Smoked salmon, saffron, and orange pirogues

Look who's back :) I've had such a crazy busy autumn with quite an intense mix of work, studying, moving, and although I have been cooking, there just haven't been enough time and energy to also blog about it.

Anyhow, I made these little pirogues or pasties recently. Saffron and oranges are two common flavourings for a lot of typically Swedish Christmas treats. Here I incorporated saffron and oranges with smoked salmon in puff pastry pirogues. The results is a salty tasty treat with a hint of sweet citrusy zest, perfect as a starter or served with drinks. The pirogues can be made the day before, and served cold or hot.

I was lazy and bought puff pastry. If you too feel like not making your own, buy a high-quality all butter puff pastry.

Smoked salmon, saffron and orange piroges (30 mini pirogues)
1-2 packages of puff pastry
300 g smoked salmon
200 g cream cheese
0.5 g saffron
1 dl chives, finely chopped
1 dl dill, finely chopped
1 orange
black pepper
pinch of chili flakes
1 egg, beaten

Heat the oven to 200C

Prepare the saffron; I find it easiest to grind the saffron threads with a pinch of salt using a pestle and mortar to a powder. I then add a little water, this makes it easier to transfer the saffron and infuse it into the other ingredients

Mix salmon, cream cheese, saffron, chives, dill, chili flakes, zest from one orange, and juice from half an orange in food processor to a coarse mix. Season with black pepper.

Roll out the puff pastry, and cut it into squares roughly 4 x 4 cm

Add 1-2 tsp of the filling to each square, fold over the pastry to a triangular shape and join the edges. Crimp the edges using a fork to form a seal

Transfer the pirgoues to a lightly oiled baking tray and brush the top with egg wash

Bake for 10-20 min until golden brown

Transfer to a cooking grid to cool, or serve directly

Smaklig måltid!

Smoked salmon mousse canapes

For the Easter celebrations, I did a smoked salmon mousse served on crostini as canapes. To me this is a very Scandinavian dish, with a traditional combination of smoked salmon, dill and lemon. To make it more festive, you can top the canapes with caviar, I used red caviar, which comes from lumpfish (stenbit), and sea roe, which comes from the capelin fish (lodda). In Sweden, you can buy jars of different types of caviar in every supermarket and it is used in a lot of different seafood dishes. The most common type of caviar sold in Sweden though is smoked cod roe, this is sold in tubes (Kalles kaviar) and a popular spread on crisp bread or on boiled eggs. I love Kalles kaviar, I can eat it as it is directly from the tube... It is one of the things I really can get serious cravings for.

In the UK, caviar is not as common, I usually only find the red or black from lumpfish at Waitrose, or I buy it from one of the Swedish shops, Scandinavian kitchen or Totally Swedish. Not everyone I served caviar to has really liked it though, I remember once when I still worked at KCL, when to celebrate finally publishing a paper, I brought cava and canapes with red caviar to work. The only people that really liked it where from Luxembourg, Russia, Scandinavia and France....

Anyhow, caviar is delicious, and if you get a chance you should try it. However it's actually not an ingredient in this salmon mousse, so don't worry if you're not a caviar fiend. This is an incredibly quick and easy festive dish, done in minutes.

Smoked salmon mousse canapes (around 30)
200 g smoked salmon, finely chopped/minced
150 g philadelphia cheese
0.5 dl creme fraiche
1 dl dill, finely chopped
0.5 dl chives, finely chopped
0.5-1 lemon, juice and zest
1 small pinch of chili flakes or cayenne pepper, or a few drops of Tabasco sauce
1 pinch of black pepper
salt

Stir together the smoked salmon, soft cheese, creme fraiche and herbs. If you want a smoother texture and pinker colour, you can mix it using stick blender but I like it a bit coarser

Add chili flakes/cayenne/Tabasco and black pepper, and the zest from half a lemon and a squeeze of lemon juice. Taste, and add more lemon, salt, and pepper if necessary

Serve on for example crostini or crackers, or you could serve this on crisp lettuce leaves as well. Garnish with caviar, dill, chives, slices of smoked salmon or lemon

Salty licorice chocolate truffles

Hi, my name is Saga and I'm addicted to salty licorice.

