Semla Pops

Yes, it is once again Fat Tuesday and while toying with the idea of baking semlas, and weighing against the fact that I had lots of the buns left over from last year, the lovely ladies at HR (where I work) went ahead and ordered several crates for the whole office to celebrate.

So my mind went on spinning - moving down to a smaller scale, maybe on a lolly stick, hm?



And so I got the idea of a semla pop. And I googled it, there was nothing of the kind.

But of course semla buns are from yeast dough, there is no way I could get them that small. And then be able to scoop out the crumb in the middle in order to fill with marzipan etc.

Then it struck me - choux buns! They pretty much have a hole in them per definition. And I wouldn't be fiddling with marzipan, crumbs and milk etc for the filling, just push in a small pinch of marzipan, squirt a little whipped cream, put the lid on and dust with icing sugar. The whipped cream, was just that - whipped cream with a couple of tsp of icing sugar added to it.

And that's precisely what I did and even my parents liked them, to the point that we put away the 9 pops I made straight away, leaving barely enough time for photos.

So this is what I did. One batch of choux buns of previously tried and tested recipe. It ended up a bit runnier than I expected, not sure why and as I piped slightly smaller blobs, I ended up with about 75 of them.

Once they had cooled completely, I carefully cut off the tops of a few as the semla lids.

Into the cavity I placed some marzipan, about the size of a hazelnut and pushed a lolly stick through.



As you can see this time I had polystyrene pieces, which I saved after the candles on Falbala's latest birthday cake. A little Blu-Tack worked a treat.

It occurred to me that I should have cut the lids into triangles, but with my Mum and Dad standing next to me and not really succeeding in waiting for me to finish constructing my little semla pops, I didn't bother.

On further thought, the lolly sticks aren't really necessary, the mini-semlas work quite nicely as bite-sized treats and as it turned out, survived a night in the fridge without problems, which was a massive bonus. I decided not to take the risk of a second night in that cold place and ate the few remaining survivors for breakfast the next day.

My original plan was to make the whole lot into semla pops and take to work, sadly I fell the victim of this year's heavy duty flu and ended up working from home most of last week, so as only bonus I got to keep all the little semlas.

As for the flu, I've mostly kicked it, it seems, but according to the Swedish news, it's the worst epidemic in 20 years.