipe No. 2: sourdough Easter cakes without yeast
Easter sourdough bread is an old Russian recipe that makes the baked goods light and delicious. Sourdough Easter cakes remain fresh for a long time without changing their taste.
Ingredients:
- Wheat flour - 1.5 kg
- Sourdough - 300 g
- Milk - 600 g
- Eggs - 10 pcs.
- Cognac - 200 ml
- Granulated sugar - 500 g
- Candied fruits - 250 g
- Butter - 300 g
- Zest of one orange
- Vanilla sugar - 3 tsp.
- Salt - 2 tsp.
- Boil the milk and cool to 30–35 °C. Afterwards, dissolve fresh starter and 750 g of flour in it. Mix the products and leave in a warm place, about 25-30 degrees, for about 3 hours, so that the dough rises and becomes lumpy and loose.
- Grind the butter with a mixer until white. Afterwards, add one egg yolk at a time while continuing to beat the mixture. Then add sugar, vanillin and continue beating the mixture. The more fluffy it is whipped, the better the cake will turn out.
- Wash the orange, grate its zest on a fine grater and add it to the beaten yolks.
- Pour cognac into the suitable dough, add a glass of flour and knead. Afterwards, add the butter mixture and knead the dough, gradually adding all the remaining flour. Knead the dough until it stops sticking to your hands.
- Beat the egg whites into a tight, thick, stable foam and add to the dough, then the cakes will turn out light and airy.
- The last step is to put candied fruits into the dough, stir them in, cover the dough with a clean towel and leave for an hour and a half.
- After this time, generously grease the molds with butter, fill them 1/2 full with dough and leave to stand for 15–20 minutes. Afterwards, place in an oven preheated to 180°C for 1.5 hours. Check the readiness of the baked goods with a wooden skewer; if there is no sticky dough on it, the Easter is baked.
- Remove the finished cake without yeast from the oven, cover with a dry towel and let cool. Then remove from the pan and cover with fondant.
How to make sourdough for Easter cake
To make Easter without yeast lush, tasty and aromatic, you should make a starter that will help achieve the amazing result of a delicious Easter cake.
Sourdough ingredients:
- Flour - 150 g (any: wheat, rye, whole)
- Water - 150 ml
- Mix 50 g of flour with 50 ml of water. The consistency of the mass should be pasty, like thick sour cream. Cover the starter with a towel and leave in a warm place for a day, stirring it 3-4 times.
- After a day, the mass will be covered with small, sparse bubbles. This means that you need to add another 50 g of flour and add 50 ml of water. Mix the starter and leave it again for a day under a dry towel in a warm place. Stir it again 4 times a day.
- After 2 days, repeat the procedure: add the remaining flour and water, knead the mixture, cover with a towel and leave for another day.
- The next day, the starter will increase in size and will consist of a foamy cap. This means that it is ready for further use in baking.
Happy Easter to all forum members!
First, prepare the wheat sourdough (with a rye starter):
Starter refresh -
1 tsp rye starter (from the refrigerator)
15 g wheat flour
15 g lukewarm water
Mix everything, cover the container with the starter with gauze in several layers (or just a lid, but loosely to allow air access). And leave at room temperature for 6-8 hours.
Single way:
Mix 30 g of fresh starter with 150 g of wheat flour and 150 g of water, leave at room temperature for 12-14 hours.
Or triple:
Mix 30 g of fresh starter with 30 g of wheat flour and 30 g of water, leave at room temperature for 6 hours.
Then add 50 g of flour and 50 g of water and leave for 6-8 hours.
Finally add another 70 g of water and 70 g of flour and leave for 3-4 hours.
The wheat starter is ready to use, you can prepare the dough for the Easter cake.
Test composition:
300 g wheat sourdough
380 g wheat flour (preferably bread flour, but regular flour is fine)
40-50 ml milk
3 eggs
120 g sugar
vanilla or 1 tbsp. vanilla sugar
80 g softened butter
8 g salt
100-150 g mixture of raisins and candied fruits
Preparation:
Combine sourdough, sugar, vanilla or vanilla sugar, eggs, milk, flour in a bowl. Start kneading the dough; at the end of kneading, gradually add soft butter, piece by piece. The result will be a very soft, sticky dough. Leave it for 20 minutes, covering the bowl with the dough with a towel.
Next, add salt to the dough and knead well with a mixer or by hand for at least 15-20 minutes (the longer you knead, the better). The dough gradually becomes more manageable and begins to lag behind the walls of the bowl (when kneading with a mixer) or from your hands and from the table surface (when kneading by hand).
I kneaded the dough by hand, greased the table and hands with vegetable oil before doing this, and did not add excess flour when kneading.
The finished dough is very soft, silky to the touch, it easily stretches to a thin film and does not tear.
At the end of kneading, add raisins and candied fruits to the dough, mix well.
Place the finished dough in a bowl lightly greased with vegetable oil. Cover the top with a towel or film and leave for 3 hours. After every hour you will need to fold and stretch the dough.
To do this, carefully remove it onto a board greased with vegetable oil and stretch it over the surface into a rectangle. Fold part of the dough from one side to the middle. Then repeat the same on the opposite side..
After 3 hours, carefully remove the rested dough from the bowl and transfer it to the cake pan, filling about 1/3 full. I greased the sides of the pan with melted butter and lightly sprinkled it with flour, and placed a circle cut out of parchment paper on the bottom. Cover the top with a towel or film and leave in a warm place to rise. My dough tripled in size in 5 hours. The dough proofing time will depend on the temperature and humidity in the room.
