Cozonac și pască
Festive sweet bread and Easter cake
Sweet yeast bread with walnuts and an Easter cake with sweet cheese, for the great feasts
Photo: Vvssmmaann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Andcrislor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Cozonac is a rich, sweet yeast bread often rolled around a filling of ground walnuts; pască is the round Easter cake with sweet fresh cheese and raisins. Together they grace the Moldovan table at Easter, and cozonac at Christmas too. Moldova shares cozonac with Romania and Bulgaria; the Ukrainian paska is more of a rich white bread.
Origins and history
The name cozonac may go back via the Bulgarian kozunak to a Greek diminutive. In Romania and Moldova the bread is traditionally baked during Holy Week, often on Maundy Thursday or Saturday morning, and also for Christmas. For Lent there is a version without eggs and butter, cozonac de post. Pască owes its name to Paști, Easter, and is purely an Easter bake. A report on traditional Moldovan pască describes how bakers put a cross on the cake and only cut it on Easter Sunday. In Ukraine the Easter bread is called paska, but there it is usually a rich, decorated white bread with no cheese filling.
What goes into it
Cozonac is a yeast dough with plenty of eggs, milk, butter and sugar, flavoured with lemon zest, vanilla or rum. The dough needs long kneading and several risings. The classic filling is ground walnut with sugar, sometimes with cocoa or raisins; Romanian bakers also add lokum, Turkish delight. The sheet is rolled up and baked in a loaf tin, so that a cross-section shows a spiral. Pască has a base and rim of the same kind of dough, with a filling of sweet fresh cheese, eggs, sugar and raisins, often finished with a plait or a cross of dough.
Where and how to try it
In the weeks before Easter, bakeries and supermarkets are full of cozonac and pască, but many families still bake their own. Pască is the bake of a single feast: taste it and you are tasting Easter. A slice of cozonac with coffee or tea can also be found in cafés and bakeries outside the holidays.
Cozonac și pască
Ingredients
Method
- Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm milk with 1 tbsp of the sugar and leave for 10 minutes until frothy.
- Whisk the egg, egg yolks and the rest of the sugar until light. Mix with the flour, salt, yeasted milk, lemon zest and vanilla and knead for 10 minutes. Knead in the melted butter a little at a time until the dough is supple and glossy.
- Cover and leave to rise in a warm place for 1 hour 30, until doubled in size.
- Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold in the walnuts, sugar and cocoa.
- Roll the dough out into a 30 by 40 cm rectangle, spread with the filling and roll up from the short side. Place the roll in a buttered loaf tin and leave to rise for another hour.
- Brush with egg yolk and bake for 45 to 50 minutes in an oven at 170 °C. Cover with baking paper if the top browns too quickly. Leave to cool completely before slicing.
