Making paska, or Easter bread, has become a tradition at 27th Street. Usually we make 2 batches, or about 8 loaves so we can make lots of people around us happy, but seeing as we’re in the midst of a pandemic, we scaled back to one batch this year.

We were down to the the last bit of some sad old yeast which wasn’t too interested in raising anything, much less a batch of paska, but the last time I ventured out shopping, I was able to buy some good fresh yeast at Adonis.

We make our paska in coffee tins because that’s the way Sheila’s mom always made it, and that’s good enough for me. We’ve used the same tins for several years, and we have different sizes too. We grease the inside of the tins and then coat with breadcrumbs – again, because that’s how Sheila’s mom always did it. This year, though, we had no breadcrumbs, so I substituted corn meal and that worked out just fine.

Today’s paska was one of the best batches we’ve done, light, slightly lemony and delicious.