Friends, there is very little time left until Easter, but I’m late with the Easter cake recipe, sorry! But I still have time) We baked this cake at a master class in Vladimir and Moscow, and soon I will take it to Odessa. Initially, I wanted to bake an authentic Easter cake according to an old recipe, in search of which I looked through a mountain of books and websites and eventually settled on Daria Tsvek’s Easter cake - quite famous.
Daria Yakovlevna Tsvek is called a great Ukrainian cook and best-selling author. Her books are indeed very famous: “Sweet Cookies”, “For Guests and Family”, “For Our Littlest”, “Good Evening”, “Children and Parents”, etc. “Sweet Cookies”, for example, was reprinted nine times, and , in the latest edition, real tools with which she worked were used for illustrations: whisks, molds, rolling pins, planks, knives, etc. Tsvek lived all her life in the west of Ukraine, baked and wrote down recipes, and is famous for this. Uverla Daria Yakovlevna in 2004
Her Easter cake recipe is known to many, it is made with yeast and white flour, but I decided to convert it to sourdough, changing it a little, increasing the percentage of baking and making a version with whole grain flour, which I show here. Recently, by the way, I learned that there used to be a tradition of baking three types of Easter cakes: unleavened - for the dead, “yellow” - in honor of the risen Christ, and “black” with a lot of yolks, for nature, health and fertility of people and animals. It turns out that I have just the last ones here.
As you know, sourdough dough is made in a complex manner, in several stages, with the gradual addition of baking. I tried to simplify the recipe so that it could be baked by both experienced bakers and those who are just starting to get acquainted with sourdough. I warn you: it ferments for a very long time! Therefore, I’ll tell you the routine right away: in the morning I put the starter in milk, by the evening it’s ready, almost overnight (not all night, the kneading lasts about 40 minutes) I knead the dough and just leave it on the table, covering the bowl with film. In 7-8 hours it just manages to reach the desired state. Otherwise, these cakes are not at all difficult, you just need to be patient.
For the dough:
100 gr. mature sourdough with 100% humidity;
350 gr. milk or water;
350 gr. white flour;
100 gr. Sahara.
Stir sugar in milk until dissolved, add starter, stir, add flour, stir until smooth, leave for 10-12 hours. The dough will rise, become porous and fluffy, tasty (be sure to try it!).
For the test:
500 gr. whole grain flour (if you want to bake Easter cakes from white flour, take white flour, the same amount);
10 yolks (this is approximately 220-240 g);
200 gr. white or brown sugar;
10 gr. salt;
200 gr. good butter, chilled, plastic;
200-300 gr. raisins or a mixture of dried fruits.
For my Easter cakes I ground fresh flour, it tastes better.
1) Mix the dough with flour and yolks, let stand for 15-20 minutes. I kneaded it in an Ankarsrum Original dough mixer at first speed.
2) While the dough is resting, pour boiling water over the raisins and leave for 15 minutes to steam. This is important to do, because unsoaked raisins will spoil the cake: when ready, they will pull all the moisture on themselves, leaving the crumb around them dry and tasteless. After 15 minutes, drain the water and let the raisins cool.
3) Start kneading at the first speed of the dough mixer. If you use whole wheat flour or regular flour, do not turn the speed up faster than first, add salt.
4) Start adding sugar in portions, adding a new portion after the first one has gone.
As the dough begins to come together and signs of gluten development are visible, start adding butter - in pieces. It took me 5-6 approaches to add all the oil. If at this stage of kneading you notice that the dough has become too stretchy and sticky, and the gluten has developed well, it is better to add the oil by hand so as not to over-knead the dough.
5) Add the raisins last.
6) Remove the dough from the dough mixer, place it in a glass bowl or plastic container, greased with a thin layer of vegetable oil, fold the dough into a ball, cover with a lid or cover with film and leave to rise. Fermentation at room temperature for about 6-7-8 hours. As I wrote above, I simply leave the dough to rise on the counter at room temperature.
7) Place the risen dough on a table sprinkled with flour or greased with butter. Divide the dough into pieces, round the pieces, as if stretching and folding, so that the surface of the dough is stretched, the raisins should be inside the dough, and not outside. Divide the dough between the molds so that it fills about half of the mold.
8) Proof for about 6 hours at room temperature. For Easter cakes made from white dough, proofing can be increased by another couple of hours. Evaluate the degree of proofing by how the cakes have increased in volume and become fluffy; their surface should be very soft (therefore it is important to cover it with film or a bag so that a crust does not form), and bubbles can be felt when pressed.
9) Baking in an oven preheated to 175-180 degrees for about half an hour.
10) You can coat the finished Easter cakes with glaze, or you can leave them like that. I’m not specifically giving the recipe for the glaze, because I don’t know what kind of glaze I’m going to make yet, I’m a complete novice when it comes to goasures)
Those cakes that I baked last time, which, in fact, I took for this recipe, turned out simply incredible, the best: fantastically soft and completely non-sour, despite the fact that they contained more than half whole grain flour. But there are still white ones. My family really appreciated the “white” option, although I liked the “black” one better.
And here is the Easter cake in the video!
The song Hey You by The Clarks is playing here.
Delicious baked goods to you!
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