guilty pleasures: Mazurek with dulce de leche - Polish traditional Easter cake

I decided to cook and bake things traditional this year. As I've said in the previous post, Easter makes me think of kraszanki and pysanky, but there are many other traditional Polish dishes served at Easter.

I wouldn't be me if I didn't bake a cake and the most popular Easter cake in Poland is mazurek. The word itself means a couple of things but we will be concerned with the sweetest of the meanings.

The cake is extremely simple because you only need to bake a shortcrust bottom and than put a filling on it.

Shortcrust

Here you can find a detailed recipe for basic shortcrust with some more pictures.

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Filling

Once we have the dough kneaded, baked and cooled, we need to prepare the filling.

Dulce de leche filling is again the easiest thing to do. Sue me, I'm lazy. :)

You either buy dulce the leche in a can (as I did) or cook a can of condensed milk for 2-3 hours.Apart from being lazy I'm also impatient, so the condensed milk thing wasn't an option.

The canned dulce de leche may be quite hard to pour onto crust. There is an easy way to overcome this tiny obstacle - just put the can in a bowl and pour some hot water around it. It will melt inside and be considerably easier to spread on the crust. I wasn't too fussy about the looks of it, to tell you the truth, so I just used a teaspoon to spread the filling.

Remember, you decide how much filling you want on your crust! I just used 10 heaped teaspoonfuls of dulce de leche and it was enough to cover the crust.
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Decorating

And we would be done with mazurek if it wasn't for the decorating. Mazurek also served as a table decoration at Easter. The top of the cake is always decorated in some way - use this link to google images for some reference.

My idea of decorating mazurek is very simple and doesn't require a lot of time and effort on your part.
I used a stencil of a branch with catkins (hazel catkins are one of the things associated with spring in Poland) I made out of this colouring page (this link takes you directly to the pdf I used).

As dulce de leche is sticky you put your stencil on it only for a short period of time or you won't be able to take it off.

Sprinkle some cocoa (or grated chocolate or chocolate sprinkles) on the stencil to make branches. Take it of carefully not dripping excess cocoa everywhere on the cake. I almost destroyed the cake being clumsy like that and had to add another branch to cover spilled cocoa.