Glad hjärtensdag 2010

Jennifer In my list, I said that one of my goals was to write a post a day while unemployed. That went out the window on the very first day, of course, but I intend to do some catching up with short posts: more fika- and pub-småpratar, and similar little stories of odds and ends.



To start with, let's talk about brownies. There's not too much "Swedish" in this story, except that if we weren't here, we wouldn't have met our Swiss friends, and we might never have been given a Swiss cookbook, and then we wouldn't have made our Valentines dinner out of Swiss food (sauerkraut, bacon, and Gruyere spring rolls). (They make brownies here, sort of; it's called kladdkaka, but it's too sweet and gooey for my tastes.) So, for dessert, I made "Basel brownies" from the Swiss cookbook. This recipe is the absolutely fussiest brownie recipe I have ever seen, requiring for instance separating the eggs, and pouring boiling water over the chocolate and then decanting the water, and taking up every bowl in the kitchen while the ingredients wait their turn to be assimilated.

They are really good, by the way; the texture is quite unusual, and they are very chocolately and tasty, even made with Swedish chocolate rather than Swiss. (But really, Swedish, Swiss... who can tell the difference?)