There is a wonderful tradition in Sweden of eating buns for all occasions. All sorts of buns are available. I once tried to make Swedish Semla, which is a spiced bun made for lent that is filled with almond paste and cream. My yeast skills weren’t very good then and I ended up with a big horrible sticky mess that took hours to clean off the bench top! I’ve made several Swedish style buns since then, but much simpler than the semla. I decided to make some Swedish buns for Easter and thought that the cute “Bunny Bread” image being shared around Facebook would be a good idea. As we all later found out, the bunnies were actually made with a biscuit dough, but we had a good laugh at some of the not-quite-bunnies that were produced, including my “guinea pigs”.
I decided to have another go, but this time with a more traditional style bun – shells (or snails). These are traditionally topped with flaked or chopped almonds or Pearl sugar. Pearl sugar is a bigger sugar crystal that doesn’t melt in the oven, so it is sweet and crunchy on top of the bun. It can be bought online, but I didn’t have time. Instead we made plain and almond ones (high salicylates and amines). The base dough can be used for all sorts of buns – plain, filled, etc.. I used a vanilla filling this time, but you can use anything as the filling. I adapted the bun recipe from a booklet called “Bullfest, Baka Godare Bullar Med Kaffegrädde”, which means “Bun Party, Bake Better Buns with Coffee Cream”. Coffee cream is a 10-12% fat cream that is used for coffee drinking (hence the name), but as we don’t have that here I just substituted for a combination of milk and pure cream.
[gmc_recipe 10787]
[gmc_recipe 10807]
YUMMY!! 🙂