Is it the time for Fika now?

Yes, it is at all times. Swedes can have it after breakfast, during Midday, just before lunch of after, just before dinner, as well as as the last snack of the day in the late evening. I would call it the Afternoon Tea in England, le Goûter in France or Podwieczorek in Poland, however there is a a little trick here, because there is no set time for it and Fika usually happens few times a day and Swedes spend about an hour daily in total on that "coffee break". Why? Because Swedes are on the second position after Finns in drinking coffee in Europe or maybe even if the whole world. It just became an institution in culture of this Scandinavian country.

What is the best aspect of Fika? Without consideration, it is surly the sweet bun, which comes with it. Sometimes it can be a sandwich, but mostly it is the vetebröd, so the sweet yeasted bread, kanelbullar- the cinnamon bun or lussekatter, which is a saffron bun.

The funny thing is that coffee was not widely accepted until about 18th century, when first cafés were  opened in Stockholm, but negatively they were opened only for elite men, where they could talk politics for example. Women had to meet at home, which later on changed into the habit of meeting for a cup of coffee.

On the other hand, the beginning of coffee adventure in Sweden dates back to 1685, when King Karol XII wanted to import some to his country after his trip to Turkey, where he tried this mysterious beverage. Few hundreds years later Gustav III was strongly against it and wanted to carry on an experiment, so he freed twin prisoners, however what they had to do was: one of them had to drink cup of tea three times a day and, not suprisingly, the other had to drink three cups of coffee. Unfortunately, doctors and the King died before the end of experiment, but the results were that the one drinking tea died at the age of 85 (which was a lot at that time) and (this time- suprisingly!) the other twin overlived him!

Where I am trying to get with this is that I have a really easy recipe for you for the cinnamon buns, which was originally in polish from a website: http://kuchnia.wp.pl/id,9128,title,Cynamonowe-buleczki,przepis.html?ticaid=113260 , but I translated it for you, so more people can try it!

So it goes like that:
Ingredients for the dough:
- 4 glasses or flour
- sprinkle of salt
- 125g of melted butter
- 30g of fresh yeast
- 80g of sugar
- 2 eggs

For the filling:
- 2 tablespoons of melted butter
- 1 and a half tablespoons of cinnamon
- 6 tablespoons of sugar

For the icing:
- 200g of caster sugar
- 2 tablespoons of water or orange juice

How to do it?
Warm up the milk in the pan (but don't boil it), add sugar and mix it thoroughly. To this mixture, add the broken yeast and leave for few minutes.

Sieve the flour and add salt. After mixing, add eggs, melted and cooled down a little bit butter and the milk and yeast mixture. Knead the dough and if needed, add some flour (well I needed milk, but I think that it just depends how precise you are with the ingredients). Grease a bowl with olive oil and put the dough in it. Cover it with a linen cloth. Leave it for an hour in a warm place.

On a breadboard (I just did it on the worktop) roll out the dough to get a thickness of a 0,5 cm in a shape of a rectangle (30x50 cm). Grease the dough with butter and then sprinkle it with cinnamon mixed with sugar (leave 2 cm on sides, so that it is easier to stick it together later). Roll the dough and cut in slices with a thickness of 2-3 cm and leave for 45 minutes.  Then, bake it in the oven with a temperature of 180 degrees Celcius for 15-20 minutes.

When the buns cool down, we need to ice them on top. Water or orange juice (I used water, I am too afraid to put juice in this mixture) mix with caster sugar (the texture needs to be easy to spread). Enjoy!

In my opinion they ended up being to stiffy, but tell me in comments what do you get from this recipe and if you like it! A little help- I read on other blogs by Swedish people that it is good to put half or two thirds of the flour at first and after first rising of the dough, add the rest, because they are much lighter afterwards. Therefore that is my mistake that I have not read it before. Shame!

After trying the first, still hot bun with that cinnamon spilling out from the roll I thought about IKEA and what I then found was: http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_GB/pdf/Kanelbullar_RecipeCard_UK&IE_A5.pdf

I will try this one next time and also if you are going to one of the shops in a near future, look for recipes inside, because I found one for lussekatter in Croydon IKEA, as well as in Łomianki IKEA, so I have it in two languages and I still haven't tried it! Sorry...

The last thing... Have you ever thought, where the word Fika comes from? It is quite funny, because the word is inverted syllable slang term derived from "kaffi", the 19th century word for coffee, as that very interested blog has told me: http://food52.com/blog/9499-the-history-of-fika-swedish-coffee-break and this one confirmed: http://szwecja.net/NOW/fs-now/2013/kawa.html

There are also very interested statistics about Fika and drinking coffee in Sweden, but I will not get into details and I will check it personally, if I get a chance to visit that country, which hopefully, with my dad's enthusiasm to travelling could happen in a near, near future!