things we eat and drink, at home and out and about
I went to the bakery the day after I found myself immersed in the Saint Blaise’s celebrations vortex, and I saw a sort of colourful bun on the shelves behind the baker. I asked what they were, and she said that it was their own take on Saint Blaise’s buns!
Continue reading “More takes on Saint Blaise’s celebrations”
This is a revised version of the original recipe from Nigella.
When we made these last year, we faithfully followed the recipe to the letter, and while the result was very nice, at heart we knew that it could have been better.
So this year I decided to repeat the recipe and not go for better but for PERFECT. I printed the recipe so I wouldn’t miss a beat while cooking, but afterwards I did so many things in slightly different ways and added so many annotations that it almost is a different recipe (while still being a recipe for hot cross buns), hence I am posting it here.
I loosely followed this recipe from Felicity Cloake, but either I didn’t have enough of some of the ingredients or didn’t want to sacrifice an egg for painting. So I did a few replacements and alterations, detailed below.
The results are surprisingly good, given it’s the first time I made these. The flavour is spot on, exactly what I want from a cardamom bun. They are moist and buttery enough, and the slightly coarser texture from the wholemeal flour wasn’t really in the way, with all that is going on, as there are already the big cardamom seeds interrupting any pretence of smoothness in the dough.
Also, since they have whole grains rather than being 100% refined flour, they are totally healthy 
(just ignore the sugar, and maybe the butter, eh??) 
As I said in my Fogassa d’Ontinyent post, I have been trying to locate the “proper” recipe for this for a few years already.
I think I started searching for a recipe in 2018, as November approached and I desperately wanted to eat a fogassa but could not visit Spain for multiple reasons. And I thought: Well, it is “only” a sweet bun, so it can’t be that hard to find a recipe for it, right?
Well, turns out that it can!
Continue reading “The quest for the perfect fogassa d’Ontinyent”
I love skeletons and skulls and spooky things in general (think Scooby Doo and Victorian horror novels level of scariness), so I always get very excited about the idea of baking things in that theme.
The more I learn about this, the more I realise there are a lot of traditional goods that were also baked in commemoration of the loved (but dead) people. All of these things look very interesting to me but I have no time to tackle all of them at the same time.
So I decided to make a list! Maybe it gives you ideas. Show me your pictures!
Continue reading “Spooky things to bake around Halloween”