Quintessential Sweden: Abba, pickled herring, meatballs… cinnamon rolls.

Sweden is equated with many things, but there is nothing as iconic as the cinnamon roll. In Swedish culinary culture, every cup of coffee deserves to be served with a baked good. This tradition is called fika and at its core is the cinnamon roll.

I don’t mean the cream cheese frosting topped, so-sweet-it-makes-you-cringe version that is served in the U.S., I mean the classic Swedish pastry, with a hint of cardamom and just sugary enough. In a country where cinnamon rolls are a staple in every cafe and bakery, and every respectable Swede has made their own batch at least once in their lives, it should come as no surprise that Sweden is in fact the cinnamon roll’s presumed country of origin.

The beauty of the Swedish cinnamon roll is in its versatility. Depending on your mood, you can switch out a few key ingredients for a completely different taste. Cardamom infused filling instead of the standard cinnamon and sugar mix for example.

October 4 marks Kanelbullens Dag (Cinnamon Roll Day) – an entire day devoted the the baked good. Since you probably don’t have the chance to sit in a warm Stockholm cafe on a crisp autumn day and order a kanelbulle from the counter, here are a few versions you can make yourself. Just be sure to serve with coffee.

Kanelbullar – Swedish Cinnamon Rolls

Makes about 30-40 buns

Dough ingredients:

• 2 1/8 cup (500 ml) milk
• 25g fresh yeast (or 2 envelopes dry active yeast)
• 2/3 cup (150 ml) brown sugar
• 5 7/8 cups (1400 ml) flour
• 2 teaspoons whole cardamom seeds
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 5 ¼ oz (150 g ) butter (at room temperature)

Alternative 1: cinnamon filling

• 4 ½ oz (about 125 g) butter (at room temperature)
• 1/3 cup (75 ml) regular sugar
• 2 ½ teaspoon cinnamon

Alternative 2: cardamom filling

• 4 ½ oz (about 125 g) butter (at room temperature)
• 1/3 cup (75 ml) brown sugar
• 4 teaspoons whole cardamoms
• (optional: 1 teaspoon cinnamon)

Topping

• One small egg (whipped together)
• Pearl sugar or sliced almonds

Prepare the dough: Crumble the yeast (if using dry yeast prepare it as required) in a big bowl. Heat milk until it is warm to the touch, about 100ºF (about 110ºF for dry yeast). Add the milk to the yeast and stir until yeast has dissolved.

Crush the cardamoms in a mortar and pestle.

Mix together flour, sugar, cardamom and salt before adding it to the milk and yeast mixture. Add in the butter in small cubes. Blend well, either by hand or by using a food processor. Knead it well for about 5-10 minutes.

Cover the dough and place in a draft free place and let it rise for at least 40 minutes.

Filling: Mix all ingredients for the filling to an even batter. It is important for the butter to be at room temperature so it’s easier to spread. 

Divide the dough into two pieces and using a rolling pin (or a wine bottle), roll each of them out separately to the shape of a rectangle (see diagram above).

Spread half of the filling onto each piece of rolled out dough so that it covers the entire area. Roll the dough up beginning with the long side. Slice the roll into about 20 equal sized (about 1 inch wide) slices and place them with their cut side up on baking sheet. Repeat above procedure with the last piece of dough.

Let them rise for about 30 minutes.

Note: You can also fold the dough as shown below which is more common when making the bun with cardamom filling.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg and brush all buns and sprinkle pearl sugar or sliced almonds on top.

Bake them in the oven at 225ºC (about 440F) for 8-10 minutes.

This dough recipe was adapted from Mia Örn’s recipe on Kardemummabullar.

The post Baking and Celebrating Swedish Cinnamon Rolls (On Cinnamon Roll Day!) appeared first on EcoSalon.

The perfect complement for afternoon coffee or tea.

Put two Swedes who love to cook in a kitchen together and there will be an immediate discussion of what baked good needs to be concocted for afternoon coffee. After all, we don’t mess around with our coffee breaks, and a serious coffee break deserves a serious pastry. So we settled on mazariner.

Mazariner are the darling of Swedish cafes, a balance of buttery pastry and almond filling topped with a thin layer of icing; the type of thing you bite into and wonder where this food has been all of your life. They’re just fancy enough that you don’t keep them on hand at all times, but you don’t have to put them on a serving tray.

