been thinking about Good Fridays past, and how I used to spend them. As a working mom I would generally take the day off. The children, once they were school age, would have the day off as well. Sometimes there would be a church service, sometimes if the weather was sunny and warm we'd do something outside. But especially, on Good Friday I did Easter baking.
Holiday baking was something Mom practiced in a big way. She inherited this from her mother, my Grandma Wolinski, and passed it on to me and my sisters and brothers. My siblings and I have likewise passed on this activity to our sons and daughters. And my ten year old grandson bakes as well.
Mom would start her baking early in Holy Week. She did homemade bread, from a recipe from her mother. She did sugar cookies, dozens of sugar cookies, cut out with Easter-themed cooky cutters and frosted in pink, yellow, green. She baked a delicious sweet yeast bread, shaped in pieces about 3
or 4 inches long, and dipped in melted butter, sugar and cinnamon, called “Russian Bread.” My recollection is that Mom got this recipe from a friend when they were both young mothers. It became a must at every Easter and Christmas from then on. And most wonderfully, Mom made an Easter Lamb cake every Easter. Actually, she made several, sometimes 3, sometimes more. One would be kept for
the family, the others given to friends, neighbors, the sisters who taught in the parochial school.
decorate their Easter Lambs, laboriously squeezing out row after row of buttercream frosting to resemble fleece. I did this too when I started making Easter Lambs for my family, in the early 70s. It was hard work, and led to aching fingers. Somewhere along the line I decided to try frosting the cake and patting on coconut to make the fleece effect. But so far as I know, my sisters, daughter, and nieces still do the frosting the traditional way.
At some point I also started making Hot Cross Buns and an Easter Nest coffee cake, both recipes from a 1973 cookbook, “Better Homes and Gardens Homemade Bread Cook Book.”
Here is the Easter Lamb that Lara made last year at her place:
notebook, and made copies for her sisters (my aunts) and her children. The recipes were ones that Grandma had written out and mailed to Mom when she was a young mother. The Easter Lamb recipe was one of those included in the notebook collection. My copy of that recipe, the one for Russian Bread, and a shorthand version I wrote out for Mom’s sugar cookies, are frail, frayed and spotted with the accumulated splatters of decades, roadmaps of my Easter baking of years gone by.