Eggless Slovak Paska Bread and Paska Peeps

Slovak Paska is an Eastern European Easter Bread made with eggs, sugar, milk, flour and yeast. It has so much decorative details on the top. For the Baking Eggless Challenge this month, everyone wanted anything other than sweets and so I selected this decorative bread. This is not loaded with sugar. And the technique used in the decorations was quite interesting. There is also peeps made out of paska flour. These are cute bird figurines made with the dough and then baked. So this became this month's challenge. We had to avoid eggs in the original recipe and come up with our own recipe without compromising on the texture of the bread. Here is my experiment with the dough....

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Koulouri/ Greek Politiko Simiti

The Baking Eggless group has completed two years and is entering the third successful year. For the last 24 months, in the group we have done so many experimenting and have prepared 24 dishes without eggs. We have done so many cakes and desserts. And for this year, we just want to stay away from cakes. To start it, this bread recipe suggested by Priya of Priya's Versatile Recipes is perfect. I have seen so many bread recipes which uses eggs for giving the softness. But according to the group, we can make soft bread without eggs. And here is the result to prove us right. Sesame covered ring shaped bread is a famous street food in Turkey and Greece. In turkey it is called as Simit ( I have already posted the recipe here) and in Greece it is called as Simiti/ Koulouri. The traditional Simiti is like simit, a ring shaped bread covered with sesame seeds but Politiko Simiti is a braided version of the simiti.  

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Faluche Du Nord

Faluche is the traditional bread from Nord - Northern region of France. It is usually flat in shape and soft and slightly dense and mostly had as breakfast with bread and jam. It is also used to make sandwiches. The procedure is quite easy and the recipe is vegan too. Madurai is very cool nowadays which is very nice but as for as bread baking is concerned , it is not that good. When I made the dough, it took nearly 4 hours for the first rise which usually happens in 45 minutes. So if you are baking bread in winter, please be patient and do not blame the yeast. And when I arranged the cut out bread dough in the tray, there was a power shut down and it never came back until 4 pm. I placed the tray in refrigerator until 4 (even though there was no power, it is better to keep it in a cooler place so that it doesn't over rise) Then I placed the tray in a warm oven for 1 hour before baking. So for a simple bread I needed a whole day. The final result was amazing. The bread needs to be white but mine were slightly brown. The crust was crispy and the crumb was so soft and when paired with a chocolate spread, it tasted wonderful. Sruti and myself finished off half the batch when it came out of oven. It was that good!!! For this month's Home Baker's Challenge, our host Priya Suresh gave us three French recipes and this was one among them. I loved  baking these cute little breads and loved eating them too... Linking this to Yeastspotting.

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