As Fat Tuesday (or Pancake Day as it is known in the UK) is in two days, Sara and I decided to try making Swedish semlor — cardamom rolls filled with creamy marzipan and topped with whipped cream.
We had an adventure getting to the final product, but what we got is delicious.
The Original Semlor Recipe
Ingredients
Buns
25 grams yeast (fresh or instant!)
75 grams butter
200 ml milk
2 eggs, divided
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cardamom
500 grams sugar
700 grams flour, divided
2 teaspoons baking powder
Filling
Marzipan/almond paste
Milk
Whipped Cream
Icing sugar
Directions
Melt butter over low heat in a saucepan. Add milk and heat until lukewarm. Crumble yeast into a large bowl and add some of the warm liquid to dissolve the yeast. Add remaining liquid, salt, cardamom, 1 egg, sugar, and 600 grams of flour. Work into a dough, then cover the bowl with a cloth and let rise for 30 minutes.
Mix together the remaining 100 grams of flour and the baking powder. Knead into the dough. Divide the dough into 12 balls, place on lightly greased baking sheets, and let rise another 35-40 minutes.
Beat the remaining egg (or you can use milk instead) and brush on the tops of the buns. Heat oven to 250° C. Bake on middle rack for 10 minutes.
Allow buns to cool. Meanwhile, mix marzipan/almond paste with warm milk until it achieves a smooth, creamy texture. Once buns are cool, cut a circular hole in the top of each bun, but keep the “lid”! Fill with some of the almond mixture, then top with whipped cream. Replace the “lid” and sprinkle with icing sugar.
What We Actually Did…
Firstly, the original recipe did not actually specify fresh/instant yeast, so we had dry yeast, which does not dissolve well in a butter/milk mixture. The package directions instructed us to add some hot sugar water to the yeast and let it sit until frothy. The trick to doing this successfully is to decrease the amount of liquid you add in the recipe by the amount in which you dissolve the yeast.*
We did not do this. The package told us to dissolve 15 grams of yeast in 500 ml of hot water with some sugar. 500 ml seemed like a lot, so we used… less. 200 ml maybe. However, with the extra liquid we got a nice batter as opposed to a dough. Hmm… Well, we let it sit for awhile, hoping it would magically sort itself out, but no such luck. So we added extra flour, but it quickly became apparent that we would need A LOT of extra flour to make a proper dough. So we experimentally spooned some dough-batter into muffin tins and stuck them in the oven at 200 C for 20 minutes or so until they looked golden and cooked.
*Even if we had tried this, we would probably have encountered the same problem, as the only liquid in the recipe was 200 ml of milk, so if we dissolved 15 grams of yeast in 500 ml of sugar water per the package instructions, we’d still have an excess 300 ml of liquid yeast even without adding any milk!
We also worked hard to get our cardamom. Ground cardamom isn’t sold here, and we weren’t about to buy a large jar of cardamom pods when we hardly use them. So we plucked the cardamom pods from an infusion mix of Sara’s, ground them, and ended up with a grand total of 1⁄8 teaspoon of ground cardamom. As we were only making a half-batch, this wasn’t as off as it could have been, but we supplemented the remaining 1⁄8 teaspoon with half-and-half cinnamon and allspice.
The result was a tasty (though probably much denser) bun, even without the filling. We managed to make the filling without mishap, and the final product is delicious.