Salty licorice is hugely popular in Scandinavia, and it is by far my favourite type of sweets. I really do get cravings for it, and I cannot have it at home without devouring it immediately. Anytime anyone comes to visit me from Scandinavia, they have to bring salty licorice to me. When the cravings gets to bad, I also usually go to Scandinavian kitchen at Great Titchfield st or Totally Swedish on Crawford st for a hit. Cyber candy in Angel and Covent garden also have salty licorice, but the most impressive store is a new sweets shop in Covent garden on Long Acre, Sugar sin. It is owned by two Swedish sisters, and they have an impressive range of Scandinavian sweets that you can pick n mix. The shop is so cute, with old-fashioned sweets jars. I highly recommend a visit if you like sweets, and in particular if you share my addiction of salty licorice.

Sugar Sin. Picture borrowed from Hop Interiors, where you can see more pics and read an interview with the owners of Sugar Sin.

I love the combination of salty licorice and chocolate, it is a match made in heaven combining to great things into one! My favourite one is Fazer's Salmiakki, with a soft salty licorice centre encased in milk chocolate. Marabou Black, with milk chocolate and splinters of salty licorice, is pretty good too. Inspired by these two, I decided to try to make my own chocolate truffles with salty licorice. After a quick googling I found a recipe at Söta saker, that I tweaked by adding milk chocolate and adding more salty licorice. The result was delicious! I will definitely make these again.

Salty licorice chocolate truffles (20 truffles)
100 g milk chocolate, chopped
100 g 60% dark chocolate, chopped
1 dl double cream
1-1.5 dl salty licorice (I used Turkisk peppar), crushed

Start by splintering the salty licorice. Place the salty licorice caramels into double plastic bags, and place onto a tea towel. Using a hammer, crush the caramels. You want a quite coarse powder with some larger pieces.

Heat up the cream, and pour into a bowl over the chopped chocolate. Stir until the chocolate has completely melted and you have a soft even mix

Stir in the salty licorice. Reserve 1-2 tsp of the finer powder for decoration. How much salty licorice to add is a matter of taste, I added quite a lot.

Pour the truffle mix into a small square tray lined with baking paper. The truffle mix should be approx 1 cm high.

Sprinkle with the licorice powder, then leave the tray in the fridge for about one hour

Transfer the now hardened truffle to a cutting board and remove the paper. Using a sharp knife, cut it into 2 x 2 cm square truffles

Store in the fridge until serving

Swedish semlor

I'm baaaack!!!

Hi and merry Christmas and Happy New Years and long time no see. So, I decided to continue. I do like blogging about food, but I might add a post or two about other stuff too.

First out is a recipe for semlor (semla sing, semlor pl), a cardamon flavoured sweet bun filled with almond paste and whipped cream, traditionally eaten on Shrove's day, or, as it's called in Sweden, Fat Tuesday. Here in the UK the tradition is to eat pancakes on this day, usually with lemon and sugar. Really tasty too, but almost nothing beats a semla. Fat Tuesday was this week, but I hadn't time to bake then and therefore baked this weekend instead.

The other reason I decided to bake semlor is that it reminds me of home. My grandma always makes here own, usually smaller than the one's you find at the bakeries, and with her homemade slightly chunky almond paste. I thought a lot about my grandparents and family during the past weeks, as my granddad has been very ill and sadly passed away a couple of days ago. Sometimes it is very hard being an expat, you never feel more far away than on occasions like this.

Anyhow, I used a basic semla recipe, but I tweaked it a bit by adding more cardamon and changing the filling slightly. Here in the UK, you can't find mandelmassa, a less sweet almond paste compared to marzipan, and I like my filling to really taste of almonds and be a bit chunkier, like my grandma's, so I added chopped almonds to it.

The result was delicious, so delicious I had more than two. The exact number will however remain a secret as it's slightly embarrassing. In particular as I still managed to eat a full dinner....

