Last week, my cousin Alida, who lives in Vancouver spent a week with us in Helsinki before flying on to Paris for the rest of her summer holidays. We decided to not only pack as much fun as we could into the week we had together, but to show her the whole of Helsinki. Not an easy task if you only have a week, but we solved it by taking her all over the city the way the crow flies. That is, a flight over Helsinki in a hot air balloon.
We had a wonderful sunny summer day and good visibility. The flight exceeded all expectations. It was fun and we loved every second in the air. We even got ‘baptised’ with champagne afterwards and received a certificate of flight while snacking on bread that the pilot’s wife baked for the occasion. Recommended for everyone who wants to see the city in an hour.
Apart from the wonderful flight and seeing the city from the air, it was a most interesting experience to see them inflating the balloons. It starts off with a fan and cold air to get the balloon inflated at first, then they switch to hot air. The size of those balloons was impressive. They are beautiful and the flight is smooth and silent except when they switch on the hot air propane burners.
There was not a lot of time for baking while we were running around with our visitor. But I did bake some Sugary Toasted Sesame Seed Cookies before she arrived which we enjoyed with a cup of tea in the evenings.
I discovered the original recipe on the McCormicks website. We cannot buy the jars of McCormick’s toasted sesame seeds here in Finland. I made this recipe using organic sesame seeds which I toasted in a non-stick pan on the stove. I am also a bit of a sesame fanatic, so I doubled the amount of toasted sesame seeds used in the original recipe. And, instead of dribbling melted choccy over them, I added dark chocolate chips to the batter. Alida turned out to be as much of a sesame and dark choccy fanatic as I am, so no cookies were left by the end of her stay.
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