Made in small oval tart tins, they can seem daunting to make, but as it turns out, are easy enough that you don’t need to cruise to your local IKEA to track down the mass produced version – although they do have them if you’re in a Swedish food pinch.

Our recipe search started with a few Swedish cookbooks and a call to my mother who was immediately reciting the ingredients from a page she had ripped out of a Swedish magazine sometime in the late 80s – when you come across a good recipe, you hold on to it. Johanna, being a more skilled pastry “chef” than myself did a creative combination of the many versions, and we both decided that plain icing just wouldn’t suffice. Add a little orange juice and you have a real masterpiece.

Make a batch of these, brew a French press and it will almost be like you’re sitting at a cafe in Stockholm. Almost.

Mazariner

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 7 oz butter (almost 2 sticks)
• 2 cups regular flour
• ¼ cup sucanat or organic cane sugar
• 2 teaspoons whole cardamom (crushed in a mortar, or slightly ground in a coffee grinder)
• One small egg

Filling

• One cup blanched, ground almonds (can be replaced with almond meal)
• 2 bitter almonds (about 1 teaspoon almond extract, or more depending on how strong you want the taste)
• 2.5 oz butter
• ½ cup sucanat or organic cane sugar
• 3 small eggs

Icing:

• Juice from an orange
• ¼ cup confectioner’s sugar

Directions:

Dough:

In a large wide bowl cream together butter, egg and sugar. With your hands, mix in flour – this can be done either in the bowl or directly on a clean counter top.

Crush the cardamom with a mortar and pestle as fine as you wish. If you don’t have a mortar or grinder, you can use pre-ground cardamom. Add it to the dough and blend well.

Let the dough sit in a cool place for at least 30 minutes to chill and harden.

Filling:

While the pastry dough rises, blanch the almonds by pouring boiling hot water over them and letting soak for a few minutes. They are ready when the skin slips off easily.

Skin all of the almonds and grind them into a fine meal in a food processor.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter and set aside to cool.

Whisk the eggs together with sugar to a porous batter and add in almonds, almond extract (if you didn’t use bitter almonds) and butter. Stir together until well blended.

Grease small tartlet tins* (see illustration above) with butter. Line the molds with a thin layer of dough (about 1/8”) and fill them almost to the top with the almond mixture. If there is any leftover dough you can freeze it and use it some other time.

Bake in the oven at 400°F for about 15 minutes. The cakes should have got a slightly brown color on top. Let them cool a little before removing the cakes from the mold.

Icing:

While the mazariner bake, prepare the icing. In a small bowl add the confectioner’s sugar and drip in some orange juice. The icing should be a little thick but still easy to drizzle over the mazariner. Wait until the mazariner have cooled before icing them.

Serve the mazariner for an afternoon tea or coffee break, you’re sure to make some new friends if you pull these out.

*If you don’t have small single cake molds as described you can use mini muffin trays or similar forms. In Sweden, disposable aluminum forms are often used, but stay away from single-use containers and do the best with what you have. We always encourage creativity!

Illustrations by Johanna Kindvall

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Celebrate Fat Tuesday Swedish style with this classic recipe.

By nature, I am not a follower of recipes. This is most likely my mother’s influence. Just as creative in the kitchen as she is with her artwork, the most common response to “What’s in this? It’s delicious! Can you write down the recipe for me?” is “Oh, I don’t really know exactly what I put in it.”

She does of course have some standard recipes that she can recite off the top of her head, but for the most part, she is a student of serendipity and chaos theory.

As it turns out, like mother like daughter.

When friends ask for recipes I actually have to go home and remake whatever food they’re looking to add to their cooking repertoire, simply so that I can figure out the exact measurements. Apparently “just enough of [insert ingredient]” doesn’t work for most people.

But there are those dishes for which I throw habit out the window, and commit to taking time to being a diligent cook that sticks to a recipe. Sometimes, there is no room for error.

If there’s one baked good that has to be made perfectly, it’s the Swedish semla. Also known as fastlagsbulle or fettisbulle, it is a flour bun filled with almond paste and topped with whipped cream and powdered sugar. Historically it was made for fettisdagen, Fat Tuesday. But we live in the modern day Western world, where eating decadent food doesn’t usually come with too many restrictions, so in Sweden, you can find semlor decorating the bakery shop windows just after the New Year all the way through Easter.