Semlor (12 buns)
7.5 dl strong wheat flour
25 g dried yeast
0.75 dl sugar
2 tsp ground cardamon
a pinch of salt
100 g butter
2.5 dl milk
1 egg, beaten

Filling
200 g marzipan or mandelmassa
150 g chopped almonds
0.5 dl milk or cream

5 dl whipped cream

Mix flour, yeast, sugar, cardamon, and salt together in a large bowl

Melt the butter, add the milk and warm to 40C, slightly hotter than finger temperature

Add the butter and milk to the flour mix, stir together to a dough.

Knead the dough for a couple of minuter, add more flour if necessary.

Leave the dough in the bowl, covered with a tea towel, to rise for 45 min

Divide the dough into 12 pieces, roll each to a small bun, and place on a buttered oven tray.

Cover with a tea towel and leave to raise for another 30 min

Brush the buns with egg wash

Bake for 10-15 min in the middle of the oven at 225C

Remove from the hot oven tray and let the buns cool down

To make the filling, coarsely grate the marzipan (this is easiest to do if you first leave it in the freezer for 30 min) and mix together with the chopped almonds and milk.

Whip the cream, it should still be a little loose

Cut of a thin lid from the buns. Scoop out a hole in the middle of the bun, this additional bread can be added to the almond paste if you like (I usually don't bother...).

Add the almond paste to the bun, and also add a generous amount of whipped cream. Place the lid on top. If you like, sprinkle the lid with icing sugar (I didn't have any at home, and don't think it's really necessary).

Enjoy!

Fried herring (strömmingsflundror) with potato mash and fennel salad

Fried herring (strömmingsflundror) with potato mash is one of my favourite traditional Swedish dishes. Herring is called strömming or sill in Swedish. The difference is that strömming is fished in the Baltic sea on the east coast of Sweden and sill on the west coast. In my mind strömming is also usually smaller than sill, don't know if that's actually true. If you have small herrings, when you fillet the fish you keep the two fillets connected and don't divide them along the backbone, this is what makes it a strömmingsflundra.

Herring is eaten in many different forms in Sweden, fried, pickled, cured and fermented. I like some pickled herring at Christmas, Easter or midsummer, but otherwise my favourite is having it fried or fermented. The fermented one is not for everyone, when you open a can you can smell it a mile away. But eaten outdoors in August, with almond potatoes, crispbread, onions, and washed down with an ice-cold schnapps, it is a real treat.

Although herring is fished around the UK, I've never seen it in any of the usual supermarkets (except as roll mops or smoked), so on Saturday I went to Borough market. I love food markets, and although Borough market can get really crowded, at 10 in the morning it was fairly empty. One of the fish stands had herrings, albeit quite a bit larger than I would have liked. Once the main ingredient was sorted and I picked up some veg, bread, cheese, and beautiful pink forced rhubarb for dessert, it was time to indulge by downing a couple of oysters and having a couple of fried scallops. Heavenly.

I served the herrings with potato mash (recipe not included, I'm sure you already know how to make a potato mash) and a fennel salad with ruby grapefruit. As the herrings are quite a rich fish (and even more so with buttery mash and a little clarified butter at serving), I like something with a bit of acidity and bite to complement it.

Fried herring with potato mash and fennel salad (4 portions)
24 small herrings or 0.8 kg herring fillets
bread crumbs or oat meal
1 bunch of fresh dill, finely chopped
1 bunch of fresh parsley, finely chopped
120 g butter
salt and pepper
butter or oil

Get your fishmonger to fillet the fish unless you got a good sharp knife (I regrettably don't have a very good one anymore). If you have small herrings, it's not a problem that a lot of the small bones is still there when you eat it, but as I found out this time, if you have larger herrings you might want to try to remove more of the bones prior to cooking them or you'll spend the entire meal picking out the bones.

Dip the skin side of the herrings in breadcrumbs or oatmeal, and place on a tray. Sprinkle the meat side with salt and pepper.

Mix the finely chopped herbs with butter, and cover the meat side of half of the herrings. Add another herring fillet with the meat side down on top (like you're making a fish sandwich with the herb butter in the middle)

Fry the herrings on medium heat in butter or oil in a frying pan until golden on both sides and the fish is cooked.

