Saint Lucia Buns. Yes, Taylor, I send buns.
December 13th is St. Lucia day. I spent 31 years of my life not knowing this. The first 31 to be exact. Living in Scandisota has taught me that there are many dates I spent much of my life oblivious to and in doing so I missed out on a lot of butter, flour, sugar, and calories in general. I’m working on rectifying this.
Last year for Christmas I received Pat Sinclair’s cook book, Scandinavian Classic Baking. Today’s recipe for St. Lucia Buns comes from this fine book. I’m not going to reprint her recipe here because, duh, it’s not mine and I would need permission to do that. You can find plenty of recipes out there on the interwebs if you want to have these ready for tomorrow morning. Or you can rush down to Ingebretsen’s and get your own copy of Scandinavian Classic Baking. I recommend it. Cookbooks are vinyl in an mp3 world.
So if I’m not printing a recipe why read on? Because I’m going to give you a few tips that’s why dummy. Nothing like a good insult to up the readership.
Tip #1. Don’t forget to add the eggs. I did till a few minutes into kneading. Though I’m guessing it would’ve worked I didn’t feel like kneading eggs directly into the dough. What worked for me was to crack two eggs into a bowl and whisk in a 1/4 cup of flour or so to make them less slimy. Then I flattened out the dough, made deep finger divets in it and poured the egg/flour combo over it. Fold it over and start kneading. It’ll ooze out a bit, but stick with it and it’ll all come together. And adding flour won’t hurt because you just added more moisture and they should balance each other out.
Tip #2. If you’re dividing dough into 16 equal pieces and don’t feel like busting out the scale here’s what I do. (adjust #’s as needed) The knife I cut my dough out with is 1 1/2 inches wide. 1.5 x 16 = 24. Roll the dough (like a snake) into a 24 inch long cylinder. Start at one end and lay the knife flat on top of the dough so the dull side of the blade is lined up with the end of the dough. Upright the knife (now the sharp side is in a cutting position on the dough) and cut a disc of dough. Repeat. Work down the length of the dough and you’ll have 16 equal size pieces of dough. And yes, a picture would’ve been worth a thousand words in this case.
Tip #3 Make them the night before and bake them in the morning. I made the dough, let it rise, punched it down, divided and formed my little S’s and layed them on parchment lined baking sheets. Now cover them with plastic wrap or put in a big plastic bag and immediately put them in the fridge to retard the dough. In the morning take them out and let them warm up and rise. I accidently woke up at 4 so I went ahead and pulled them out of the fridge and put them in the oven with the oven light on to rise. When I got up at 5:30 I pulled them out and preheated the oven. By the time the oven was up to temp I put the first tray in and they came out wonderful.
Oh. And for those of you keeping track of my imperfections: I didn’t use the signature ingredient, Saffron. The roads were crap and I didn’t want to make a special trip for it. But I do love Cardamom. And so I used that (1 teaspoon).
Break more rules. Bake more bread.