Having learned last year the danger of trying to tweak a recipe to my own standards – even my mother still cringes that I thought using whole wheat flour instead of pastry flour would be a good choice – I pulled out my copy of Swedish Cakes and Cookies, the modern and translated version of a classic that you can find in any Swede’s cookbook collection.

I was committed to making a good semla. Which meant of course measuring perfectly. But you can only veer from regular habits so much. I soon realized that the recipe didn’t call for cardamom.

Fail.

I added in two teaspoons.

Oh, there’s no recipe for almond paste? I certainly wasn’t going to trek to the gourmet food store and buy some (I do have my limits after all). So I made my own, purely guessing on what almond to sugar ratio I should use.

Plenty of mixing, rising, kneading and oven to cooling rack transfers later, I had a kitchen table full of semla buns and a full French press. If there’s one baking production that pays off, it’s a semla. Especially one made with ample cardamom and homemade almond paste.

Note that this recipe makes 10-12 buns. Unless you have a crazy coffee get together for an army planned, don’t make the semlor all at the same time. The buns store well in the freezer, and can be defrosted for when you want to fill them with almond paste and whipped cream. Which means you can make one now for yourself, and serve your friends later. Smaklig måltid!

Classic Swedish Semlor
Ingredients

• 100 grams butter (7 tablespoons)
• 1 ¼ cups milk
• 2 tablespoons active dry yeast
• 4 cups flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ cup sugar (if you want a sweeter version, you can use up to a ½ cup)
• 1 egg
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons powdered cardamom

Filling

• 2 cups blanched almonds + ¼ cup sugar blended in food processor
• Inside of buns
• ½ – 1 cup milk

Topping

• Whipped cream
• Powdered sugar

Directions
1. Melt butter in a saucepan and add the milk. Heat until the liquid is warm to the touch.

2. In a bowl beat the egg and add in yeast, salt, sugar and milk mixture. Combine baking powder and flour and mix thoroughly. Cover the bowl and let rise for 30 minutes.

3. Place dough on lightly floured surface and knead until smooth. Form into round balls and place on greased pan. Cover with tea towel and let rise until double the size.

4. Brush the balls with a beaten egg. Bake for 8-10 minutes at 450F. Let the buns cool.

5. Cut off a circular “lid” off of each bun and set aside. Scoop out inside of bun with a spoon or fork. Mix in a bowl with almond paste and add enough milk to make a smooth mixture. Fill buns with mixture and top with whipping cream. Place lid on top of whipping cream and garnish with powdered sugar.

Illustrations by Johanna Kindvall

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Swedish Advent coffee gatherings and the must have baked good of the season.

The season of Advent is upon us. In Sweden, Advent is holy, not just because it represents a religious tradition, but more practically it celebrates and honors light. Every Sunday through Christmas a new candle is lit, until the four long candles in the Advent candlestick are burning in unison. Throughout the month of December, windows blaze with the traditional triangle shaped candelabra, bringing a hue of gold to the otherwise dark and long winter nights.

Just as candles are an integral part of celebrating Advent, so are pepparkakor. Gingerbread cookies are the staple of Swedish Advent coffee gatherings and celebrations and the must have baked good of the season.

I grew up, every December, carefully rolling out gingerbread dough. In the early years, it was an awkward dance of pushing and pulling a rolling pin about half my size. Flour tended to go everywhere, and I would end up grinning with dough pieces stuck all over me. Yet my mother simply left me to it, and if I rolled too hard and the dough got stuck to the countertop, I was forced to find a solution myself.

Dust with flour, roll, pull up dough, flip over and repeat until just the right thickness to slice into with a Swedish cookie cutter. These cookie cutters were carefully kept in a large tin – which had at one point in the early 80s held Danish butter cookies certainly purchased at duty free on one of her connecting stops in Copenhagen. Hearts, pigs, Christmas gnomes, the classic gingerbread couple; I loved, and still love, sorting through and picking out my favorites. Feeling lazy? There were always the Franska Pepparkakor to make, a much simpler process of rolling out a log and slicing the cookies. In fact, if Swedish Jul for Dummies were a book, this recipe would be in it.

But pepparkakor are one thing, and a pepparkakshus (gingerbread house) is quite another; same dough, same concept and yet when you move from cookie to house, baking takes a completely different level of culinary creativity.

