Tag Archives: Anna Brones

Mazariner – a Swedish Pastry Classic (collaboration)

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Story by Anna Brones • Illustration by Johanna Kindvall • Recipe by both

Put two Swedes who love to cook in a kitchen together and there will be an immediate discussion of what baked good needs to be concocted for afternoon coffee. After all, we don’t mess around with our coffee breaks, and a serious coffee break deserves a serious pastry. So we settled on mazariner.

Mazariner are the darling of Swedish cafes, a balance of buttery pastry and almond filling topped with a thin layer of icing; the type of thing you bite into and wonder where this food has been all of your life. They’re just fancy enough that you don’t keep them on hand at all times, but you don’t have to put them on a serving tray.

Made in small oval tart tins, they can seem daunting to make, but as it turns out, are easy enough that you don’t need to cruise to your local IKEA to track down the mass produced version – although they do have them if you’re in a Swedish food pinch.

Our recipe search started with a few Swedish cookbooks and a call to my mother who was immediately reciting the ingredients from a page she had ripped out of a Swedish magazine sometime in the late 80s – when you come across a good recipe, you hold on to it. Johanna, being a more skilled pastry “chef” than myself did a creative combination of the many versions, and we both decided that plain icing just wouldn’t suffice. Add a little orange juice and you have a real masterpiece.

Make a batch of these, brew a French press and it will almost be like you’re sitting at a cafe in Stockholm. Almost.

mazariner

dough
7 oz butter (almost 2 sticks)
2 cups regular flour
¼ cup sucanat or organic cane sugar
2 teaspoons whole cardamom (crushed in a mortar, or slightly ground in a coffee grinder)
one small egg

filling
one cup blanched, ground almonds (can be replaced with almond meal)
2 bitter almonds (about 1 teaspoon almond extract, or more depending on how strong you want the taste)
2.5 oz butter
½ cup sucanat or organic cane sugar
3 small eggs

icing
juice from an orange
¼ cup confectioner’s sugar

In a large wide bowl cream together butter, egg and sugar. With your hands, mix in flour – this can be done either in the bowl or directly on a clean counter top. Crush the cardamom with a mortar and pestle as fine as you wish. If you don’t have a mortar or grinder, you can use pre-ground cardamom. Add it to the dough and blend well. Let the dough rest in a cool place for at least 30 minutes.

While the pastry dough rests, blanch the almonds by pouring boiling hot water over them and letting soak for a few minutes. They are ready when the skin slips off easily. Skin all of the almonds and grind them into a fine meal in a food processor. In a small saucepan, melt the butter and set aside to cool. Whisk the eggs together with sugar to a porous batter and add in almonds, almond extract (if you didn’t use bitter almonds) and butter. Stir together until well blended.
Grease small tartlet tins* (see illustration above) with butter. Line the molds with a thin layer of dough (about 1/8”) and fill them almost to the top with the almond mixture. If there is any leftover dough you can freeze it and use it some other time.
Bake in the oven at 400°F for about 15 minutes. The cakes should have got a slightly brown color on top. Let them cool a little before removing the cakes from the mold.

While the mazariner bake, prepare the icing. In a small bowl add the confectioner’s sugar and drip in some orange juice. The icing should be a little thick but still easy to drizzle over the mazariner. Wait until the mazariner have cooled before icing them.

Serve the mazariner for an afternoon tea or coffee break, you’re sure to make some new friends if you pull these out.

*If you don’t have small single cake molds as described you can use mini muffin trays or similar forms. In Sweden, disposable aluminum forms are often used, but stay away from single-use containers and do the best with what you have. We always encourage creativity!

–

Other Swedish baked classics

Semlor – cardamom rich bun is filled with almond paste and heavy whipped cream
Kanelbullar – Swedish Cinnamon Bun
Lussebullar – Saffron Buns
Pepparkakor – Ginger Bread Cookies (at EcoSalon)

This article was originally published at EcoSalon, 15 May 2012

 

Semlor for Fat Tuesday (guest post)

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My second guest to write here on kokblog is Anna Brones who is a Swede (like me) living in Portland, Oregon. Anna is a writer and co-funder of Under Solen Media (New Media Marketing company). We just met on the Internet and immediately started a conversations around Swedish treats such as knäckebröd, gravlax, and the Swedish Fat Tuesday bun called Semla.