Serve with potato mash, a little additional melted and clarified butter to pour over, lemon wedges and fennel salad

Fennel and grapefruit salad (4 portions)
2 ruby grapefruit, peeled and segmented
1 head of fennel, very thinly sliced
0.5 red onion, finely chopped
200 g salad leaves like spinach
1 lemon, juiced
1 tsp coarse mustard
1 tsp honey
1 tsp olive oil
pinch of salt
pinch of black pepper

First make the salad dressing by mixing lemon juice, mustard, honey, olive oil, salt and pepper

Add grapefruit, fennel, red onion and salad leaves to a bowl. Dress the salad.

Chicken stew with wild mushrooms and herb roasted potato wedges

Growing up I hated to go out picking mushrooms and berries in the forest. I couldn't think of anything more boring. The fact that I would usually get lost as well didn't help. Still, to have a freezer full of treasures like chanterelles is an amazing thing. When I came back from Sweden after Christmas I got lots of chanterelles from my mum. My grandmother makes an amazing chicken stew with chanterelles and morels that inspired this recipe.

If you're not lucky enough to have a mum giving you wild mushrooms, you can find canned and dried wild mushrooms in well-stocked grocery stores and delicatessen. The great cafe/store Scandinavian kitchen on Great Titchfield street usually also have canned chanterelles. If you haven't been there, I really recommend it. They've got the sweetest staff, and always have lots of tasty Scandinavian sandwiches and cakes. I have to admit though that I mostly go there to feed my addiction to salty liquorice...

Chicken stew with wild mushrooms and herb roasted potato wedges (4 portions)
400 g chicken fillets, cut in 2 x 2 cubes
1 large yellow onion, finely chopped
4-5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
200 g smoked bacon, finely chopped
200 g frozen black chanterelles (thanks mum!)
200 g chanterelles, canned
200 g morels, canned
5 juniper berries, crushed
1 tbsp blackcurrant jelly or jam
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tbsp light soy sauce
2 dl half-fat creme fraiche
2 dl milk
olive oil
salt and pepper

Herb roasted potato wedges
1 kg potatoes, peeled and cut in wedges
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tbsp coarse salt
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tbsp dried rosemary
1 tsp black pepper
olive oil

Preheat the oven to 200-225C.

Add the potato wedges to a large oven tray, drizzle with olive oil.

Add the garlic, herbs, salt and pepper and mix so that the wedges are covered by oil and spices.

Roast in the oven for 20-30 min. After 10 -15 min, turn the potato wedges to make sure they'll get nice and golden on all sides.

While the potatoes are roasting, make the chicken stew.

Add the chicken to a frying pan, add salt and pepper and brown the chicken

Saute onions, garlic and bacon for a couple of minutes in a large pot.

Add the mushrooms and fry for a couple of more minutes before adding all the other ingredients including the chicken.

Cook on medium heat for 15-20 min.

Add soy sauce, salt and pepper to taste.

Saffron cake

I'm not a big fan of Christmas as a holiday, it's to commercial and I find a lot of the traditions quite restraining. Maybe I would feel differently if there wasn't Christmas stuff in the shops already in September. It's only November now, but I've already heard enough Christmas songs. At work I'm for sure the grinch, and my colleague S is definitively the Christmas fairy.

Anyhow, there are things I do like about Christmas, like a lot of the traditional food and drinks. In Sweden we make a lot of cakes and buns with saffron before Christmas. This is a slightly different saffron cake compared to the traditional ones. It got a beautiful yellow colour, and helps me feel maybe a tiny bit more happy about Christmas approaching.

Saffron cake
200 g butter
0.5 g saffron
2 eggs
3 dl sugar
1.5 dl milk
1.5 cm fresh ginger, grated
4 dl plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
juice from 1-2 lemons

Preheat the oven to 175C

Butter and bread a 24 cm cake tin

Melt the butter

Using a pestle and mortar, powder the saffron threads with a little sugar

Whip eggs and sugar. Add saffron, butter, ginger, and milk.

