Easter is coming soon, time to prepare! Cooking 'Paskha'

Happy Easter to all friends who celebrate it today! Easter (or as we call it Paskha - Пасха) for Russians, who are mostly Orthodox Christina, comes next week, on Sunday, the 15th of April.

As for the Easter traditions, you might remember the post about traditions in Russia. You may also refer to the post about the Easter postcards and congratulate your orthodox friends with a beautiful vintage Easter postcard.

Let's see what and how do we cook for this kind spring holiday.

1. Paskha, cottage cheese (tvorog, творог) cake or curd
2. Kulich, or Easter cake
3. Painted eggs

Usually all cooking starts on Thursday. Then on Saturday the food it taken to the church to be blessed. And on Sunday it's time to eat all that!

Let's see how to cook no.1, Paskha

Пасха - Paskha is a kind of curd made of cottage cheese, eggs, sugar etc which is cooked once in a year - only for the fest of Resurrection. It's original shape is cut pyramid, that's representing the Tomb of Christ. Together with other traditional dishes, Paskha is taken to the church on Great Saturday and is blessed. You may eat it when the Great Lent is over, on Sunday - the day of Resurrection.

Indeed there are many ways to cook it as well as to cook the cottage cheese itself, but here is one of the recipes.
the recipe is taken from gotovim-doma

Ingredients

cottage cheese (fat) - 500 g,
Eggs - 2-3 pieces,
sour cream - 200 g,
Powdered sugar - 70-100 g,
butter - 100 g, candied fruit, almonds, raisins

Preparation


Rub Cottage cheese through a sieve or twice through a meat grinder.
Put on a little thick-fire pan and melt the butter in it. When the butter is soft, add cottage cheese and stir until the mixture becomes more liquid. Then add sour cream and mix well carefully. At the very least add the eggs one at a time and stir until smooth mass.

Cook on low curds heat, stirring constantly to avoid burnt. Once the mass begins to boil, remove the pan from the heat and put on ice or in cold water, and stir to cool.
Add powdered sugar and vanilla sugar.

Prepared mass is put into the pasochnitsa (it's a kind of a bowl whith s special shape, that will make the shape of your future cake) which is moisten with water and laid with cotton towel. Fold the edges of cloth, put the oppression on it, and put into a cool place not less than for 12 hours.

When ready, Easter cake is carefully extracted from pasochnitsa, bend the edge of the napkin and put it on a dish. Decorate Easter with candied fruits, raisins and marmalade.

Traditional decorations are letter ХВ, first letters from the phrase Христос Воскресе which means 'Christ is risen'; and three-bar cross


There are many other variants of its taste, like Easter with condensed milk, Easter with almonds and raisins, Easter with pistachios, Easter with cocoa, Easter with pumpkin,  Easter in sweet custard etc