Easter Sunday will be with us at the end of this week and, as much as we want to, we can’t eat chocolate for every meal…

There are so many delicious Easter recipes that can make your weekend eggstraordinary, from easy, fun ideas to traditional dishes such as lamb and hot cross buns. But when planning your Easter menu you need to think about what your most important sous chef can do…your range cooker!

So enjoy some inspiration and show off your cooking skills using some of the best range cooker features for feeding the whole family this Easter weekend…

Meat

For many cultures, meat is a traditional part of the Easter celebration meal. Depending on preference, popular meat dishes can be lamb or ham and eating fish on Good Friday is a tradition that many of us follow.

The roast lamb dinner is one that many eat on Easter Sunday, featuring different flavourings and spices depending on the dishes’ origin. Marination of the lamb often takes place using items such as garlic, lemon and herbs, which are rubbed on the lamb before roasting and left for a number of hours.

The Rangemaster handyrack is a great feature for cooking your Easter meat of choice. A fantastic roasting tray that is cleverly mounted onto your oven door, it is a great safety feature and enables you to open the door to check on or baste the joint of meat without having to touch the dish itself. Once finished cooking, simply remove the handyrack and place it into the dishwasher for cleaning.

Or how about a smart electric meat probe? The food probe, featured in models such as the Bertazzoni Professional and AGA Masterchef Deluxe 110, enables you to control the internal cooking temperature of any type of meat in the oven. Once the probe is set, cooking stops automatically when the desired temperature has been reached. This type of precise control allows you to get the maximum taste out of your meat or fish.

Hot Cross Buns

A must have at Easter, hot cross buns truly steal the show. The much-loved baked treats are a true delight, covered in a sticky glaze and now full of many different surprises. From the traditional fruit or sultanas to flavours such as banoffee, chocolate chip and even cheese and marmite, they really are a springtime staple.

Although it is sometimes said you can heat your hot cross buns in a toaster, it is not recommended. The grill on your range cooker is often the best place to warm these snacks up. Cut your hot cross buns in half and turn each piece under the grill for a couple of minutes. The grill on your cooker has a much more powerful heating element that a standard toaster, and should do the job a lot quicker (just make sure you keep an eye out for burning!).

You can even toast your hot cross buns on a griddle. The removable teppanyaki griddle from Rangemaster gives a soft, flat surface which gives perfect space for multiple hot cross buns for everyone to enjoy. Simply turn the buns like you would on a grill tray and evenly cook them, making sure to keep an eye on them as they will toast quickly. The griddle is also coated for non-stick easy cleaning.

Easter Cakes

Whether you are going for the traditional Easter Simnel cake or some lovely brownies made from all your favourite Easter chocolates, baking has never been easier with the right range cooker.

Your range cooker having a fanned oven is a welcome addition when baking as the fan circulates the heat, meaning the temperature should be constant throughout the oven. This means:

• Evenly baked cakes due to even heat distribution
• Faster baking time
• More energy efficient due to shorter cooking times
• More suitable to cook multiple cakes at the same time as the oven will heat it as if it is a single dish

ILVE also offer the very handy baking setting on their models. Distributing the heat evenly ensures a moist, even bake every time and can be used alongside the steam release system, allowing you to choose between wet and dry cooking. The steam release system works alongside a function to create the perfect cooking environment by eliminating steam as required. Dry cooking is ideal for breads and retaining the moisture within cakes, whilst wet is perfect for cooking roasts and stews.

Bread

Bread is another traditional dish of Easter. Bread has long played an important role in religious ceremonies and celebrations. Sweetened bread is a common delicacy at Easter time but around the world there are many variations on the staple food. In countries such as Bulgaria and Romania, people bake Kozunak, a sweet leavened bread. Depending on which region it is made in, different ingredients are added to enhanced the taste, such as raisins, Turkish delight or flavourings.

Recipes from places such as Greece colour the eggs red to symbolise the blood of Jesus and pressed into a braided dough, such as Tsoureki. This is a sweet Easter bread commonly flavoured with orange zest and spices, and has gone on to inspire our very own hot cross buns in the UK.

Keen bakers will welcome the exciting use of a bread proving drawer, available on the Rangemaster Deluxe models. This unique feature to range cookers reaches temperatures of 40°C, so you can rest and rise dough prior to your baking. This drawer can also be used to melt ingredients such as butter, rest meat or warm up plates ready for serving (it also doubles up as a great storage drawer).

Fish

On Good Friday, it is a tradition to eat fish rather than meat. The medieval Catholic church decreed that meat – specifically the meat of warm-blooded animals – shouldn’t be eaten on Fridays, which means some fast by eating fish instead.

When cooking fish on a range cooker, a griddle is a great way of making sure it is cooked to the best it can be. A griddle is a type of grill with a flat or ridged surface for cooking. Unlike a regular frying pan, the base of a griddle pan often has raised ridges. It is the perfect way of giving a chargrilled look to your food, whilst often making it healthier due to the channel that runs around the outside of the griddle plate, causing any fats or oils to run off.

Providing flexibility and often healthier food, there are griddle solutions for both gas and induction hobs. This sit on griddle from Rangemaster sits snugly on top of the gas hob and pan supports. The flat plate is ideal for cooking items such as bacon and French toast, whilst the grooved part of the plate provides fat drainage, offering a healthier way to sear your fish. There is also our very own Bigblue griddle. This has been cleverly designed to get the best from griddle cooking, and it vitreous-enamelled to ensure many years of cooking service. The iron ribs are designed to deliver optimum heat, whilst allowing juices to freely run down. Universal in design, this griddle has been engineered to fit a broad variety of pan supports.

We hope you have a very happy Easter and enjoy plenty of yummy treats!