Cookies, cookies, cookies! Ideally I would like to bake, say seven or eight different kinds so when you browse into your cupboard or onto a nicely presented table you see them all lying there, one different from the other. I’m not really interested in eating seven or eight different cookies (I have more of a savory tooth), but I would love to just look at them, arrange them and know that they are there. Pretty. Fine. Ready to eat. Nice presentation.
So far we have made Swedish gingerbread cookies (they top the list of importance), chrusciki and vanilla horn cookies, and that is really plenty, but I do love the idea of baking an unnecessary amount to completely indulge in and treat your friends and family to.
And the same thing goes for candy. This year we have made salted caramels, burned almonds (twice - I doubled the second batch and it came out disastrous, it must have messed up the proportions or the cooking surface ratio) and dark truffles, and I’m about to make whiskey-raisin-marzipan-chocolate rolls (my mother's delicious recipe really calls for portwine, but one takes what one has), as well as white truffles with lime and cinnamon. But I would also love to make crisp chocolate covered Sevilla orange peels, nougat, fudge, fine marzipan figures, knäck, kola, multiple chocolate truffles in a range of flavors, mint pastiller, ice chocolate and other traditional sweets. I could go on all day.
Apart from candy and cookies, I also have plans on baking vortbread which is a traditional Swedish Christmas bread that calls for brewer’s wort (or simply porter and soda, which is all I have access to). It’s a quite dark and heavy bread which you eat Christmas ham on. If I have the time, I also would like to make some hardbread (crisp bread), which is really rather easy and it’s so nice to have around. We'll see, of course then there is food to be cooked as well…
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