Lemon Surprise Easter Egg Buns - from Kiwicakes test kitchen

These colourful Easter Egg buns are perfect for a celebratory Easter brunch. They provide a heartier alternative to traditional chocolate indulgences!

Firstly get your sweet bread dough mix underway. I used the recipie in my breadmaker booklet which is:

350ml water
1 egg
2T melted butter
1t salt
2T sugar
4c high grade flour
3T milk powder
2t yeast

My breadmaker dough cycle takes 1 & 1/2 hours. If you were making it by hand I would allow a similar amount of time for hand-kneading and proofing. This dough weighs 1.2 kg. I split it into 65 gram balls, yielding 18 nicely sized buns. I rolled them into oval egg-like shapes on a lightly floured silicone mat, which provided just the right resistance for rolling dough balls.

The sun wasn't out in Whangarei this morning so my proofing options were limited. Giving the buns 30 minutes in a just-warm oven worked perfectly and they doubled in size.

While the buns proof you have time to prepare your egg washes. Whisk together 1 egg yolk with 3T cold tap water. Then split into 3 bowls and add a squirt of your favourite gel colour to each. Today I used lemon yellow, sky blue and a tulip red / dusty rose Americolor combination. Remember that your colours may behave slightly different to normal when mixed with the yellow of the egg yolk (e.g. my attempt at pink/red was stubborn at keeping its orangey tinge).

Paint 6 buns with each of your egg wash colours prior to cooking. I used a pastry brush (pictured in an egg wash bowl above) for an easy and even coating. The natural bristles are soft and didn't mark or indent the buns.

Easter Egg buns take almost 10 minutes to cook on fanbake at 200`C. Keep an eye on them after 8 or 9 minutes in case you need to save the tops from browning. 

Now comes the lemon surprise - I injected my sweet rolls with a lemon curd filling. Simply fit a disposable piping bag with a long bismarck tip and push the tip through one side into the middle of each bun. Squeeze a consistent amount into each bun, aiming for about 2 teaspoons. The bun closes back up again nicely once you remove the tip and the filling stays hidden in the centre.

Look at this luscious lemon curd and how its texture compliments the soft sweet bread. Curd is a lovely and tart surprise in these buns but using your favourite seedless jam would work equally well with the bismarck tip technique.

Serve in a fun Easter basket for maximum impact!

Strawberry pink champagne cupcakes

These cupcakes came about when I was tasked with making something for a cake guild meeting about "flavour profiles". I knew in advance what our demonstrator was making for the evening, so I tried to make something a little different to her flavours. The recipe formed and grew in my head as I was making them, and had a minor adjustment part way through.

To my regular vanilla cupcakes, I added two tablespoons of freeze dried strawberry powder. I baked them in the usual way, but the resulting cake was a little too subtle in flavour. Here's where they took a turn for the better: I decided to add a Strawberry creme  to the centre of each cupcake using Gobake Easy Frost and freeze dried strawberry powder. It's super easy, the recipe for creme is right there on the packet. Any unused portion can be stored in the fridge or frozen to make ice-cream like this. I used a Wilton bismark tip to fill the centre of the cupcakes (using Wilton's method, which you can see here).

To my buttercream icing recipe I added a few drops of Americolor pink gel paste colour and some Lorann champagne oil flavouring. It was piped with a simple 1m swirl (these cupcakes were all about the flavour not the decoration). We had a lot of items to taste test during our guild evening. These were a hit on the night and I will definitely be making them again.