The weekend baking project. Swedish cinnamon rolls.
Text © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
Fast and easy to bake, these can can be filled and glazed with most anything you favour from crushed pecan in maple syrup to vanilla custard. Glaze with likewise as many of your heart’s culinary desires from cream cheese to Dulce de Leche.
Related:
A Swedish fika over cinnamon rolls
Kanelbullens Dag, Cinnamon Rolls Day 2009
Cinnamon Roll Day (Kanelbullens Dag) in Sweden, 2007
In the garden, in a light cotton tie dye skirt, as the Swedish west coast swings into early summer.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
Cheryl Cordeiro and Alvin Tan with his art, at Phunk Studio’s Empire of Dreams exhibition, January 2013, Singapore. Phunk Studio is a gallery space that illustrates an integral perspective expressed through art.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
I’ve been reading Doriane L. Coleman (1996), Jürgen Habermas (1976) and Ken Wilber (2000), where I’m finding a lot of humour in Wilber’s writings in how he incorporates Habermas into his own philosophical reasoning, specifically talking of how some disciplines argue themselves lost into aperspectival space usually at higher levels of development within the individual, the organizational, national and transnational realms. More thoughtful and filled with much less humour is the article by Coleman on “cultural defense” and “the Liberals’ Dilemma”.
This article is an exploration in thought on the dialectic of progress, the nature of multiculturalism (and its consequences when used in court as a “cultural defense”) and aperspectival fallacy.
Carved details in the style of Rococo, on a Chinese gold on black lacquer cabinet purchased from China during the 1910s.
The cabinet is of the provenance, Family Sederholm.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
Spring, finally. Enjoying the first day of the year that is not freezing cold.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
From a late night’s adventure in baking – two different types of sourdough bread, from a kefir culture and a buttermilk culture.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013
At this year’s Passion for Food Festival 2013 in Gothenburg, one of the talking points was about how homebaked sourdoughs are now coming back into fashion in Swedish households. Most people still lamented the time it took for a culture to start and rise, this being the primary reason why sourdoughs were abandoned for decades as a household project due to a lack of time.
So sourdoughs were not always favoured in breadbaking history, and I couldn’t help but laugh when I read in a well-regarded Swedish cookbook printed in the late 1990s that sourdough cultures were cumbersome to work with because they tended to die on you, not give enough raising strength to the dough or worse, produce bread with uneven holes in the texture. And to think, at this year’s food festival, I was so taken in by sourdough bread with exactly those large, uneven roles going through its entire structure that I thought I’d adopt a sourdough culture as a pet project to see how it works out.
It’s been a few months and the culture is alive and well, no fuss to it at all, contrary to how it is often written about in numerous cookbooks and websites. Just see that you have enough of the starter after a baking project, leave it out a few days and I can almost assure you, it’ll live. Yeast and bacteria are after all, quite resilient organisms.
I now in fact have two different sourdough cultures to experiment with to my heart’s delight, where as pets, they hardly take any time looking after at all.
Teahouse. 高山流水.
Tea-drinking at teahouses is a tradition in China that goes back to the Three Kingdoms of Wei, Wu and Shu, 220-280 AD.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2010-2013
Walking through the streets of Hangzhou, I could never quite grasp the sentimental feelings of its romantic past even as my eye caught the elegant lines of temples, the fine pagodas and the many intricately carved bridges that made the landscape so picturesque.
But arrive at the calm and mirroring waters of West Lake, and the realization sets in – that the city through numerous phases of transformations, carries within its aura a purity of natural beauty and a sense of timelessness. And it is perhaps this, that rocked the souls of the literati both past and present.
Continue reading “Teahouse in Hangzhou“
A mixture of sweet and sour apples render
a nice balance to the flavour of this cinnamon infused creation.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013
It was over a delicate apple crumble dessert served with whipped cream and cinnamon, in the plush setting of the Bar and Billiard Room at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, that the importance of the use of status symbols in Asia was explained to me as a series of unhappy events that a Nordic company experienced in its early years in Singapore, during the late 1990s.
Different views of what defines success
Asia and Scandinavia have different views of what defines success. They also have different ways of showing social / organizational affluence, a lack of understanding on either side on the effective use of such status symbols could well lead to an awkward situation of miscommunication, some small, others needing nothing less than a crisis management strategy.
Some ten years ago, part of how Nordic organizations expanded their operations was to send a core-team of top Scandinavian managers to oversee initial functions in Asia. Chances are, this modus operandi has not changed much since then.
The general idea was to bring with them a set of core cultural values and have them cascade through the new organization, in this case, a Singapore subsidiary.
Continue reading “Conversation about status symbols over cinnamon infused apple crumble”
Extra Virgin | Virgin Extra.
Organic Olive Oil.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013
Per-Olof Arnäs on “Terminator, TinTin and Teleportation”, an variation of his lecture on “The digitization of transportation” at Vetenskapsfestivalen 2013.
Text and Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013
The 25th of April was the second day of the Gothenburg International Science Festival 2013, where in the public arena of Nordstan in Gothenburg, a lively presentation on the topic of transportation for the future was ongoing by Per-Olof Arnäs of Chalmers University of Technology in the morning. Colleagues from the University of Gothenburg would also be giving some presentations through the day, regarding the various aspects of the crisis in Europe and how that might have rippling effects on issues such as European state leadership and workforce migrations between countries in Europe.
This year’s theme at the science festival is Cruise and Control. In a multi-dimensional and multi-levelled approach, the event aims to address questions pertaining to the Individual such as personal health and fitness, to security controls by use (or abuse) of technology in Society, to larger Environmental issues such as finding balance between consumption and sustainable living.
Continue reading “The Gothenburg International Science Festival 2013”