I was hemming and hawing on making a blog post about paska. Because to be honest, I’ve always hated paska. When it started getting close to Easter, my foster mother would start baking loaves and loaves of paska in preparation for our Easter gathering. And everyone would say how her paska was always so delicious, but I had a problem with it. I didn’t like it at all. She always made the loaves so big, that I felt that the ratio of bread to icing was not right and there was always too much bread and not enough icing. And because she always made so much, there was always so much left over that we’d be eating Easter bread for days! (And then it would be dried out Easter bread).
So I never liked it. And as an adult I refused to eat it. Every year when my sister would come out for Easter she would bring Easter bread and talk about how awesome it was and I would agree with her, but secretly, I never actually ate it. I just had too many bad memories and couldn’t bring myself to eat that awful bread. And then my wife made her recipe. She made small, round loaves of paska, which made the perfect bread to icing ratio. The bread was soft and lemony topped with buttercream icing. My kids loved it so much, and I ate a fair share myself. (We also like to slice the bread and ice it on the sliced side, for icing with every bite.)
I’d like to know your thoughts on paska/Easter bread. Do you like it? Do you not like it? Do you have a secret ingredient that you think makes your paska the best? Let me know! For some reason comments were disabled on my last blog post, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so hopefully that isn’t the case for this post. Sorry about that!
- 2 1/2 tsp yeast
- 1 cup warm water
- 2 tsp sugar
- 2 cups milk
- 3/4 cup butter
- 5 eggs
- 1 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 lemon (juiced and zested)
- 8.5 cups flour
- 1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
- 3 cups icing sugar
- 2-4 tablespoons cream (or milk)
- 1 tsp vanilla
- Mix yeast, sugar & water together in a small bowl. Let it sit for 10 minutes or until it gets frothy.
- Heat butter & milk together in a small saucepan until butter is melted. Remove from heat and cool.
- Beat eggs in a large bowl until frothy.
- Slowly add the sugar to your eggs, then add the salt, lemon zest, lemon juice, and vanilla.
- Add your yeast mixture & milk/butter mixture and either knead by hand, or use a dough hook on your mixer to mix everything together until fully incorporated and until dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl. This is a sticky dough, but if the dough is not pulling away from the bowl, slowly add a little bit more flour until it does. Be careful not to add too much flour or your bread will be tough.
- Keep mixing for 9 more minutes.
- Grease the sides of the bowl, cover with a cloth or plastic wrap, and let rise for 1 1/2 hours.
- Punch down and let rise for another 30 minutes.
- Form the dough into small loaves (I made 6 loaves) and place on a grease cookie sheet. Let rise for another 2 hours.
- Bake at 325 for 15-20 minutes, or until they are golden brown on the top.
- Place on a cooling rack and let cool down completely before icing.
- For the buttercream icing, mix all ingredients in a bowl and whip until fluffy.
- Ice your paska and enjoy!!
- Paska is best eaten fresh, but freezes well (just don't put the icing on before you freeze it)
Do you like it? Do you not like it? Do you have a secret ingredient that you think makes your paska the best? Let me know!
I made 24 loaves of Paska for my friends and family following your recipe. I have never baked Paska before and the taste was great. ( We love lemon so I added a bit more lemon than the recipe called for.)
The Paska is very tasty, however I do have two questions for you:
1. I may have missed it, although I re-read the recipe several times, but when do you add the flour? Is the flour added to the wet ingredients all at once or at different times? Or, are the wet ingredients added to the flour? Should the flour be sifted before using it? I did not sift mine, and while I was kneading the dough felt it was lumpy. I kneaded most of the lumps out, but that took a lot of hand-kneading. Could you please advise me on when and how to introduce the flour into the process?
2. I was surprised that Mennonites added sprinkles to the icing. At first I thought this was your take on Paska, but further investigation showed that all the Mennonite Paska recipes added sprinkles. Do you have any idea how sprinkles became part of the Paska making tradition?
I love the breads I have made, and thank you for your recipe. I love cooking, but I am terrified of baking. This is the first yeast-based recipe I have tried, which did not fail. You have given me confidence to try more baking projects.
Thank you, and Happy Easter.
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. Paska definitely has an ideal bread to icing ratio and the icing on the top crust doesn’t get close to enough. My family spreads extra icing on also. I, too, think that stale paska isn’t really better than any other stale bread.
I’ve been working on my recipe for a long time and haven’t gotten it quite where I want it yet. I found a few things that have helped, though:
Roux, aka tangzhong, take 5 to 10% of your flour and 5x as much liquid as flour and cook it, stirring, until it goes thick like pudding. It increases softness and shelf life.
Egg yolks. Use some whole eggs and some egg yolks. The white adds structure and rise to the bread but makes it taste drier and ,I think , speeds up staling. Using some yolks alone increases richness add improves keeping. I use the leftover whites to make Swiss meringue buttercream to ice with.
Oil. Substitute some of your butter for oil. Just like in cake baking it’ll increase perceived moistness.
I like your blog a lot. Happy Easter!
This Mennonite boy had a mom who made bread her entire life and for the life of me I have struggled to come close to her breadmaking finesse. That siad, I’ve never heard of paska but I’m very intrigued, perhaps I’ll see if I can not mess it up too badly! Happy that I found your site and looking forward to following you.
This recipe turned out awesome! My partners (german mennonite) grandmother makes Paska at Easter and this is almost identical. Im not able to get the recipe from her at this time so thankyou for sharing!
That is so great to hear!
[…] to make a proper Easter post (I actually thought Easter was next weekend). My children all wanted Paska (Easter Bread), and have been asking daily for the last week, and I thought it was weird that they would ask for […]
[…] of March. So for the last few years, my wife has been making smaller, artisan bread type loaves of Easter bread, which I think tastes better than the rectangular loaves that my foster mother used to make while I […]
Followed this recipe exactly and they came out raw in the middle. Cooked the second batch twice as long and they’re still raw in the middle. No one can figure out what we did wrong because we followed it exactly but we’re definitely going to try again and see how it goes