Easter Wreath

This easter wreath with nut or almond filling and easter eggs is always part of the classical easter baking mania at our house.

I use a quark (cream cheese) oil dough instead of a yeast dough, the recipe was one for "Nussschnecken" (spiral shaped nut pastries), which I got a long time ago from my first boyfriend's mom. Thanks Gaby!

Ingredients:

150 g quark (or cream cheese)
6 TBSP milk
6 TBSP oil
75 g sugar
1 vanilla bean
salt
300 g flour
1 pck. (15 g) baking powder

Filling:
200 g ground almonds or hazelnuts
1 egg
60 g sugar
½ TSP cinnamon
some milk

Egg or milk for shining/brushing

powdered sugar icing, if you like

Energy: 303 kcal per piece at 12 pieces

Preparation:

Mix quark, milk and oil, add sugar, vanilla mark, salt, flour and baking soda. Knead well and roll out to a rectangle of about 20 x 60 cm. 
Mix the ingredients for the filling, keep the halved egg shells from the egg!

Spread the filling on the dough rectangle, leave a margin on the longer side. 




Start at the opposite long side to roll up the dough, then cut the roll length wise, such that you get 3 equal parts that are still connected on one end.
Braid the parts to a nice even braid, fix the endings, arrange in a circle on a baking sheet and connect and glue together the ends of the braid.


Crack the egg for shining the dough into a cup, grease 3 or 4 of the half egg shells and push them onto the wreath. They are the placeholders for the prettily colored, hard-boiled easter eggs which we cannot bake with the braid, obviously, but add on the baked wreath afterwards.


Brush the wreath with the mixed egg and bake it for about 25 minutes at 180°C, then replace egg shells with easter eggs.

If you prefer to hide the filling in the braid, you can cut the quark oil dough into 3 pieces, roll each out to form a 10 x 70 cm rectancle, spread them with one third of the filling each, roll the rectangle up such that you get a long rope, and braid these ropes into the wreath.

For little wreaths which make a nice present with an easter egg in the middle, you just make several small wreaths as described above.

And last but not least, for Nussschnecken, for which this recipe was meant: Once you spread the filling on the big rectangle, roll up the dough and cut it into dishes. Lay the dishes on a baking rack, and bake them for only about 17 minutes at 180 °C . Brush them with powdered sugar icing.