German Chocolate Easter Cake
This recipe has been held dear in my family for decades and my mum has kindly agreed to let me share it 🙂
Yeast Dough Recipe
1000 g Flour
40 g fresh Yeast
1 Tablespoon Sugar
500 ml of lukewarm milk
150g softened unsalted butter ( room temperature )
1 Egg
1 pinch of Salt
Pour the flour into a large bowl.
Create a well in the middle of the flour and crumble the fresh yeast into it.
Add the sugar into the well and use 1/3 of the flour and 1/2 of the lukewarm milk and stir it all gently in the well until smooth.
Cover the bowl with a cloth and let the dough rise for 20 minutes in a warm place. The yeast will rise and bubble up which is normal.
This is what the dough should look like after the first rise
Then add the rest of the lukewarm milk, the soft (room temperature) butter, the egg, salt and mix with the remaining flour.
Knead the dough properly (with your hands) punch the dough down
(I actually throw it down onto my slightly floured kitchen surface about 5 times)
Put the dough ball back into the bowl again, cover and let it rise for another 30 minutes in a warm place.
You will see that the dough has risen beautifully and changed texture.
This dough can be used in many different cakes and breads and you can experiment with fillings (even cheese and rosemary are nice) and shapes, but my family tradition is to bake it into a circular plait.
Flour your surface and rolling pin and gently roll out your dough into a large rectangle about 0.5-0.75cm thick.
Cut it into thirds with a knife.
Now you can fill your cake with literally anything you like from jam, nuts, chocolate, raisins etc…. ( my mum would roll her eyes now as she only likes this very plain and she usually only adds a little lemon zest and sugar to bake this into a plain brioche style bread. She loves to eat the bread in slices spread with butter and jam.)  But for me, my favourite filling is chocolate or marzipan, or even better chocolate and marzipan.
For Easter I add 2 packs of Cadbury mini eggs and 1 pack of golden marzipan cut into thin slices and I distribute the filling evenly over the 3 strands of dough which I then roll so that the filling is inside each of them.
Filling and closing up the strands of dough
Now have a bowl of warm water handy and fold each strand in half, wet the dough slightly with water and fold the other half of each strand over and close each strand into a roll. Don’t forget to squish down the ends.
Now plait the 3 strands into one large plait and bend it into a circle. Close the 2 ends as neatly as possible. Transfer onto baking tray.
Plaiting the strands and forming a circle.
Bake for 25-30 minutes on 200 C
It smells divine and should be eaten on the day of baking or warmed up the next day.
Bon Appetit x
To add even more of an Easter feel to this cake, why not dye some hard boiled eggs as decoration 🙂
Hard boiled eggs dyed in glasses with food dye
Here is another fun idea to theme your Easter lunch:
Easter Bunny Fruit Salad
All you need is a pineapple, blueberries and some toothpicks to hold it all together
( and of course any chopped fruit you like for your salad)
