St. Lucia Buns

My main cultural heritage is Swedish. My mom's side of the family are somewhat recent immigrants (my great grandparents immigrated from Sweden) and I know we are still in contact with others in the family who stayed in Sweden. One thing I've been trying to do is recapture that side of my heritage to share with the girls.

A big celebration at midwinter is the St. Lucia's Day or the Feast of St. Lucia. It's like a pagan/christian combo holiday like most at midwinter and is usually celebrated on December 13. It used to be celebrated on the winter solstice but got moved and coopted once Christianity came to town. Now it's part of Advent and the celebration of light.

The girls are still too young to dress in a white gown and wear a wreath with candles on their heads, so this year is us just dipping our toes into celebrating it. But as I was charged with bringing desserts for Christmas Day with the family, I decided to make the saffron sweet bread that is typically eaten at that feast!

I used this recipe from the NYT.  St. Lucia Buns It was fairly easy for a beginner to make, and I'm pretty sure they came out good. The saffron is VERY strong, and you use a lot of it, which makes them fairly expensive to make. After grinding, 1g became my 3/4 of a teaspoon. It's a LOT of saffron threads. So heads up.

I took pictures as I made them today and you can follow along!  I'll recreate the recipe here on the blog if you can't access the NYT website for whatever reason.

Make sure you have everything plus your recipe!

INGREDIENTS

• 6 ounces butter, melted
• 2 ½ cups lukewarm milk
• ¾ teaspoon saffron
• 1 cup sugar
• 1.7 ounces fresh yeast
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 pounds wheat flour, or as needed
•  Beaten egg, for brushing
•  Raisins, for garnish.

Me: NAILED IT

Me: MELT DAMN YOU

 Place the butter and milk in a medium bowl.

Amy's Tip of the Day: If your husband has not cleaned the mortar and pestle out after grinding up super spicy peppers, use some rice and just grind on that for a little while. The rice soaks up the capsaicin and coloring and you're left with a clean mortar and pestle!
Do not rub your eyes after trying to clean it the old way. Or your nose.

 Using a mortar and pestle, grind the saffron with a pinch of the sugar, and stir into the mixture

All those little flecks are the saffron.

This was my first time using fresh yeast in a brick. The package said it was good until Jan 2018 but man... I dunno. The microbiologist in me was skeptical. I mean, I know it's a yeast, but I saw some filamentous fungi on this stuff. Also, 1.7 oz is a LOT of yeast! It was almost this whole brick (2 oz)!!!  I was able to cut out the stuff I thought was bad/discolored to pare down to 1.7, so that worked out okay. 

 In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in a little of the lukewarm butter mixture, then add the remaining butter mixture, the remaining sugar and the salt.

Me: DISSOLVE, DAMN YOU

Let 5 year olds help where possible for best memory making.

Nailed it again. 2lb of flour

Yes, those eggs are out on the countertop. They are straight from a chicken's cloaca though, so they're shelf stable so long as they're not cracked. #themoreyouknow #besteggsever

 Gradually add enough of the flour (almost all of it) to make a workable dough, kneading for 10 minutes by hand or 5 minutes in a mixer with a dough hook. 

Dough hook it is. Best. Wedding Present. Ever.

 Shape into a ball, sprinkle with a little flour and cover with a cloth. Allow to rise in a warm spot for 30 to 45 minutes.

Photo credit to the hoosband.

 Transfer the dough to a floured work surface, and knead in additional flour if the dough is sticky. Shape as desired into buns, braids or lengths.

Star Wars Cheezits definitely necessary for this recipe to work well. Also, those silicone baking mats are the fucking bomb. Highly recommend. Merry Early Christmas to meeeeeee.

 Place on lined baking sheets, and allow to rise again for 30 to 45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 400F.

My dough shaping was not on point at first.

Hoosband takes silly photos of the scientist/baker/mom extraordinaire.

 Brush the buns with beaten egg, and press raisins lightly into the dough.

Much more on point dough shapes. The bottom row were made by Kaylee. <3 

12 minutes was about the magic number for the sizes I made. Super quick to bake. All the time is spent in prep, really.

 Bake until golden and risen, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a bun comes out dry. Smaller buns may take 8 to 10 minutes; larger lengths and braids, 15 to 20 minutes.

