Easter Bread

Growing up my Mom had a few different bread recipes that she regularly made, but Easter was the only time she would break this one out.  I remember she would have the dough rising on her bed with a sheet pulled over the top.  The smell of yeast permeated the house.  This became everyone's favorite bread, probably because it was only for special occasions.  

I made this for the first time for Easter in 2017.  I'll be honest, the day before Easter was crazy, so much going on that the bread was left to rise way longer than expected.  I was worried it wasn't going to come out right, but in the end it looked and tasted great.  We didn't braid the hard boiled eggs into the loaves the way Mom used to, but I think it is still special.  I probably wont be waiting until Easter to make this again.

We cut the recipe in half to make it easier to work with, and it is still a lot of bread.

Ingrdients:

• 5 cups all purpose flour
• 6 eggs
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup oil (we used olive oil, mom used vegetable oil)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 package yeast
• 1/4 cup warm water

Instructions:

• Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and set aside to activate for 5-10 minutes.  It should turn foamy showing that the yeast is good.
• Add the flour to the bowl of your stand mixer with dough hook attached.  Add sugar, salt, oil, activated yeast and lightly beaten eggs.  Mix with dough hook on low until soft dough forms.  Knead (in the mixer or by hand) for 15-20 minutes until smooth.  
• Put the dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 3 hours.
• Turn the dough out from the bowl, punch down and shape into loaves.  We split the dough into 3 equal pieces and rolled them out to form long strands that we braided together to form 1 large braided loaf.  This could easily make 2 or 3 regular loaves.  cover the loaves lightly with plastic wrap and allow to rise again until at least doubled in size (this is where we left them much longer than expected, and it came out great).
• bake on center rack of oven for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.