Mazurek, Traditional Polish Easter Pastry
Polish Easter like most of our holidays includes a lot of food, some typical for that time of the year and holiday occasion. One of these specialities is a desert called Mazurek – a small pastry topped with jam followed by toffee or chocolate and finished with things like nuts, almonds, etc.
Pastry Recipe
The dough for a Mazurek is a usual buttery pastry dough:
- 1/2 kg of self-raising flour
- 250g of butter (preferably 82% or more)
- 1/2 glass of sugar
- 1/2 small pot of cream
- 1 packet of baking powder (16g)
- 5 egg yolks
Mix the sugar with the eggs, next add the remaining ingredients. Roll the dough into thin slices and create small pastry pieces like below.
Finally put it in the oven at 200C until they are golden brown.
Pastry Factory
Out of many things my family is fond of there are two quite interesting things that show at times like this holiday. We love working in little “factories” and food seems to always come in large quantities. Even when living on my own I cannot cook a meal for less then three or four – you end up freezing a lot of home made “ready meals”.
So in total we made a little over a 100 pastries. And factory style teamed up to finish them into the final product called Mazurek.
The next step on the production line was smearing a thin layer of raspberry jam over each piece. This adds moisture to the pastry as well as helps break the sweetness of the finished product. Once the jam dries up a little you create your base – this time we had chocolate toffee and caramel toffee both made from condensed milk.
Next you cover the base with various toppings like: nuts, almonds, raisins, etc. Finally you can add some decorative icing as the finishing touch. Last stage below, with my mom doing the icing.