Buns for a Quiet January Afternoon*

*By "quiet January afternoon" I mean as quiet as one can be when one has to break off kneading dough to repeatedly yell the cat off the dining room table, answer and respond to ALL CAPS TEXTS furiously discussing Tuesday's episode of Pretty Little Liars, listen first to the washing machine spin cycle on the crooked laundry room floor (bangbangbangbang) and then the dryer with zippers and buckles smacking the inside at every revolution (clankclankclankclank), and also watch an episode of Top Gear one has seen fourteen times already but still wants to watch, at a volume loud enough to hear over the mixmaster.

So. Right.

Quiet January Afternoon.

The first time I ever had Cardamom Buns was in Stockholm, in the basement cafe of NK (Nordiska Kompaniet), the beyond wonderful department store in the heart of the city. Imagine Bendels, Saks, Bergdorf, Crabtree & Evelyn, Balthazar, and your favourite bookstore rolled into one gorgeous turn-of-the-century-Swedish-architecture building, and that's what you'd get. It's pretty much one of the best places on earth.

The life changing buns in question are, at NK and in Sweden in general, served larger than the ones I made, and stuffed with whipped cream.

You read that right. I'll give you a moment to process.

I brought a box back to my aunt and uncle's house that night, and my cousin Will and I sat at the kitchen table and ate our way through the entire thing. Bun by glorious bun. You know in Harry Potter when it's said that one of things that bonds you for life is "knocking out a 12-foot mountain troll"? This was kind of the same thing. After systematically demolishing all of them, we were pretty much BFFs.

But back to the buns.

CARDAMOM BUNS
or
BUNS FOR A (RELATIVELY) QUIET JANUARY AFTERNOON

This is a half portion of Trina Hahnemann's recipe in The Scandinavian Cookbook, which is an utterly drool-inducing trip through 12 months of Scandinavian cooking. Cardamom Buns are technically in the February chapter, but I figured Trina would forgive me just this once.

 INGREDIENTS

• 1 oz (4 packets) yeast
• 1 1/2 cups milk, heated and cooled to room temperature
• 2 tbs butter, melted
• roughly 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tbs sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 1 egg, beaten

Dissolve the yeast into the milk in a mixing bowl, and add the melted butter. Sift the flour, sugar, salt, and cardamom together and stir the dry ingredients into the milk mixture.

Either with your hands or with a dough hook, knead the dough, adding more flour as necessary until it comes cleanly from the edges of the bowl.

*a note on the flour measurement: Trina uses pounds as a flour measurement here, which freaked me out a little bit. Especially since Google and Wikipedia, usually so helpful, seemed to have differing opinions on just how many cups were in a pound. An average of 10 different consensi (plural of consensus? I'm going with it) told me it was somewhere in the range of 3 3/4 cups. So with that in mind, be prepared to add flour if the dough is too sticky, and add it slowly so that you don't go overboard. As I said above, I started with 3 cups, and slowly added another cup until the dough was a good consistency.

Pounds. Huh. I suppose that's what you get for Scandinavian Winter Farmhouse Comfort Baking.

Put the dough into a large bowl, cover, and let it rise for an hour. Turn it out onto the counter and knead it again.

This is where you make a decision about what shape buns you want. I decided to make small pull-aparts, since they were going to the LL's and since the sight of dough buns stuffed up against each other in a baking tin makes me inexplicably content.

See? Contentedness Achieved.

If you want bigger buns, go right ahead and shape larger circular ones. I put them in a buttered 9 x 13 pan, but Trina says "on two baking sheets lined with parchment paper" so it's every man, woman, and Beetle for themselves, really.

Let them rise again for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, turn the oven to 400 degrees, and brush each bun with a bit of the beaten egg. Bake them for 20 - 25 minutes until golden and shiny.

BEETLE NOTES

These are what you make when it's foggy and cold, quiet and clear, and there is still snow on the ground. If you can swing it, as I did last night, having a full moon rising overhead doesn't hurt either. I imagine Cardamom Buns are made in Scandinavia in February because it's still dark almost all the time, really really cold, and you've probably just shoveled your front walk for the 80 millionth time since New Year and could really use a warm and spicy pick-me-up.

And now I have to make a cardamom-based confession. I mentioned above that I halved the recipe. In my excitement about baking with cardamom (I can't help it! I love it!), and because I normally double the spices, I used 2 teaspoons instead of 1. This might have been overkill. [hangs horns in shame]

The LL-Jury has yet to report back, but according to Mum it's a bit too much. Oops. I can tell you that with the addition of jam the flavour is somewhat muted, but with only butter, it's a wee bit overpowering. I contemplated telling Mum she was just a wimp and clearly not make of strong enough stock, and that any proper Scandinavian woman worth her salt would have robust enough taste buds to handle an additional teaspoon of cardamom (for REAL) but decided that she was probably right. Sigh.

Which, really, is just proof that a) Trina Hahnemann knows what she's doing, which I totally figured out already, the woman is a Norse goddess and b) if you're going to half a recipe, Beetle, make sure you half the whole thing and not half selectively.

On the plus side, the dough itself is fluffy and moist. The buns pull apart from their neighbours quite cleanly, and they toast without going all rock-cake-like or burny.

So barring the cardamom over-enthusiasm, these are scheduled for a repeat. Mum had them with coffee this morning (because morning = coffee or death), but I have a feeling that when afternoon rolls around she's going to break into the hot chocolate. Because why not. I mean, if Trina says so . . .

It's probably a good thing we don't have any whipping cream in the house, actually, now I come to think of it.

Probably a very good thing indeed.