je vais où?

A little indie-electro pop from Swedish group Urban Cone, which is the kind of song you should be listening to on a sunny afternoon.

Image: Urban Cone

My favorite Swedish pastry? The semla. There are of course dozens of amazing Swedish baked goods, but this one is special because it only comes once a year. Baking a batch in the middle of summer or early fall? Unacceptable. The semla is meant to be consumed on Fat Tuesday, but of course that can be stretched out to include anytime between New Year’s and Easter.

Back to the semla.

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It’s Lucia Day in Sweden which means on the other side of the Atlantic it’s time for singing the Lucia song and baking saffron bread. And drinking glögg of course.

Saffransbröd – Saffron Bread adapted from Vår Kokbok

Almond paste

• 1 cup blanched almonds
• 1/3 cup sugar

Mix almonds and sugar in Cuisinart or blender until a chunky paste forms. Set aside.

Saffransbröd – Saffron Bread

• 1/2 gram saffron
• 75 grams butter
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 3 teaspoons yeast
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup golden raisins
• 3 cups flour
• Currants for decoration

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Love collaborating with Johanna of Kokblog on recipes. Her illustrations provide plenty of inspiration.

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 theFranska 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.

Full article + recipes here.

Fika. The best Swedish word there is. A noun, a verb… it’s all encompassing. In it’s simplest form, it all comes down to this equation: Coffee + baked good = Swedish tradition.

Here we’ve got a little blackberry tart with heavy whipped cream, complete with a slice of chokladkaka in the background. Summer bliss.

Love From Sweden: an ongoing travel photo series to capture the essence of Sweden. 

Lös godis: very much my one true love. Imagine this: an entire wall covered in all kinds of candy, from salted licorice to chocolate covered rum balls, all to be carefully selected and placed in a colorful bag.

Weigh it at the checkout, raise your eyebrows when you realize how much was actually in that bag, and then smirk internally when you say to yourself, “who cares, it’s Saturday!” Then take it all home and pour the lös godis into a bowl where — for maybe for a few seconds — you enjoy the multicolored glory. But soon it’s all consumed, an empty, wrinkled bag with a fine layer of sugar your only remnants.

Love From Sweden: an ongoing travel photo series to capture the essence of Sweden.