Add the baking powder

Finally add the flour and make a smooth batter

Pour the cake batter into the tin, and bake for 45 min.

While the cake is still hot from the oven, pierce the surface with a fork and pour onto the lemon juice.

Dust over the cake with icing sugar before serving.

Here is a different Christmas song, Achtung Christmas by Tyskarna från Lund (the Germans from Lund). The band started as part of a Swedish comedy group, Varanteatern, and makes fun of stereotypical synth music.

Oven pancake with bacon and apples (fläskpannkaka med äpplen)

I've been ill for the last couple of weeks, I have this very persistent cold. When I'm ill I feel really sorry for myself and wish I was home and my mum could take care of me. Unfortunately I am a grown-up, and unless I'm extremely ill like last year when I had the swine flu and had to go into to the hospital for a bit, I have to take care of myself (but must say my flatmate does a great job of taking care of me too, she's a sweetheart). The next best thing after my mum at times like this is comfort food.

Maybe this is an expat thing, but I think it probably is the same for everyone, comfort food is food you grew up eating. One of favourite dinners growing up, and still when I go home, is a thick pancake with salty bacon. In Sweden you would use rimmat fläsk, which is a heavily salted fatty pork meat, here I used smoked bacon but I think pancetta would work as well. Instead of bacon, you can make this pancake with apples but then you might prefer having it as dessert. Here I used both bacon and apples as I like the contrast between salt and sweet. In Sweden you would eat your bacon pancake with sugar or lingonberry jam, thus you would get that contrast anyway. I'm not very keen on jams so I add the apples instead. To make this a meal, I serve it with a simple salad with grated carrots, grated cabbage and oranges.

Oven pancake with bacon and apples (6 portions)
600 g smoked bacon, chopped
2 apples
50 g butter
5 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 L milk
5 dl wheat flour

Fry the bacon in the pan until it starts to be slightly crispy

Whip the eggs, add the salt, 2 dl of milk, and flour, stir it until you have a smooth batter. Add the milk, a little at the time, and whip it until you have a smooth batter.

Put a large oven tray in the oven at 225C, add the butter to the tray

Once the butter has melted, add the bacon and apples to the tray. Pour over the pancake batter and put the tray in the oven.

Cook for ca 35 min until the pancake is golden and has risen.

Serve with sugar and jam if you like, and salad.

As I'm feeling a bit home-sick and nostalgic, I've been listening to Bo Kaspers Orkester a lot today, a band I listen to a lot during late evenings over endless cups of tea with my friends during my late teens/early twenties. Here is one of my favourites, Hon är så söt (She is so sweet)

Kladdkaka - Swedish sticky chocolate cake

Kladdkaka is a Swedish sticky chocolate cake, a bit similar to chocolate brownies. Kladdkaka is very popular in Sweden and is served in most cafes. I made this as dessert to have after the chili on our birthday party. It is very easy to do, the only thing is to keep an eye on the time, if it is left to long in the oven it goes dry and you really want it to be quite gooey and loose.

I used a recipe from a Swedish blog dedicated to kladdkaka and other chocolate cakes, the original recipe can be found here http://kladdkakerecept.blogspot.com/2007/11/lyxig-kladdkaka.html

Kladdkaka (8 portions, but sometimes it is enough for only 2 people as it is delicious...)
100 g butter
100 g dark chocolate, I used Green&Black 70% dark chocolate, chopped
4 tbsp cocoa powder
2 eggs
2 dl sugar
1 1/4 dl flour
1 pinch of salt
2 tbsp strong coffee

Preheat the oven to 175C.

Butter and bread a 24 cm cake tin.

Melt the butter, and add the chopped chocolate. Stir until the chocolate has melted in the hot butter.

Pour the butter and chocolate mixture into a bowl, add the sugar, salt, flour, coffee and eggs. Stir until you have smooth and glossy batter.

Pour the cake batter into the tin, and bake for 20-24 min. The cake should still be quite soft and gooey in the middle when you take it out.

Let the cake settle for a couple of hours before eating. It's great on it's own or you could serve it with ice cream or whipped cream and raspberries. You can also vary the recipe by adding for example raspberries and pistachio nuts to the cake batter.

