Travel Diaries: 48 hours in Oslo

Oslo

When our plane started to descend into Oslo airport the reality of Norway’s natural beauty became apparent. Visible out of the window as the plane banked into a sweeping turn was mile upon mile of lakes, mountains and trees all covered in a deep blanket of early winter snow; a sea of white broken by pockets of grey lakes and the dark spikes of conifer. The snow was unexpected, as when booking this trip for November we’d been told it was likely too early, but welcome. Even the airport, surrounded by snow dusted trees, was turned into something picturesque. Sat on the bus from the airport, which I’d recommend over the train as it’s significantly cheaper for a round trip and only takes 40 minutes, I took advantage of the free wifi to frantically do some googling for “Oslo’s best cinnamon bun“. The bun which really stood out was made by WB Samson, the Oslo institution. Each bun is baked in its own individual tin, knotted up rather than simply swirled and covered with cinnamon and a little salt. I could happily talk about this bun for the rest of this post, but as it was simply a pitstop we made between the bus terminal and our hotel, I should probably get going with the rest of the trip.

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Pumpkin Spice Baileys Glaze for Pumpkin Cinnamon Buns

Pumpkin Cinnamon Buns

I’m freshly back from a trip to Norway, and I may have eaten my body weight in cinnamon buns. They were completely different to the ones I’m about to post about, but I thought it was relevant. I’m going to be trying to find a recipe for one of them soon, so keep your eyes out for that. In the meantime, this is an updated recipe to something I baked a year ago, and while pumpkins are still in season (yup, they don’t disappear after Halloween) I felt that it was a great time to stick this together. The cinnamon bun recipe itself is the same as the first one, I just didn’t roll it as thin and changed the glaze, from the maple to something slightly different. I stirred through a decent helping of the new Baileys Pumpkin Spice to give it a bit of a kick. The pumpkin spice, unsurprisingly, goes well with the pumpkin in the buns and the cinnamon that’s running through them.

Pumpkin Cinnamon Buns
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Red Onion & Rosemary Focaccia

Red Onion & Rosemary Focaccia

As alluded to previously, on my last trip up to Scotland the weather was pretty awful. This meant we spent a lot of time baking, and as well as the honey & rye cake, mac n cheese and chocolate cardamom bread we also baked a loaf of Focaccia. I’ve tried making focaccia once before, and to be honest, that was a bit of a disaster. It didn’t rise properly, dried out and came out looking a bit like cardboard. Having seen other people have similar issues I put off trying to bake focaccia again for a very long time, years, in fact. A dark and rainy day on the Isle of Mull felt like the perfect time to try again, and this time we cracked it.
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Where I Ate: October 2016

Butterscotch Cronut

A while back I used to do round ups of the places I ate, things I baked and recipes that I cooked each month. This was, in part, to keep a kind of diary and to show the places that I get recipes from for my day to day baking and cooking which don’t necessarily make the blog. The posts, while a fun summary, were too long and took far too much time to put together for what they were. I have decided to revive them in a slightly different manner however. I’m taking out the bits around everything I’ve baked & cooked and I won’t be listing every single meal I’ve had out that month. What I am going to do is concentrate on a small handful of the best (or worst) places I’ve eaten across the previous month. So without further ado, here’s some eating out highlights from October.

The month started with a trip to Leeds where I ate at Bundobust, because that’s basically where I eat every time I head up. It’s my favourite place in Leeds and I’ve talked about it at length before. The rest of the month was London based and it was also one of my 3 veggie months for 2016. The highlights are as follows:
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