4.9 from 141 votes
Italian Easter Egg Cookies with Eggs
These Italian Easter Egg Cookies are soft braided dough treats wrapped around a whole hard-boiled egg, finished with a cross of dough strips and decorated with colorful sprinkles. The dough combines flour, butter or lard, sugar, eggs, and citrus zest, creating a tender but pliable texture ideal for braiding and shaping. This festive baked good showcases traditional Easter symbolism with practical steps for assembly.
Servings:
10
cuddures
Cuisine:
Italian
Ingredients
- 1 kg 00 flour or all-purpose flour
- 300 g butter or lard
- 350 g sugar
- 5 egg
- lemon zest
- orange zest
- 2 packets baking powder about 32 g
- salt a pinch
- 10 egg hard-boiled
- Sprinkles colored
Instructions
- Boil the 10 eggs and let them cool.
- In a large bowl put the flour, sugar, baking powder, and grated zest of one medium lemon.
- Add the lard and 5 uncooked eggs and knead the ingredients with your hands. When it’s well mixed, transfer the dough to a work surface or pastry board and knead again until the mixture becomes homogeneous. The dough shouldn’t be hard, but quite soft and not sticky.
- Take 1/6 of the dough and cover the remaining dough to prevent it drying out.
- Divide the 1/6 into 3 parts and roll them to form sticks, thicker than 1 cm and all the same length.
- At one end, lock the sticks, form a braid, and then lock the other end.
- Transfer it gently onto the oven pan and pull the two ends together to form a circle. Take one boiled egg and place it in the center. Press gently to fix it in place.
- Take a small portion of dough, form a stick, and divide it into two equal pieces. Put the new formed sticks over the egg forming a cross, and press the ends of the sticks down gently so they adhere to the braid.
- Repeat the process with the remaining dough, then brush them all with egg yolk and decorate with colored sprinkles.
- Preheat the oven to 390°F and bake them for about 20-25 minutes. Cool before serving.
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