Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

Norwegian Skolebrod custard buns Earlier in the week I'd made a French Fruit Tart and I had a good amount of pastry cream leftover. I didn't want it to go to waste, and it's not something you can really freeze. Although I've never tried to freeze pastry cream, I've read that it separates when it thaws, and trying to reconstitute it sounds like a pain.  So, I decided to make Skolebrod Custard Buns .  The word Skolebrod is Norwegian for "school bread" and I've read this is a traditional treat schoolchildren would enjoy when they got home from school, or maybe they were sent to school in their lunchboxes.  Apparently in Norway you find them in every bakery. I've made them before, and they're delicious. Here  is the recipe I used. It was already in my recipe binder.  This time, I decided to halve it because it looked like I only had 7 spoonfuls of pastry cream.  However, I wish I'd made the entire recipe and  made smaller rolls.  Each bun ended...

Today I made Hot Cross Buns to freeze for Easter morning. We're visiting Grandpa, so I needed to make these ahead of time. I used  this recipe  from Sally's Bake Blog. I've made them before but I can't remember how it went. This time, however, I had a lot of trouble with the dough sticking to the sides of the mixer no matter how much extra flour I added. I have a feeling it could have been because I didn't follow the recipe to the letter. It calls for 3.5 cups of flour, but somehow I skipped looking at the amount in the ingredients, only looked at the directions, and started beating 2 cups of flour with a dough hook instead of with the paddle attachment. By the time I came to my senses, switched attachments, and put in all the flour needed, perhaps the die was cast.  I was late to a French lesson, to boot.  So I dumped the mess out on the counter, added a lot of bench flour, and somehow made a dough.  They baked up fine and I tried one after dinner and it was d...