Enter, my father. Not known for his kitchen prowess – to his credit he is well versed in the world of exotic, black teas – gingerbread house making was his turn to put his carpentry and mathematical brain to use in an area normally left to my mother and I.

In his mind, a pepparkakshus was a serious matter. This is why, two decades later, we still have the same designs, meticulously drawn onto graph paper and cut out with an X-Acto knife, kept in the same, yellowed folder, “Jul” marked in red pen on the outside.

He put the same energy into crafting our annual pepparkakshus as he put into building our own house. Case in point: the pepparkakshus was always constructed with melted sugar, a binding agent that no child under the age of 12 should ever play with. But once dad had constructed the house, I got to decorate it, and he would watch as I sloppily poured icing all over the top, at first attempting to make a design and later resorting to the excuse “I just wanted to make it look like it snowed on the roof.” Fortunately like any good father he was never upset at his daughter’s decorative destruction of his architectural masterpiece.

Of course every kid-friendly holiday treat has to have an adult alternative, and beyond the pepparkakshus, my father’s other seasonal claim to fame is a mean batch of glögg, Sweden’s mulled wine. Whereas expertly crafting gingerbread houses was probably more of a fatherly duty, glögg was a personal masterpiece, picked up at about the same time that he wandered into the Nordic lands and stumbled upon my enchanting mother.

There has never been an Advent that I can remember that he didn’t have a batch brewing in our cast iron, red enamel pot- a kitchen item that’s probably as old as I am. During the month of December it sits there on the back left burner, ready to cook up another round. For not being a man of the kitchen, I can call my father at any given moment and he can rattle off his well-mastered glögg recipe as if he were reciting multiplication tables, which is helpful since even in a studio apartment, December is not December without the smell of glögg warming and a plate of pepparkakor.

Two years ago my father sent me a gingerbread house kit from a trendy grocery store that will remain nameless. The result was disappointing. No planning and no process, without even getting to the taste issue and the fact that the kitchen didn’t smell like spices. Tradition requires commitment, and for the month of Swedish Advent that commitment is making a good batch of pepparkaksdeg (the dough) and baking out a batch of cookies and constructing a house, no matter how old you are.

Now to find the glögg mugs.

Pepparkakor (Gingerbread Cookies)
(About 75-100 cookies)

¼ cup (50 ml) heavy cream
2/3 cup (150 ml) light syrup* or molasses
Almost one cup (200 ml) sugar
3 ½ oz (100 gram) butter
One tablespoon ground ginger
One tablespoon ground cloves
One teaspoon ground cinnamon
One tablespoon ground cardamom
One teaspoon baking soda
3 cups (700 ml) flour (+ some for the rolling out)

Melt the butter and the syrup on low heat. Let cool before adding the other ingredients. Work the dough well. It’s important that the spices are freshly milled. Let the dough rest overnight in a cool place so the spices have time to fully develop their aromas. The resting will also make it easier to roll out the dough.
Roll out the dough and cut out shapes with gingerbread cutters. Bake in the oven at 375ºF (190ºC) for about 6-8 minutes. Keep an eye on them as they burn easily.

This dough can also be used for a gingerbread house. Just roll it out slightly thicker. Have fun!

This recipe is a modification of the original at the Swedish shop Svensk Hemslöjd in Stockholm.

*You can buy light Syrup (ljus sirap) at Ikea. You can also use ”Lyle’s Golden Syrup” that you can find in British food stores.

Franska Pepparkakor  (French Gingerbread Cookies)

1 cup (almost 250 ml) almonds, chopped
7 oz  (200 g) butter
1/2 cup  (120 ml)  sugar
1/2 cup (120 ml) molasses
4 tsp ginger
4 tsp cinnamon
4 tsp ground nutmeg
4 tsp cardamom
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp baking soda
3 cups (700 ml) flour
Cream butter, sugar and molasses.

Mix dry ingredients with almonds, then combine with butter, sugar and molasses. Knead together with your hands.
Roll dough into cylinders, about 12 inches long and wrap in wax paper. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Cut dough into 1/4 inch slices. Bake at 380 for 10-12 minutes.

This recipe is adapted from the Swedish classic: “Sju sorters kakor.”

Illustrations by Johanna Kindvall

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