The Nordic Baking Book: Vanilla Cream Buns (Vaniljbullar)

This recipe was almost another disaster. I am surprised to be writing this post since at about hour three I was sure this attempt would only end in wasted time and ingredients. On the fourth hour, however, I put these buns in the oven, hoped for the best, and shockingly they turned out to be edible.

This recipe comes from The Nordic Baking Book by Magnus Nilsson, one of my favorites but a very challenging cookbook for me. This was the most difficult recipe I've attempted so far, not surprisingly seeing as it included fresh yeast and using my mixer to knead the dough. I definitely need a lot more practice kneading out that process.

This recipe is actually three recipes all put together. It calls for starting with a quantity of one of the three basic sweet wheat bun dough recipes and a vanilla custard as two of the ingredients. I chose the most difficult and time consuming dough recipe.

It began with me spending way too much time trying to convert the fresh yeast to active dry yeast quantities. I have not converted fractions to decimals or used algebra in a long time, but it was a nice mental exercise for a little while. 

After combining all the other dough ingredients, I put it all in the mixing bowl and began the mixer on level 4 and put a timer for 20 minutes, per the instructions. About halfway through I noticed my mixer starting to slow down but I wasn't noticing the dough getting shiny or super elastic so I kept it going. My mixer died at minute 12 to the point where it would not turn off at all anymore until I unplugged it. 

I took out the dough from the mixing bowl and kept kneading by hand, as it did not seem ready yet. Leila's dough recipe specifically mentioned requiring a lot of gluten development and at least 20 minutes of kneading. I made sure to hand knead for those remaining eight minutes, and was sweating by the end of it. And yet my dough didn't seem to be ready yet. It did enter my head around the 30 minute mark that perhaps it had been over-kneaded.

I knew something was wrong when it wouldn't integrate with itself any longer whatsoever, but thought it might still be salvageable and mostly didn't want to waste the entire tablespoon of ground cardamom in the dough. In any case, I decided to stop kneading after 30 minutes, and left it to rise for the one hour (at least), per the instructions.

Then I began on the vanilla custard/cream recipe. It calls for 1 or 2 pods but it just did not sit well with me financially to use two. I thought one pod was sufficient vanilla flavor.

It was only once I finished the vanilla cream recipe that I realized it was approaching dinner time and my child would be hungry soon, but I couldn't recall the exact time I started proofing the bread. It didn't appear to have doubled yet by what I thought was about an hour of proofing, but I had things to do and a child to feed, so the next step had to wait until after dinner.

Once I finally had time to get back to the recipe, it did look like it had at least gotten larger, though it was extremely dense and difficult to manipulate into the 25-30 pieces.

I used a heavy marble roller and was having to put all of my body weight into the dough to get it to remotely flatten and stay that way. The dough was way overworked at this point. I had to roll it much larger than necessary to be able to close up the rolls completely when folding over. Also, it didn't want to cooperate at all in staying put together so I had to end up twisting the ends together to keep in the vanilla cream.

There was also much more custard than necessary compared to the amount of dough. I only ended up using about a third of the custard for these buns.

After the second rise I really didn't notice a big difference in size. In my oven the buns did not start to get even slightly golden until about 15 minutes later, at which time it started smelling like a holiday ham (perhaps the cardamom?). I took them out despite them not looking anything like the picture in the book (they were much darker in the book). They were very dark on the bottom so I think this was the perfect time to take them out. 

Then I covered the buns with butter and sugar and fed one to my husband.

To my surprise, they turned out to be quite delicious. If you're short on time, a premade custard would likely work fine. I felt the filling took a backseat compared to the flavor of the cardamom in the dough. I would also caution these are extremely filling and dense buns. They do freeze well.

My husband and I decided that these get four Nordic spears. If you'd like to try this recipe yourself, go to page 266 of The Nordic Baking Book by Magnus Nilsson.