Korovai (коровай, decorated wedding bread)

A wedding bread should enter the room like good news. Round, tall, egg-gold, carrying birds, braids, wheat ears, little dough suns, all the things a family hopes will keep flying after the music stops. Korovai is not a quiet loaf. It sits on a rushnyk, the embroidered cloth, and asks everyone at the table to look at it before anyone dares take a knife to it.

The old rule says it is baked by korovainytsi, women with happy marriages, while songs run through the kitchen. I won't police your guest list. Invite the hands that bring calm and good will, because the point is not superstition dressed as manners; the point is that a wedding bread is made in company. One person mixes, another rolls braids, somebody makes birds that look more like shoes, and the whole thing becomes itself anyway.

What decides the bread is strength under decoration. The main dough is rich with milk, eggs, and butter, so it rises soft and golden; the ornaments are made from a leaner dough, firm as modelling clay, so the birds and wheat ears keep their shape while the loaf swells beneath them. Bake until the smell changes from sweet dough to toasted wheat and butter. Then tap the bottom with a wooden spoon. It must sound right.

Make one big loaf. There is no tradition of a shy korovai, and there is no wedding blessing in a bread too small to share.