Martha’s 6 Favorite Easter Sides to Make This Year

Bath buns, spice buns, penny buns, Chelsea buns, currant buns, hot cross buns, all have one thing in common. There is English as afternoon tea. And traditionally, these soft and slightly sweet cakes are served on Good Friday. My mom made really delicious hot cross buns every Easter in our home in Nutley. I had them for Ash Wednesday and then for Good Friday. Right, and they were tender and delicious and full of currants. I always asked mom to put more currants in them because she was always skimping on the currants. I also used citron from time to time. That's right. Well, here's a recipe that is an adaptation, I think, of mom's original. One cup of milk, right, mother? It's been heated just till it's- Lukewarm. If it's too hot to touch it, it's too hot for the yeast. And you're pouring in- Two envelopes of dry yeast. And that's just the regular dry yeast, right? Fleischmann's. Okay. And you stir to dissolve. And you need your sugar. Half cup and two teaspoons of salt. Half a cup of sugar, two teaspoons of salt. Okay. And now the melted butter. Oh, yeah, it's been melted and cooled. Yep. 12 tablespoons. 12 tablespoons of unsalted butter. And for flavoring, I used cinnamon and nutmeg. Oh, great. Three quarter teaspoon of each will do it. Okay. There's the cinnamon. So it's three quarters of a teaspoon of grated nutmeg. Look at this beautiful nutmeg, mother. This is so strong. I'm not gonna add a whole three quarters because this is fresh and pungent. So we'll see how that might- I can smell it all the way here. Oh, yeah, it's very fragrant. To this, we add the flour. Okay, so- About five and a half cups. And I'll beat up four eggs. Now, this is a really easy dough because it's just the liquid and the flour. Yep, really easy. Five and a half cups. About that. And this was acceptable for Lent? Well, there's sugar in them. How did we get away with the sugar? I used to give up sugar for Lent. We gave up candy. Oh, candy. So sugar in baked goods, we didn't have cakes or too many pies, but hot cross buns were acceptable because it's sort of a bread. And bread, you know, is the staff of life. There's always some rationalization. You know, Easter is the season of the resurrection and a rebirth of spring. So bread had a very important part. That looks good, doesn't it? Okay, so why don't we take this off and see how we're doing. Okay. So how many currants are you adding? About a cup of them. Okay. The more, the merrier, you know? I like fruit in my cakes and buns. Oh, it looks beautiful. Take all this out, and I'll get going on kneading it. Okay, how much kneading do you think it's gonna require? Well, we'll have to mix all the currants in first. And a wood scraper, please. Here you are. And it doesn't stick. Lovely. And now this has to rise until it doubled in bulk. I like to turn this around so that the top gets a little bit of butter on it, too. Good idea. Now you cover it. So we're gonna let this rise for an hour and a half, but we have one already made that really did rise beautifully, didn't it? Nice and spongy. So I'll turn it out on a lightly floured surface, give it a couple more. And I'm making the little egg wash with really an egg white wash for the tops. Just a little bit of salt, water, and egg white. One egg white. So now this makes 24 buns, and you can form the buns. And I'm going to brush them with egg white. And I'm rolling these between my hands. Okay. And what's nice about an egg white glaze like this is that it doesn't really add any color, but it does add a beautiful shine. And this dough is dark because of all those spices. One thing my mother is very good at is high-speed big production. I think that comes from having such a big family, don't you? Perhaps. Nice. Okay, there you go. So this here, you can... Cover that. Cover lightly with plastic wrap, and let these rise until they're doubled in bulk and look like this. They'll be ready to be baked. Now we're gonna cut the tops of these in a cross that... Who was it? Queen Elizabeth required. And so now these go into what temperature oven? About 350, 375. Okay, for approximately 25 minutes. And here is a finished batch. Oh, they look so good, and they are tender. And to make the glaze, confectioner's sugar. Right. What else? Well, we add a couple of spoons of milk to the confectioner's sugar. Just a little bit. Like one, two. That's enough. And a little lemon juice for flavoring and perhaps a little rind. And we'll pipe this on. You can do it with a spoon, but it works so easily with a piping bag. And a nice little secret so everything doesn't leak out of the pastry bag is that the tip is covered with a piece of plastic wrap. Oh. See? So we can now decorate our hot cross buns with beautiful crosses. Yeah, right into the cross. I always used to lick off the cross. I think most kids do. And then I would eat my hot cross bun. Let's see if they're as good as I remember. Really good. And this recipe is called brown sugared carrots. So peel and halve lengthwise one to one and a half pounds of carrots. Try to have them pretty much the same size. Ready to cook the carrots. In a large skillet, large enough to hold all of the carrots, heat two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and cook the carrots in that pan until they start to lose some of their moisture. Move them around. Coat them with the oil. So now while you're sauteing, add