Women bake Easter bread and paint eggs on Holy Thursday

The main preparations for Easter are made on Holy or Maundy Thursday, when the women bake Easter bread and pound cakes and paint eggs, Info-Prim Neo reports. Pop singer Stela Mitriuc learned to make pound cakes from her grandmother. “I always admired my grandmother from Falesti, who brought up and educated seven children. My grandfather was killed in battle in Poland during the Second World War and she went through difficult times after the war. However, she always fed her children well as she regularly made cakes and other tasty food. I still don't know what she made them from,” the singer said. Stela Mitriuc likes candies very much. That's why the pound cake made by her is always very sweet and contains many currants. “My pound cake is special as I talk to the dough. I praise it, tell it how tasty it will be and how much joy it will bring to my children,” she said. For the Easter meal, Stela Mitriuc also makes biscuits by the recipe of her grandmother. Ludmila Ciotu from Calarasi town was raised in a religious family. Her father was a psalm reader at Alexandr Nevski Church in the town. It is one of the few churches that remained open during the Soviet period. Her mother taught her to cook, including dishes for the Easter meal. “I always considered my mother's pound cake special. I have never eaten something tastier and I learned to cook like her,” Ludmila Ciotu said. She and her sister made the first pound cake in the year when their mother passed away. They cried when they tasted it – it was like their mother's. Folk singer Maria Iliut goes to her native village Crasna in Cernauti region on Easter. “In our village, they make larger pound cakes so that they are enough for 40 days, until the Ascension,” Maria Iliut said. “I liked to help my mother bake. We made cakes using dozens or even thousands of eggs and kilograms of butter. Most of all I liked making small knot-shaped bread.” On Maundy Thursday, the people take drinks and food to the church to have them blessed and then give them to the poor to remember the dead.