A
re you the kind of person
who groans when hot cross
buns appear in the shops
straight after Christmas? Or
are you the kind who, in the name of
preparedness, buys chocolate eggs early
in full knowledge that you’ll scoff them
the moment the family leaves the house,
then have to go and buy more?
I used to be a bit of both. I’d try to
slip apples and sultanas into my kids’
Easter baskets and minimise the whole
festival of chocolate, while secretly
cracking into an Elegant Rabbit that
I’d bought for my niece, before having
to go out and buy her another.
But I began to wonder what the point
was of opting out of the fun stuff while
still scoffing in secret. Rather than rule
out hot cross buns,could we all plunge
our hands into our own dough and do
a team-knead instead? Uncross the buns,
even? Could we carve out a new groove
where we embraced the season with treatsthat were free from child-labour cocoa,
palm oil and plastic wrap?
Pocky sticks are the best of the worst:
salty, crunchy cracker sticks dipped into
a rainbow of sweets, but sadly burdened
with food miles, plastic and palm sugar.
But we don’t need to give
them up. Our family
subverts the form with
a cracker dough made
savoury with tahini and
sea salt, and sweetened
just a little with honey.
We melt bowls of Fair
Trade dark and milk
chocolate and fill saucers
with a palette of garden
treats. We crumble dried calendula,
cornflower and dianthus petals to make
rainbow sprinkles, grind anise hyssop
flowers to a powder to make a pocky
stick that’s a little like a purple inside-out
liquorice bullet, and every year I attempt
honeycomb made with our honey, whichWe melt bowls of
Fair Trade chocolate,
and crumble dried
dianthus, cornflower
and calendula petals
to make our own
rainbow sprinkles.never seems to work, but still tastes pretty
wonderful smashed to smithereens, folded
through our melted chocolate and used
for dipping.
Those well-kneaded hot cross buns
get a taste of the garden, too. Every winter
I stab tiny cumquats with a needle and
pack them into jars with gin and rapadura
sugar. By the following autumn the jars
are ready to strain, giving me the most
friend-winning liqueur one could wish
for, and a wonderful haul of candied,
gin-flavoured fruit. I pull the pulp
from each cumquat, squeeze out every
delicious drop of liqueur (possibly straight
into a glass of ice-cold soda), and dice the
translucent skins, adding them to the
currants, raisins and sultanas that are to
go into our buns. It’s a useful thing to
have a soothing tipple handy when little
hands are flinging dough all over the
kitchen and showing wanton disregard
for shaping buns that will cook evenly.
To counter all that sugar we visit the
chook house, the garden, then the sock
drawer. The kids grab saucepans, fill them
with cold water and add onion skins to
one, beetroot peel to another and crushed
native pepperberries with a dash of
vinegar to a third. We bring the pots to
the boil and let them simmer on low
to draw the colours from our ingredients
while taking the scissors to some obsolete
pantyhose. The kids choose a few leaves
or flowers, press them onto raw, preferably
white-shelled eggs, and bind them tightly
with pantyhose and rubber bands before
cooking them in the pots of dye. We
can never wait for them
to be cool enough to
handle, and we burn
our fingertips as we
excitedly undo the
bindings to reveal the
magic that has taken place
in the saucepans. Usually
the plants leave a white
silhouette, but calendula
and shungiku blossoms
can dye the eggshells too, giving a beautiful
effect that is all too fleeting, as we crack
the shells and devour the still-warm eggs.
All these wholesome pleasures aside,
I’m pretty sure the secret Elegant Rabbit
ritual will endure – sorry Lily. My best
self is somewhere there in the middle.●Embracing a DIY spirit at Easter means you can have your
chocolate and eat it too, writesPAULETTE WHITNEY.
A good egg
34 GOURMET TRAVELLERProduce
ILLUSTRATION DAWN TAN.