Its cold, its fresh, its festive: gotta be December, gotta be Christmas! As we busy ourselves baking the traditional Christmas cake and doing up the house, there are also more social get-togethers with friends, as we let our hair down, and unwind and get set to welcome another year.
We took the opportunity of a more relaxed Saturday to hand make a festive bread: I love saffron, cardamom and orange zest, and I love bread. So why not put it all together in one recipe to make "Pulla Bread"?! This is a Finnish semi sweet pleated bread that is enjoyed with coffee on special occasions. For my recipe, I added a lot of Turkish saffron and used honey instead of sugar. What we enjoyed the most was the braiding of the flour to make a lovely pattern.
Unfortunately I have no idea how it tasted: we packed up the whole bread for a friend whose home we were visiting for a festive dinner. Definitely one to do again, where the pleasure in making is as much as in the eating!