a little bit of salt to your carrots. This does actually help pull the moisture out of the carrots and makes it easier once you add the sugar to caramelize those carrots. You can add a little bit of pepper too. Now again, by cooking, you really enhance the color of these carrots. They're a brighter orange than they were when you put them in the pan. While this is all going on, you could at the same time make your garnish of green carrot tops. These are very greatly enhanced if you fry them. So these are just pieces of the carrot top and I have some grapeseed oil heating here in this pan. Oops. Watch out. It does splatter. Oh yeah, this does a very nice quick fry and that'll be a pretty garnish. So I'll just add a bunch of these and stand away. They have a lot of moisture in them and fry until a little bit crispy. So after about three minutes, add your sugar and molasses. That's one tablespoon, two tablespoons and one tablespoon of molasses. Very pretty. Look how they fry. And cooking them in something like a grapeseed oil is very good because that has a very high smoking point. Look how beautiful they look. And again, stir the carrots. Now, if you left this cooking without any additional moisture, you might get some burned carrots. So I would suggest adding a little bit of water and keep cooking, watching until the carrots are tender and you might add up to, oh, about a cup of water if your carrots are large and tough. So now while the carrots are cooking, add a sprig or two of fresh rosemary just into that thickening sauce. And they're starting to get a little tender. Watch the point of a knife. Just, yep, just starting to penetrate easily. When it goes through easily, you know that it's done. Now, before you turn these off, put a small piece of butter, oh, about a tablespoon and a half into the pan. And now you can scoop these out onto a platter and garnish with your fried carrot tops. Your family's going to adore them. Here at Martha Stewart Living, we've designed some really fun cookie cutters for Easter and for springtime, a hatching bunny and a barnyard hen. And today I'm going to use them to show you some decorating ideas I thought you'd like to see. Once you've baked a cookie like this sugar cookie or a chocolate cutout cookie like this hen, and they're not very difficult. The recipes are in the program guide of the magazine. How do you decorate it? Well, the techniques are really easy. We have all kinds of unusual sugars. This is called crystal sugar. It's bigger than a normal grain of sugar and it's very shiny. These crystal sugars can be dyed to order using something that's called petal dust. Petal dust is a vegetable food coloring that's in powder form. Take a little bit of it on the end of a wooden toothpick and just stir into the sugar. That petal dust, which by the way is available in specialty cake decorating stores, will tint the sugar whatever shade you like. Another kind of sugar is called a non-pari. It's really opaque grainy sugar that makes very nice decorations on these springtime cookies. To make these sugars stick to a cookie, just take some egg white, which can be powdered or fresh egg white. Just gently break it up with a fork if it's fresh and paint the areas that you wish to decorate with the sugar with the egg white. You can use powdered meringue for this also. Place this on your parchment covered baking sheet and sprinkle the sugar quite generously all over the painted area. Don't worry about the excess. That will be picked up and put back in the bowl for other decorating. Just spread that all over and let it dry. Now to decorate an empty cookie like this, outline the broken egg using a number six round tip. By making an outline like this, you prevent the icing from dripping down the edges of the cookie and then gently fill in the area that you want to be iced. This royal icing is a mixture of egg white and confectioner's sugar. You can just pull the icing with the tip to cover the area. By outlining the cookie like this and filling in, you get an icing covering that's very neat, thick, and smooth. Make sure you let the frosting dry really, really well before you start to do other decoration on top of it. Now let's see how our blue and pink bunny is doing. Shake off the excess sugar. Now with some pink icing, we'll make the nose and the ears. Some hints about using pastry bags. These are 10 inch coated bags. I have them folded over at the top and clipped with a big paper clip. This will help keep the icing from oozing out over the top of the bag. Also, to keep the icing from drying out in the tip, each of these little jelly jars that are holding the bags upright has a damp paper towel in the bottom of the jar. That'll keep the tip nice and moist. Now I'll show you how to decorate one of these big hens with kind of a quilt pattern. Take a number three tip and draw your lines across the body of the barnyard hen. These same decorating techniques can be used for any shape cookie, the stars and the moons, the heart and the hand, but just so long as it's appropriate for the occasion. