This delicious and not too sweet yoghurt crème with mandarins can be served with our without a sponge cake base. Since I wanted to finally try out my half-sphere-shaped moulds, which I got for Christmas, I made the crème without a cake base.
This recipe for "Maultaschen", a Swabian specialty, comes from Gaby, my first boyfriend's mom, just as the Easter Wreath and many more of my favourite recipes. I'd known for many years that she often makes Maultaschen, but I always thought she made the dough herself using a pasta machine. When I finally had my own pasta machine and a lot of free time as well, I called her up to ask for the recipe, and leaned to my astonishment that you can get that kind of pasta dough for Maultaschen readymade in the supermarkets of Baden-Württemberg! Here in Bavaria, a scant 200 km away, it's nowhere to be found! Of course, you could make the dough yourself, but the wide roll of dough is very handy compared to the narrow one that my pasta machine produces. The filling of Gaby's Maultaschen is rather special, too, as classically it contains sausage meat and spinach. This filling with minced beef and leek is less fatty and I like it better. Gaby's original recipe
suggests 1 kg minced beef and only one piece of leek.
As so often with good baking ideas, it was my little sister who thought of making French Macarons au Chocolat. After researching them on YouTube
she found this French video, where this recipe comes from (I only reduced the amount of ganache a bit).
I think it's funny how we all searched for paper forms for muffins, especially when they were still hard to find, and now, you see a lot of chic bakeries just using plain baking paper squares instead - which seem even more chic to me than the good old paper forms! On the other hand, I thought it a bit exhausting to wrestle the dough into them. We shall see if my colleagues find the muffins comfortable to eat out of the paper squares tomorrow ;-)
For several years now, we color some of our easter eggs with leaves from the garden. It's amazing what kind of nicely shaped leaves you can find if you look closely!
As soon as I posted my first easter bunny bread here, I found a much cuter bunny bread here. This one cannot be made with sour dough, only with yeast dough...and I found the recipe not very reliable, I had to use much more flour than was specified. 
I'm lucky enough to cook in a fantastic kitchen with granite work counters (which often mirror the flash when I take pictures but are otherwise awesome). Since a piece of the granite was cut out for the stove, we had a rather big and heavy block of granite sitting around, which lead to the idea of having it cut in shape to use as a pizza stone. Most pizza stones are made from chamotte (grog), but there are also some granite ones, only marble is chalkstone and therefore not suited for the heat differences, according to my research. You place the pizza stone on the grill rack of the oven (preferably with a margin of 1 cm all around to avoid areas of trapped heat), heat up the oven and bake the pizza or bread on the stone, which provides for the crisp pizza base by gradually suppliying the heat. You can use a wooden bread paddle to get the pizza into the oven, but since that seems to require some practice (and a wooden paddle), we used a wooden cutting board with a baking sheet on top. Sometimes you read that the pizza stone must have a porous surface in order to "absorb the humidity from the air", for which baking sheets pose a small problem. Since our stone has a smooth surface anyway (which is very helpful for cheese rests which tend to stink and burn in on chamotte stones), I guess the baking paper didn't matter. You could also remove it from under the pizza after 2 minutes of baking...but it worked very nicely like this, too!
Since bread is a lot healthier than the traditional yeast dough easter bakings, I wanted to try and bake a bread in easter bunny form. I used the dough from "Sourdough bread Rudi", which is rather soft, but it did work out okay...right?
Theses cookies were a thank-you gift for a colleague who helped to shorten my way to work by a good deal. They display the shiny new gate that pedestrians and cyclists may use since this week, between the yellow stripes depicted on the cookies (which have been painted on the street just for this purpose). 