Barmbrack – Sweetness and Synergy

Today’s card is “Barmbrack – Sweetness and Synergy” from the Halloween Oracle. What a lovely cozy card this is. The barmbrack loaf has just come out of the oven and it smells so delicious. Also, the lit Jack-o'-lanterns are adding their sweet smell of slightly roasted pumpkin to the lovely fragrance of freshly baked bread. A barmbrack is an Irish sweet bread filled with raisins.  It is also called a bairín breac - a speckled loaf (due to the raisins in it)
“The Halloween Brack traditionally contained various objects baked into the bread and was used as a sort of fortune-telling game. In the barmbrack were: a pea, a stick, a piece of cloth, a small coin and a ring. Each item, when received in the slice, was supposed to carry a meaning to the person concerned: the pea, the person would not marry that year; the stick, would have an unhappy marriage or continually be in disputes; the cloth or rag, would have bad luck or be poor; the coin, would enjoy good fortune or be rich; and the ring, would be wed within the year.” Wikipedia
Although the fortune telling part of this bread is quite an interesting fact, today I want to focus on the magic of baking bread. When we gather all ingredients for baking bread, it doesn’t  seem as they have much to offer us by themselves but when we put them all together in a bowl and mix them thoroughly the dough comes to life even after beating it up again harshly, it will rise again. And then after we have baked it in the oven all the ingredients have come together and created something so utterly delicious, it is almost unimaginable.

Yes, a loaf of bread is a beautiful example of Aristotle's phrase: “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”.

Our home baked Easter wreath

I wanted to share our traditional Easter baking. It is a roll of yeast dough filled with cream raising, hazelnuts syrup and apple  and formed in the shape of a wreath. We have just had our first serving and it was delicious!

The card says "Happy Easter!"

Our Palm Sunday Rooster Bread

Today is Palm Sunday.  The Christian community celebrates the entry of Christ in Jerusalem. It is an old custom in some regions of the Netherlands for the children to participate  in a procession with a homemade Palm Sunday pole. My daughters have been attending the Waldorf school in their childhood, were this custom also was being kept alive. 

Of course we’re not making the entire pole any more but the rooster on top is so delicious, we kept the baking of this rooster as a  family tradition for Palm Sunday.

An example of  the Palm Sunday pole

Although the church has attached their own interpretation to the symbols of this pole (as they have done with many customs of the our holidays), I’d rather see this as the a version of the May Pole which is a kind of fertility pole. This type of maypole originates from the Germanic custom to carry around a decorated pine with a rooster on top which was the rooster Gullinkambi (Old Norse for Golden Comb) The Rooster is a symbol for the coming of the light which he announces every morning.  The pine was a symbol for Yggdrasil, the world tree.

 The habit of using bread in the shape of an animal dates back to the period in which they no longer sacrificed real wild animals.

After this small dilatation I just wanted to share we had a lot of fun  with the baking and shaping of our rooster. My son in law thought it looked more like a dragon than a rooster but it tasted wonderful J