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a delicious dish out of two kinds of peas, sugar snap peas, which are these edible pod peas, which are so crispy and fresh, and shell peas, which yield beautiful, fresh peas like this right out of the shell. Some mint and some spring onions. These are really the big bulb onions, but pulled young, this is what they look like. They're not scallions, they're not chives, they're spring onions. And these just clean well, take off any excess outer skin and slice the white parts of the onion very thinly with your knife. And you saute these in a little bit of butter and olive oil until they're tender. Also, bring a big pot of water to a boil, salt it generously with kosher salt. In our pan, a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter. And you can just start very slowly cooking the spring onions and in rapidly boiling salted water, put your shelled peas and these should cook for three minutes in boiling water. Look, they immediately change to a bright, bright green upon hitting the water. And look how fantastic these look. Taste the biggest one. Needs a slightly bit more time. There, now, with this nice wire spider, which is really a Chinese tool, you can scoop out the peas and put them into a strainer sitting in a bowl of iced water. And so those will now chill, lock in the color, lock in a lot of the flavor. Now into the same water, put your sugar snap peas. These should not take too long to cook. And again, they take on a vibrant green color. Draining the peas right here on the paper towel. Now the onions are just right, getting soft, translucent. So pretty. And you can get these right into the iced water also. And these can go right into your hot butter and onions. And add your shelled peas. Now, what could be easier than that? Fresh, green, delightful vegetables. Flavorful, pretty. Oh, don't forget the last little fabulous taste. And that's mint, fresh mint. You don't want a lot of mint. You don't want it to overpower the peas. So a tablespoon or two of torn mint leaves would be just perfect for this. And don't forget a little flavoring of salt and pepper. So pretty. In Greece around Easter time, you'll find sureki, a braided holiday bread traditionally baked at home on the Thursday before Easter. And it's embellished with red hard-boiled eggs. We're using bread flour to create a good gluten formation. So into the bowl of your mixer. Now this is an easy dough because everything goes right into this bowl. There's no proofing of the yeast or anything. So one cup of room temperature water, three tablespoons of honey, Greek honey if you're making a Greek bread, and three quarters of an ounce of fresh yeast. Fresh yeast, you might have a little bit difficulty finding but it's really worth it. And this is a living microscopic organism which converts sugar or starch into alcohol and carbon dioxide and causes the nice rising of the dough. So let this just sit for a moment to dissolve. And the honey is like food for the yeast. I love making yeast doughs. One tablespoon of salt, one tablespoon of orange zest, and quarter of a cup of vegetable oil, and bread flour. We're going to use one and a half pounds which is about four and a half cups. Now you can weigh if you'd like, which works very, very well. Or measure carefully, dipping and leveling in a jar like this. And one last thing, the sugar. This is a slightly sweet bread. So a quarter of a cup of sugar. So that's everything except the egg yolks. Now the machine is fitted with a dough hook which will mix and knead the bread at the same time. And I'll just turn this on. I still have to add the egg yolks, eight egg yolks. And reserve the egg whites for meringues, for other things. And we're going to start adding that because the dough needs a little bit of moisture. So let this knead and knead. The dough used in Tzareki is rich with eggs, making it similar to Jewish challah bread and other traditional egg breads made around the world. So once the dough starts flopping around like that and comes away from the sides of the bowl, it's pretty much done. Now lift this up, release your dough hook. Still sticky, so you're going to do a little tiny bit more kneading. But what a gorgeous color dough, greatly enhanced by those farm fresh organic eggs that I used. So scrape away, this little bench scraper works very, very well for cleaning up the bowl and the mixer. Scrape down the sides. And this is going to make one big challah bread. And when I say big, wait till you see how big. So scrape everything out of the bowl onto a floured board. And look at how pretty, you can see the little specks of orange zest and flatten this out. Don't incorporate any more flour into the dough because you want a moist dough. And just pull down the top here, pull up the bottom, brushing off excess. Fold this in and this. So you're making a nice little package. And this goes right into an oiled bowl. Oil with some unflavored vegetable oil like a safflower oil will do. And then a piece of plastic wrap brushed with a little bit more oil to cover the whole thing. Put this right on the surface of the dough and over the edges because you don't want the dough to stick. And put this in a dry, warm spot until it's at least doubled in bulk. So here is our dough. So yellow, so great. Now turn this out onto a floured surface. You don't want a lot of flour. It's like a beach ball. Now deflate the dough and cut it into three equal pieces. Use a bench scraper like this. It works very well. And each of these three pieces roll into a snake 18 inches long. But try to make the cylinders pretty much even because you want a nice, even bread. Three. And then you pinch the ends together and you'll tuck this under and braid as you would a