A Quiet All Saints' Day

 

With the arrival of November, I changed the arrangement in my brown vase - and added a couple of more owls... (Cf. a previous post here.)  The bigger owls (on the other side of the bowl) will remain where they are at least until it's time for Christmas decorations, I think.

During a break in the rain, some time before noon, I took out a couple of bags to the bins at the corner of my building, and extended that walk just a little bit - without photo stops, as it was pretty much the same round as on Friday.

Did not have to put much work into preparing lunch, so instead I decided to put that effort into baking a tray of my favourite cocoa/blueberry muffins, which is something I haven't done for a few weeks either. I've changed the original recipe so that I replace 3/4 of the sugar with stevia sweetener, and half the amount of wheat flour with oats.

 

Seasonal Baking

 

 

I started this week (yesterday + today) with some traditional Advent/Christmas baking. I had prepared the gingerbread dough a couple of days in advance. The dough was easy enough to handle, nothing got burned, and the biscuits/cookies smelled wonderful (besides ginger, the recipe also includes cloves, cinnamon and cardamom), looked nice enough, and tasted pretty much as usual... However, something about the texture did not come out quite right. While they're not exactly 'soft', I'd still hesitate to call them 'ginger snaps' in English. (In Swedish,  conveniently we can use the word 'kaka' about anything from a soft cake to a very snappy biscuit/cookie, though - so from linguistic point of view, never mind!) I didn't make a very big batch, and they'll no doubt get eaten (by me) anyway ;-) The only thing I did different from usual was that I used a stevia based sweetener instead of white sugar. As the recipe also has brown sugar and treacle in it, and I kept those, I didn't expect it would make much difference. But maybe it did. (I've used the sweetener in muffins/cupcakes before, but of course those are supposed to be soft anyway...)

While I still had my baking trays and things out, I followed up today with also baking some Swedish 'Lucia buns' (saffron buns). They came out all right.

 

The shape is traditional for buns baked for Lucia /St. Lucy's day. In Swedish we often call them lussekatt (pl. -katter), but  the shape as well as the name can vary between different parts of the country. And also whether you use saffron in them or not. (My mum didn't use saffron in hers.)

Gingerbread Season

 

Yesterday was a good day for staying in and baking some Christmas gingerbread biscuits! (I'd prepared the dough in my food processor the day before.)

Do you bake these for Christmas? My recipe is one I came up with back in my youth, I think it was a mix between my mum's recipe and one from my first cookery book. Mum used to have ginger, cinnamon and clove in hers. In mine, I also have cardamom. (I love cardamom...)

There have been years in my life when I've not felt up to this kind of baking because of problems with neck-shoulder-arm. I'm happy I've been able to pick up the tradition again in more recent years. I've adjusted my recipe to only a third of the original, though. (In the past, I also used to have more friends over to share the calories...)