Sunday, December 2, 2007

Disaster


Well, it turns out baking before waking up is not always so god. My lussekatter turned out goodlooking, the dough was nice and light and everything seemed fine... until I realised that, after putting the first bunch into the oven that it was something wrong with the recipe. The recipe was in an e-mail from my mother, and it seems she wasn't 100% there when copying it onto the computer... sugar was not in the ingredient list. And I was sleepy enough when putting the dough together to not find it odd. So I quickly kneaded some sugar into the dough that was left, but I had already filled two out of three baking sheets before that. I was hoping that the lack of sugar wouldn't be that bad for those poor buns. It turned out it was though. Those last ones which had some sugar kneaded into them at the end were tasty enough. They look a bit odd, since the sugar wasn't completely incorporated which made them brown unevenly. The unsugared ones tasted like.. I don't know. Not saffron, but rather bitter. Eating a part containing a raisin provided a completely different experience though. Some sugar there. Anyway, since I put a lot of saffron into them, and since it seemed they only needed something sweet nearby, I ended up putting some sugar onto them, by stirring it with a little water. This means they are sticky, but hopefully eatable. I fell totally stupid. :)
Anyway, D:s parents arrived a little after my baking finished, bringing cookies and laughing with me at my not so perfect lussekatter. And they happily ate some too, though I chose to serve the ones that actually had gotten some sugar into them.

Oh well. The kind of things that happen. Maybe I'll make another batch before Christmas.

By the way, done right this is terribly tasty. This is my mother's recipe, or rather, ingredient list, with what I think is the right amount of sugar added. She doesn't bother to write down the method for me since she trusts me to be able to make bread, but I'll add a short description:

Lussekatter
2 -3 envelopes of saffron à 0,5 g
2 teaspoons of sugar (for the saffron)
50 g fresh yeast
0,5 l milk
150 - 200 g butter
0,5 tsp salt
2-3 dl sugar
1 egg
250 g kesella 1 %
1.5-2 l flour

kesella is low fat fresh cheese (I don't really know the English word, but the Swedish and German word is "kvarg")

Melt the butter and add milk. Heat until lukewarm. Meanwhile, mash 2 tsp of sugar and the saffron together in a mortar. Add to the milk-and-butter mix together with the egg, salt and the yeast. Stir until there are no visible pieces of yeast. Put into mixer bowl, add kesella and about half of the flour. Start the mixer (with suitable kneading attachment) and add flour until the dough gets a dough-like consistency. Run the mixer until the dough is shiny and stretchy. Since I used less hard flour than I usually do when making bread this was rather quick for me. Let the dough rise until doubled (takes about 45 minutes - 1 hour - there's quite a lot of yeast in there). Shape the dough as in the pictures, one from before baking, and one after.
Decorate with raisins as in the pictures. Coat with some lightly whisked egg. Let the finished breads rest a few minutes before putting them into the oven. Bake them at about 250°C if small, until well browned and finished through. For a little larger ones, lower the heat to about 225°C.

And no, everything up here is not blue, even though the photos indicates that. The problem is probably the very low amount of daylight, even at midday in a kitchen with a window in the north. And a very crappy cell phone camera. I'm still searching for the cable for the real one. And if I'm lucky, Santa Claus might have something even better for me (at least I asked for that).

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