Semlor buns: a Scandi treat for Shrove Tuesday

In Britain, we mark the beginning of Lent with pancakes. Although nowadays relatively few of us strictly observe the Lenten dietary traditions which prohibit the eating of dairy and meat in the lead up to Easter, we happily leap on the annual opportunity to eat breakfast for dinner: sales of lemons and caster sugar soar, and we delight in filling ourselves full of pancakes.

But pancakes are not the only Lenten final hurrah: the semla bun is the Scandinavian favourite. Following the same logic as pancakes, the buns are designed to eat up the dairy ingredients which would have been prohibited by Lent religious laws. 

Semlor buns (semlor is the plural, semla is singular) are cream buns made from an enriched bread dough, perfumed with ground cardamom and shaped into buns, before being filled with an almond paste and a chantilly cream. Versions of the bun are eaten across Nordic countries on Shrove Tuesday, but they are probably best known and loved in Sweden and Finland.

The buns have been eaten since the 1500’s, and were originally only eaten on fettisdag (literally ‘fat day’ or fat Tuesday), but in recent years, their popularity means that they are now made and sold by bakeries from Christmas right the way through Lent. In Finland, the almond paste is sometimes replaced with raspberry or strawberry jam, like a cardamom Devonshire split.

Some serve the bun soaked in warmed milk – this is a throwback to the early versions of the bun which didn’t use almond paste or cream. While I’m all for tradition, I prefer the bun in tact, with a swooping tower of cream – the taller, the better. Nowadays, the top of the bun is cut off, and a cavity scraped out; the cavity is then filled with an almond paste followed by a swirling tower of chantilly cream.