Here is more Swedish electro to go with the cake, Rebecca & Fiona's The luminary ones

Salmon pudding (laxpudding)

Salmon pudding (laxpudding) is a classic Swedish dish, but maybe not as well known as I thought. I made this for my Swedish flatmate and a couple of our Swedish expat friends yesterday, and turned out that three of them actually didn't know what it was (although that didn't stop them from accepting the dinner invitation, or from stuffing themselves once the food was on the table). After a lot of discussion on from where in Sweden salmon pudding origins (the province of Halland apparently), we moved onto children's TV shows (Solstollarna and Vilse i pannkakan, no wonder our generation is a bit... confused...), politics (Swedish general election today), and how incredibly expensive the flight tickets to go home to Sweden for Christmas already are. Important stuff for expats.

Anyhow, I can't guarantee that this dish will result in meaningful (?) conversations for everyone, but it is an easy all in one pot dish, and as evidenced by yesterdays limited leftovers, quite tasty and popular.

Salmon pudding (6-8 portions)
500 g salted, cured or smoked salmon, skin- and boneless
2 tbs sugar
2 tbs salt
1.5 kg potatoes in thin slices
2 large leeks, finely chopped
1 large onion, finely chopped
1-2 dl dill, finely chopped
6 eggs
2 dl single cream
4 dl milk
salt
pepper
butter

I prefer using salted salmon, and it is very easy to make yourself. This is a fast way of curing it. However if you want to cure salmon properly to eat it without any additional cooking, you need to cure for 24-48 h in the fridge, and should then freeze it for an additional 24 h before eating it.

Mix sugar and salt and rub it in on both sides of the salmon. Place in a dish and cover with clingfilm. Either let the salmon cure for a couple of hours in the fridge, or 30 min in room temperature. The result is a firmer fish, as the salt and sugar draws out a lot of the moisture. Salted salmon fillets are also gorgeous just fried and served with boiled new potatoes and maybe a hollandaise sauce.

Butter a large ovenproof dish and layer potatoes, leeks, onions, dill and salmon. Do several layers, starting and ending with a layer of potatoes.

Beat the eggs with the milk and cream and pour into the dish. If you use smoked salmon, you might want to add some salt to the egg mixture. Grind over some black or white pepper.

Cook for around 1 h at 200C until golden brown and the potatoes are soft.

Serve with lemon wedges, clarified butter and a fresh salad. I made the salad below yesterday, it is nice and crisp.

Crisp lemony salad
1 bag of watercress, spinach and rocket
2 small little gem salad heads
1 yellow pepper, chopped
10-12 radishes, finely sliced
3 cm of a leek, finely sliced

Dressing
Peel and juice from one lemon
1 tbs olive oil
1 pressed garlic clove
salt and pepper

To add some Swedish atmosphere to your dinner, or just because it is a great song, listen to Swedish band Johnossi's 'Man must dance'.

Cinnamon buns

Cinnamon buns (kanelbullar) are probably one of the most popular baked goods in Sweden. You can buy them in every coffee shop and grocery store. Cinnamon buns even have their own day in Sweden, it can be celebrated on the 4th of October. Everyone loves cinnamon buns, and maybe no one more than Swedish expats. It's just something so comforting, so much like home to have a warm newly baked cinnamon bun and glass of cold milk. That they also taste divine is a bonus.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I brought a cake on the wrong day for the cake club at work. To remedy this, I decided to bake cinnamon buns and bring into work the following Monday. This was met with protests from my Swedish flatmate, she thought it was very unfair that I would bake cinnamon buns when she was away from London and couldn't have any. I had to promise her to leave a bag of buns in the freezer for her for when she would be back. Like I said, cinnamon buns brings out a lot of feelings.

This recipe is again from the fantastic Sju sorters kakor cake recipe book from ICA bokförlag.

Cinnamon buns (45 buns)
dough:
150 g butter
5 dl milk
50 g yeast, fresh or equivalent quantity dry (I like Sainsbury's own as there is no need to reconstitute it first)
0.5 tsp salt
1-1.5 dl sugar
1-2 tsp ground cardamon
approx 13 dl strong white flour

filling:
100 g room tempered butter
1 dl sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
0.5 tsp ground cardamon

1 egg
sugar

Melt the butter and add the milk, warm to 37C (finger warm).

