Simple Easter mazurek

The quality of the photo is beside the point here, so please don’t bring it up. It came out the way it came out. The mazurek didn’t turn out, well, beautiful either. It turned out ours. Much like the Christmas gingerbread biscuits. They weren’t beautiful either. They were ours.

So today I went shopping with Ninka for the ingredients for our caramel mazurek. There was really just one thing that made me want to do it. We were in a cake shop on Sunday and my daughter asked for, erm, a mazurek. A whole mazurek. About 15 by 25 cm.

I tried some. Pretty good, actually. And straight away I got the itch. If I could make Christmas gingerbread and even, if I may be brutally honest and entirely immodest, an unbelievably delicious poppy seed roll (even my aunt liked it), could I make a mazurek like that?

I did take a big shortcut with the mazurek, though. I bought ready-made milk caramel. Ninka actually chose two kinds, plain and cocoa. We bought a piping bag too. Unfortunately it fell apart twice while we were decorating. Imagine the joys of “caramel hands”.

We also bought chocolate decorations. Hmm. Christmas trees, bells and angels. It was only at home that I noticed what they’d printed on the packet, presumably as a precaution against idiots: “Christ…”

Well, that should be fine. Easter’s to do with Christ too, isn’t it?

Except it said “Christmas”. Oh dear. Still, seeing as it snowed last Easter, to keep up the tradition Ninka and I made a caramel mazurek with Christmas trees and angels. Amen.

This recipe is exceptionally simple. Basically, make the dough for the base. Bake it. Decorate. Done. This mazurek isn’t nearly as scary as people make out. Good luck!

At a glance: 

Prep time: 20 minutes

Chilling time: an hour (I did 40 minutes in the fridge and the last 20 in the freezer)

Baking time: 18 minutes

Oven temperature: 200 degrees Celsius

Serves: one large mazurek, although we ended up with 2 medium ones and a few biscuits 🙂

Calories: mwahaha, hahaha (the tin says 100 grams of milk caramel – in words, one hundred grams – has 322 kcal. The tin holds 460 grams).

Ingredients for the mazurek:

• 200 grams of butter (straight from the fridge)
• 350 grams of wheat flour
• 2 egg yolks (hen’s eggs)
• half a cup of sugar
• three tablespoons of sour cream (18%)
• half a tin of plain milk caramel (dulce de leche) (that’s 230 grams; I bought a 460 gram tin)
• half a tin of cocoa-flavoured milk caramel (as above)
• decorative chocolates

How to make the Easter caramel mazurek:

I put the flour in a deep bowl and added the butter. Ninka broke the butter into little pieces with a spoon and added two egg yolks. She tipped in the sugar and added two tablespoons of sour cream. I stirred everything together with a spoon and started kneading. To keep Ninka busy too, I gave her a bit of dough to knead herself 🙂

Once my dough was smooth (you need to knead quickly and vigorously), I put my piece together with Ninka’s, kneaded it a little longer and wrapped the lot in a plastic bag. Into the fridge it went for 40 minutes.

After 40 minutes I heated the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (while it was heating up, the dough was getting very cold in the freezer, where I’d put it for roughly 15–20 minutes).

I took the dough out of the freezer and rolled it out flat. I lined a fairly large tin (about 25 by 40 cm, I reckon) with it, leaving the edges slightly raised. I put it in the oven for about 18 minutes (you can see it freshly baked, just out of the oven, in the picture below).

Here’s where I went wrong. Instead of letting it cool a little, I tried to take it out. Sadly it broke in half, and I still had to trim the pieces to get them even. So we ended up with two mazureks about 12 by 23 cm (one for Ninka, one for me) and a few little mazurek “biscuits”.

Ninka and I decorated them with a fairly thick layer of plain milk caramel underneath, about 3–4 millimetres, and piped “borders” in cocoa caramel. Then on went our chocolate trees, angels and bells. Voilà. Mazureks done. We put them in the fridge for a while so the caramel could set a little. Enjoy!