Of Eggs, Baskets and Dramatic Biographies... HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!!!!

My mom is Polish, my dad is Swiss. The good thing about being a mix is that I get to pick and match the best traditions out of two cultures while leaving out the crap boring stuff. The downside is that people don’t understand each other at our dinner table (only my brother and I speak all three languages used in my family: german, swiss german and polish. Yes you Germans out there, Swiss German is a language shut up. And yep. I have to translate stuff often. And yes. It’s annoying. But then, apparently polish is extremely hard to learn so I do forgive my dad. Occasionally.) Anyway today I will, as it is in fact Easter, tell you about Swiss and Polish Easter traditions. As you might know, most people in Switzerland care about roughly four things: chocolate, cheese, money and keeping strangers out. Ok yeah I do admit it, I tend to paint a rather dark picture of the country but that might just be because I like painters (and composers) with a dark biography, like Vincent van Gogh (Fun fact: My parents wanted to call me Vincent, had i been born a boy. Gosh that man cut off his own EAR!). Anyway. What do we Swiss do for Easter? We eat chocolate and eggs. In fact, the only really big thing is the Sunday midday meal. We have eggs in all shapes and colors. We take great pride in decorating hard-boiled eggs during hours of careful work only to use them for a game called „Eiertätsch“ where two eggs are hit against each other and the owner of the intact egg wins. The prize of the winner is only the victory itself. (I know you expected it to be money but HA! You lose!) Both eggs are then destroyed and eaten. Another popular egg game is „Eierlaufe“, a relay where the contestants have to run around while balancing a spoon with a raw egg on it. It can look quite ridiculous and (omg) in this case the winners DO get a prize. Woohoo! So yeah, we eat eggs (has anyone ever had an ostrich egg? There is an ostrich farm near my parents’ house in Switzerland but I’ve never had an egg. And the ostriches look SO evil.) and there is also an Easter egg hunt. In this case, the eggs are in fact chocolate eggs, made of the finest and most delicious Swiss chocolate. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this text it is that Swiss chocolate is indeed the best chocolate in the world. And when it is molded into an oval shape and wrapped in a colorful aluminium foil it can indeed be considered both a food- and an eye-orgasm.  Oh yeah and one last thing: We eat this very nice Easter cake (recipe below). So there you go, Swiss Easter traditions: Cake. eating eggs (both from hens, ostriches and chocolate), running around with them, and hitting them against each other. Now let’s move to Poland. Now if there is one thing you need to know it’s that many Poles like Catholicism very much. And thus most Polish Easter traditions are very much religious. Around the time of Easter there are around 1000 different days where you do different crazy stuff like take a palm tree to church, eat fish (good Friday), go to church a LOT, eat some more fish (every Friday basically, I kinda lied about it being just good Friday), go to church some more, have a massive meal on Sunday and splash people with water on the Monday. There is one funky tradition that I wanna highlight because you can modify it and it’s just funny. On Holy Saturday, we take this basked full of random stuff to church to get it blessed by the priest. The traditional components are salt, ham, bread, horseradish, water, eggs and a little figure of a lamb. And the priest says some amazing blessing and then we take the basket home, let the stuff stand around and spread all the fantastic blessing around the house and on Sunday we eat everything (I lied. again We don’t eat the plastic lamb.) and thus the blessed molecules get integrated into our bodies and it just feels so great! Yeah. And here comes the fun: You can obviously put anything you like in the basket and the priest will bless it. You can play really fun games, like hide a condom in there and have sex with a blessed condom. I have not actually done that. But you could. Also Polish Easter is a lot about decorations. We make some of the nicest decorated eggs (But they are wooden, we don’t destroy them and eat them like those Swiss barbarians.) called Pisanki. It is a tradition to get a branch from a tree and hang them on it. In fact, we once had one of those branches for so long that it grew roots and we ended up planting it and it’s now a big tree in our garden.

That is basically all I wanted to tell you about Swiss and Polish Easter. If you may excuse me now, I have to go and paint some more hard-boiled eggs while listening to Chopin. That is the composer I hinted at earlier. A genius. Died at the age of 39. And most interestingly, he was also a mix: Half French and half Polish. So he probably did the basket thing, too! Who knows, maybe he added some sheet music to his basket? Or a mini-Eiffel tower? Oh wait… that wasn’t built yet. Ach I should just go back to my eggs…

SWISS EASTER CAKE RECIPE

For the dough:

200g flower

½ teaspoon salt

100g butter

40g sugar

½ lemon: grated skin

1 egg: beaten, not stirred

For the filling:

3 tablespoons apricot jam

400 ml milk

pinch of salt (preferrably blessed by the priest)

55g semolina

50g butter

45g sugar

½ lemon: zest and grated skin

40g sultanas

20g almonds, ground

3 eggs, yolk and white separated

To make the cake:

For the dough just mix all the stuff and use it to cover the bottom and sides of a 24cm diameter baking pan

To make the filling

Bring milk to a boil. Add semolina, simmer at low heat for 15-20min.

Pre-heat oven to 220°C

Add lemon, butter, sugar, sultanas and almonds to the semolina mix, let cool down.

Add the egg yolks

Beat the egg whites until stiff, add to the mix

Finish and bake:

Spread the apricot jam on the bottom of the cake, pour the filling into the baking pan, bake for roughly 30min. let cool down. Use icing sugar and all your amazing imagination to decorate this delicious treat!

EN GUETE!