If using fresh yeast, dissolve the yeast in some of the warm milk, then add the remainder of the milk and butter, salt, sugar and cardamon. If you use dry yeast, mix it with the flour before mixing it with the milk, sugar etc.

Then add the flour, start with approx 2/3 of the flour (so mix the dried yeast with only 2/3 of the flour, or you might not add all of it...), and work the dough until smooth and not sticky. Add more flour if necessary.

Let the dough rise to double size in bowl covered with a tea towel (or use clingfilm, it works as well). This usually takes 30-60 min.

Work the dough in the bowl for a couple of minutes, and then move it to a work surface lightly sprinkled with flour.

Divide the dough into two pieces, and, using a rolling pin, roll out the dough to a large rectangle, roughly 0.5-1 cm thick. Cover the dough with a thin layer of butter, sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon and cardamon.

Start rolling together from one of the long edges until you got a long roll. Divide the roll into 1-1.5 cm thick slices. Place the slices with one of the cut surface facing upwards in paper forms (I use the ones for muffins/cupcakes) and place on a oven tray. Cover with a tea towel and let rise to double size. This again takes 30-60 min. Repeat with the other half of the dough.

Heat the oven to 225C (if using electric fan oven) or 250C (if using a conventional electric or gas oven).

Brush the cinnamon buns with egg wash, and sprinkle with sugar. In Sweden you would use a type of sugar with larger granules, pärlsocker (pearl sugar), but normal granulated sugar works as well.

Bake in the middle of the oven for 8-10 min.

Enjoy!

Fyris apple cake

Where I work we have a cake club. Every Monday we take turns bringing in a homemade cake, and this is truly the highlight of that day (sometimes week I'm sad to say), and we had some glorious cakes so far. My memory is not fantastic, and I was convinced that it was my turn to bring a cake on the Tuesday after the August bank holiday, so I decided to do one of my favourite cakes. It turned out to actually not be my turn, but I don't think anyone really complained about getting cake on a Tuesday instead of a Monday.

My mum used to bake this quite often in particular during the autumn when the apples are at their best. The combination of cinnamon and apples are a classic, and this cake is so easy to make that I highly recommend it. I've taken the recipe from a classic Swedish cake recipe book, Sju sorters kakor (Seven types of cakes) from ICA bokförlag. The title refers not to that the book only contains recipes for seven types of cakes, but to the tradition that if you invited someone over for coffee in Sweden, you should serve them at least seven different types of cakes or biscuits. This would be called having kafferep in the olden days, and I guess is the Swedish version of cream tea. Having a proper break for coffee and maybe a cake or cinnamon bun, called fika in Sweden, is still very popular. Fika can be just a short break at work, or last for hours at a cafe or at home. One of the things I miss most about living abroad is meeting up for a fika.

Anyhow, here's the recipe for this lovely cake. I have no idea why it is called Fyris apple cake, maybe it refers to the Fyris stream flowing through my Swedish hometown, Uppsala?

Fyris apple cake
125 g butter
1.5 dl sugar
2 eggs
2.5 dl plain flour
1.2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp milk
3-4 apples - for example my favourite, the Braeburn apple
1-2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Heat the oven to 175C

Butter and bread (use bread crumbs, can be bought in some grocery stores, or polenta) a round tin form, 24 cm in diameter. Using bread crumbs or polenta makes it easier to remove the cake without it sticking to the tin.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add one egg at the time, and then the flour mixed with the baking powder. Stir in the milk to a smooth batter and pour into the form.

Slice the apples thinly and stick into the batter.

Mix the cinnamon and sugar and sprinkle over the cake.

Bake for 30-40 min in the lower region of the oven (if you have an electric oven, otherwise in the middle).

Enjoy as it is or with a good custard or vanilla ice cream.

If you want to make a larger one, just double or triple the recipe and use a large oven tin and cut into squares.