hair braid. Over, over. A tight braid would be good. I think that's good. Now on Easter, they sometimes insert a red hard-boiled egg and we'll show you what that looks like. But I prefer baking this without the eggs and serving it with the eggs on the platter just because the red kind of bakes off into the bread and people don't like eating that. Put this on the diagonal and again, cover with an oiled piece of plastic wrap. If you don't oil your plastic wrap, it will pull the dough when you try to remove it and make little ugly marks. Now put this in a dry, warm place until it is doubled in bulk. So now uncover your bread. This is one egg beaten with a fork. That's your glaze. And carefully, lightly brush every single square centimeter with your egg glaze. Don't press because you'll deflate what has so beautifully risen. You can brush once and then wait a minute or so and brush again if you want a really, really deep brown crust. Preheated 375 degree oven. It's going to take about an hour to bake. Now, if you were going to insert eggs with the eggshells dyed red, put your bread into the oven for 10 minutes, remove the bread, stick these eggs into the braid, then put it back in the oven and bake for the rest of the hour. So now here are the two gorgeous breads that we have made. Red eggs are an important part of the Eastern Orthodox Easter tradition. The red eggs symbolize the blood of Christ, rebirth and renewal. I do not suggest you eat them because they've already been hard boiled and then they have been baked in the oven for an hour and they're not very tasty, but they are very pretty. And I just want you to see, this is very light. How pretty that would be on your table. Wouldn't you like to have a taste of this right now? Butter lettuce is sometimes overlooked when it comes to making salads, but it's one of my preferred lettuces. It's sweet, tender leaves pair perfectly with a fresh citrus and yuzu vinaigrette. And this salad is unusual, simple to make, and it is absolutely perfect when cooking for one or two. Break up one of the little butter lettuces. As you get into the heart of the lettuce, the leaves are whiter. On the outer leaves, these big leaves, which I'm not gonna use for this particular salad, they're darker green. I like the little center leaves, just about that size. So your lettuces should be well dried and broken into individual leaves. That's the salad. Now to make the dressing. This is the unusual part. We'll need some fresh ginger, and fresh ginger comes in the store like this, like branches. And we just need a piece about that size. To peel ginger, just use the edge of a spoon like this and the peel comes right off. There's nothing easier than a spoon for removing the skin of ginger. I don't know who found this out, but thank you. It is the greatest method. Just look how clean and lovely that ginger looks when peeled with a spoon. If you were going to peel with a knife, you'd waste a lot of the ginger. This takes just the skin off. And so this peeled ginger is what you're going to grate. Now this was originally a wood rasp, which was adapted for kitchen use. And it is very, very fine grater. It acts pretty much like a wasabi grater, which the Japanese use. See how fine it is? It has a lot of fibers in the ginger itself. And to grate it any other way is quite impossible. So this wood rasp is the perfect tool for the job. So two teaspoons of fresh grated ginger. Easy to do, right? And the juice of one lime. If you happen to have a yuzu fruit, which is a citrus fruit, sort of a cross between a lemon and a lime. It has a bumpy green skin, a little difficult to find in the marketplace. But those are yuzus. They're grown now in California. They were imported from Japan. Very flavorful, very fragrant. But we're using instead a yuzu vinegar, which is very, very nice. And we just need a tablespoon of yuzu vinegar and a tablespoon of safflower oil. This is a great oil to use for fragrant vinaigrettes because it has no flavor, it is colorless, and it doesn't seize up or thicken when it gets cold. It stays like this. And it's very, very high in polyunsaturates. So it's a healthier oil than most others. Very good oil. Safflower comes from the safflower thistle. So that's the ginger dressing. Add two teaspoons of granular sugar. So it's a sweet dressing. And a pinch of salt. Just give it a little taste, important. Mm, really, really good. And a little bit of pepper. Now I have three slices of avocado. This is going to be our surprise at the bottom of our salad. And you can just arrange those on a plate. You can sprinkle that with a little bit of sea salt, a little bit of pepper. And now toss your lettuce, smaller leaves first. Just toss in the dressing. Start with the smallest leaves and arrange the salad. It's gonna be kind of a mounded salad. It's very pretty. But this way, each leaf is coated with that fragrant dressing. I just don't like to eat salads that have partially tossed lettuce. And if you just drizzle the oil over it, it's not going to dress each piece. Better to do it in the bowl. I wish you could smell this. It's really, really good. Now you can make this, oh, in the kitchen right before your guests sit down. The bigger the bowl, of course, the easier to toss the lettuce and the faster you'll be able to create your salad. Finishing touch, a little bit of toasted sesame seeds. Just sprinkled all over the exterior of your salad.