Semlor For Fat Tuesday
by Anna Brones

In my family, as with many, food represents tradition. As a child growing up with a smorgasbord – pun intended – of Swedish foods all year round, I found nothing unusual in our repertoire of dining choices. There should always be hard tack in the pantry, pickled herring and aquavit indicate a good party, and open-faced sandwiches are a perfectly acceptable way to start the day. In Sweden, yes. In the U.S., maybe not.

The same goes for seasonal traditions. I can’t have Christmas without meatballs, and I can’t have a winter without a semla.

A semla, also known as fastlagsbulle or fettisbulle, is a flour bun filled with almond paste and topped with whipped cream and powdered sugar. Historically the decadent pastry was intended for consumption on fettisdagen, Fat Tuesday. But in modern day, the tradition of semlor has gone far beyond just fettisdagen, allowing for Swedish pastry shops and bakeries to fill their windows with the baked good from just after the New Year all the way through Easter. Several months of pastry bliss.

But tucked into the forest of the Pacific Northwest, we were thousands of miles from a Swedish bakery. And yet, I remember that antsy feeling that would come in the late winter months, as my mother would whip out the baking supplies and create masterpieces of almond paste and whipped cream. I would inevitably end up with powdered sugar on my nose.

And thus tradition was born. If Fat Tuesday comes and goes without having eaten one, something is wrong. But with a food savvy mother, my own food traditions come with high expectations.

So in preparation for fettisdagen this year, I figured it best to make some semlor in advance, fine tuning the recipe and ensuring that come Fat Tuesday, I could successfully produce a baked good that would live up to my own standards.

A misread recipe and a bag of whole wheat flour later, I had a batch of cinnamon rolls and a plate full of mini-sized semlor buns on my hands, small enough to be bite size for a five year old. Failure.

“You used whole wheat flour?”

“Well yeah, you know how guilty I feel about buying regular flour,” I responded to my mother on the phone. Along with food tradition, she has also instilled a continued expectation of stocking my apartment full of healthy food. Things made with white flour and sugar are out of the ordinary.

“Did you even buy whipping cream?”

“Umm… no,” I quietly added. What am I going to do with an entire bowl full of whipping cream by myself? I thought.

“Anna, if you’re going to make something decadent, make something decadent. It has to be a real semla!”

And that is where tradition wins. No need to use organic agave instead of sugar, or switch out unbleached white flour or even attempt to make something that doesn’t use butter and eggs, because when it comes to baking and cooking in the name of tradition, you stick with what works, and you get what you expect: a celebratory moment with a cup of coffee and a semla.

semlor
(20 buns)
400F (200°C)

250 ml (one cup) milk
100 g (3 ½ oz) melted butter
25 g fresh yeast (2 teaspoons dry yeast)
¼ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon cardamom
1 egg
850 ml (3 2/3 cups) flour

1 egg, lightly beaten, for glazing

filling
200g (about 1/2 lb) almond paste
insides of the buns + 200 ml (7/8 cup) milk
100 ml (½ cup) whipped cream

Melt butter and add in milk. Heat until lukewarm. Pour over yeast and let sit for 3 minutes. Add rest of ingredients and work the mixture into dough. Leave dough to rise under cloth for 15 minutes.

Knead dough on floured surface. Separate into two sections, then each section into 10 small balls. Place on greased baking pan and let rise for 20 minutes. Glaze each bun with lightly beaten egg. Bake approximately 15 minutes. Cover the buns with a cloth and cool on a wire rack.

To fill
Cut off a circular “lid” off of each bun and set aside. Scoop out inside of bun with a spoon or fork. Mix in a bowl with almond paste and add milk to make a smooth mixture.

Fill buns with mixture and top with whipping cream. Place lid on top of whipping cream and garnish with powdered sugar.

•••

You can follow Anna Brones on twitter, @AnnaBrones

More Swedish baked classics

Kanelbullar – Swedish Cinnamon Bun
Pepparkakor – Ginger Bread Cookies (at EcoSalon)
Lussebullar – Saffron Buns
Mazariner – Guest post by Anna Brones