Place yeast, milk, sugar and butter into Thermo bowl and warm 2 min/37ºC/speed 1. Allow to sit in bowl for 10 minutes or until frothing.
Add zests, cacao nibs, spices, egg, flour and salt and blend 15 sec/speed 6. Knead 3 min/Interval. Leave in Thermo bowl for around 10 minutes.
Knead 2 min/Interval. Add cherries and chocolate and blend 15 sec/speed 6. Scrape out of bowl onto floured Silpat mat and push together using your spatula into a nice round. Allow to double in size.
Preheat oven to 190ºC and line a baking tray with paper.
Roll out your bunnies…they need to be uniform oval shaped with no choc chips or cherries around the face part…(this was learnt through error, no trial, just error!)
Cut ears with scissors, laying the scissors back across the dough as you snip. Re roll and re cut until you are happy you have something similar to the picture you can find here! (Bunny buns) This is harder than it looks and as you can see from my pic, I didn’t get it too well.
Bake 10 minutes. Brush with either vanilla or maple syrup while still hot. Stick your bunny tail on with the syrup or just mark the tail with an x when the bunnies are cold…Place in a little garden of Persian fairy floss and eggs and you have a great edible centre piece...
OR cut them half after Good Friday, place bottom halves in an ovenproof dish, fill with raspberries, place other halves on top. Mix up a custard of 4 eggs, 500g milk, 2 tsp Heilala vanilla bean paste and pour over. Throw a few raspberries on top of that. Bake in a slow oven (160ºC) until custard is just wobbly. Serve with lashings of cream or ice cream…or both. Perfect Easter Sunday dessert.