Things I will try next time:

• A recipe that uses less saffron
• smaller bits of dough for finer looking final products
• warming up the milk a bit more before adding the melted butter, it immediately separated and solidified and I ended up nuking it a touch to get it liquid
• Buy saffron well before christmas eve, LOL, and not try to look for it at my super limited grocery store
• more raisins, omnomnomnom

WW: Things I've done since I last posted on this blog

Making my Own Maple Syrup

Today I went to a Maple Syrup Festival. If you know me even the littlest bit you'll know that I LOVE maple syrup. I grew up in New England, I settle for nothing less than the real stuff, from a tree. Aunt Jemima doesn't do it for me and I've been known to bring my own maple syrup in to restaurants if I plan to order waffles or pancakes. Eric calls me a syrup snob, but whatever. It's in my blood. My mom grew up in Vermont where she helped with sugaring and tapping the trees on a family friend's farm. So today I got to learn about the whole process of maple sugaring. I learned this as a kid in elementary school. Every March we would traipse out in the mud and sometimes snow to tap the poor lone maple that stood in the front yard. It was a lot of fun and the slightly sweet maple sap was really cool to taste. So imagine my delight when I realized that Michigan makes Maple Syrup too. And that I could make it myself. (Making it myself has become a new hobby, which hadn't really crossed my mind until we moved to WA) So I took notes from the presentations today. It wasn't totally comprehensive, they have separate classes for that, but I think I got enough information to start next year and at least try. Trees that can produce syrup: Sycamore (gives a butterscotch like syrup), Box Alder and Maple trees. Sugar maples have the highest sugar content in their sap at 2%, all others are near 1%. So you need a LOT to make syrup. The ratio is 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of final syrup product You tap the trees when you have warm days and cool nights. Tree Diameter to be ready for tapping 10 inches can support one tap +6 inches for each additional tap, but no more than 3 or 4 If you want to be totally natural, use staghorn sumac trees to make the spiles that allow the sap to flow out of the live wood. Thi wood is ideal for spiles because the core is really soft and can be easily drilled out by a small hand drill while the outer wood is hard and stiff. You file one end down to an angle all around so it fits into a drilled hole in the tree trunk and notch the other end to hang a bucket or sap collection device (clean milk jugs work well) When drilling the maple, drill two finger joints into the tree at a slight upward angle, 6 inches away from other holes that might have been drilled. The south side of the tree will have more sap flow because that is on the sun side but big trees can be tapped all around. You can identify a maple by the grey bark that peels up on one lateral side. Not a J peel in a peel from the bottom. You boil the sap down and test doneness using a maple syrup hydrometer. You want 67% density. If you go too far you've just made maple syrup candy, congratulations. Just don't burn the sugar. Now I have a new feature to check when we buy a house. Does it have maples?!?! And possible sycamores. And Staghorn sumac.

Baking: Chemistry in the Kitchen!

I have a cookie exchange on Wednesday with the Moms Group that has been my in person support since Kaylee was born. Now that it's official we are moving to Michigan for a GM job, I want to spend as much time as I can with them. However, the host's house was just exposed to croup and I have a currently sick child... so I don't know if I'm going on Wednesday. But at the very least. I have the holiday barn party on Friday where these will be greatly appreciated!

I had issues though. The recipe gave me an oddly dry mixture when all was said and done. It did not look like I could roll it out and use a cookie cutter.

This is the recipe I used. It came with the cookie cutters. Between the anise seed and the clove, I definitely had a gingerbready smelling dough!

After consulting social media (facebook) I decided to add another tablespoon of butter, this time melted instead of just room temperature. I mixed it up and thought it was still too dry, so I added about a tablespoon more milk. It was an umeasured dollop, because kitchen chemistry is not exact, or so I like to tell myself. This helped, and I figured as I rolled out the dough, the flour I used to keep everything non-stick would make up for the extra moisture.

Sure enough, it rolled well, had good cohesion and the cookie cutters worked fantastically!

On the drying rack.

Now I just need to decorate them, which is my plan for tomorrow night. I bought a ton of icing at the store today because I just don't feel like making my own. They should turn out pretty cute!