Stockholm Magic And Muffins For Lunch

We have just spent a weekend in Stockholm and discovered some magic. The city, spread out over 14 islands offers many fine views of the waterfront. We walked well over 20 kms on the first day hiking in the Royal Gardens and exploring the old town called Gamla Stan, looking at interesting sights, shops and fashions. It is a lively city with no shortage of interesting events advertised everywhere.

Most of Sunday was spent in the National Museum looking at their art collections and afterwards we went strolling through some of the more trendy shopping areas. The Swedes are famous for their glass art and this set of his and hers glasses by artist Mats Jonasson caught our eye.

We ended the 2nd day by having a drink at one of the open air cafés on the esplanade listening to a live concert that was being held in support of the people who are on a hunger strike in Iran. Then a leisurely stroll back to the hotel to go and get ready for our flight back to Helsinki very, very early the next morning. We had no trouble waking up at 4am on Monday morning. The allnight sportsbar around the corner saw to it that we did not oversleep and got up at the appropriate hour simply by keeping us awake all night.

Crayfish Season

The crayfish season in Sweden and Finland happens during August and September and is coming to its end soon. Crayfish parties are apparently common, judging by the amount of special crayfish party goodies that is on sale in the supermarkets. The Finns serve their crayfish cold. Prawns and lobster are not readily available here due to the low salinity of the Baltic Sea. We can buy those tiny shrimps and, from August, the red crayfish which is, of course, a freshwater creature and not one of my favourite snacks. Nevertheless, I felt that I should bake something that uses seafood as part of the ingredients and chose one of my favourite muffin recipes that combines prawns or shrimps, salmon, sweetcorn and some cheese.

Now, taking photos of a muffin is not really the most exciting or challenging thing to get involved with. So I had to think about a few props to make things a bit more interesting to look at. Eventually I came up with origami and started folding all sorts of sea creatures to accompany the muffins to my photo studio/kitchen counter.

If you are keen to get folding as well, here are links to some really good sites on origami that contains diagrams that can be downloaded.

Origami club has clear diagrams as well as animated instructions for each design. Diagrams are rated in terms of difficulty

Origami.com has approx 21 pages of diagrams that can be downloaded as pdf documents, and
Wannalearn.com has a list of links to different origami sights and pages.

And if paper folding isn’t your thing, I have also included some links to sights where you fill find diagrams and instructions for really good and interesting paper models.

Yamaha has a great sight with all types of paper models as well as very detailed, complicated models of their motorbikes.
Spacestation 42 has a list of papertoys, crafts and models for all ages and include links to the Canon, Epson and Hitachi papercraft pages as well as Yamaha.

Seafood Muffins With Cheese and Sweetcorn

½ Cup Milk
3 Large Eggs
140g Tin of Sweetcorn Kernels – do not drain
1 Cup Cheddar Cheese – grated or small cubes, plus extra for the topping
Few Spring Onions - chopped
1 Cup Prawns – roughly chopped or:
Shrimp – defrosted, if using frozen shrimp
1 Cup of Smoked Salmon – cubed (I used hot smoked salmon)
2 ½ Cups Self-Raising Flour
1 scant teaspoon Cayenne Pepper
½ teaspoon Salt

• Prepare muffin pans – I used the large American style muffin cups because these muffins really stick to the pan. The recipe makes about 10 muffins.
• Preheat the oven to 200 C.
• Beat the milk and eggs.
• Add the sweetcorn and its juice and stir.
• Put the flour, pepper and salt in a bowl.
• Add the fish, prawns and cheese to the flour.
• Stir in the wet ingredients.
• Put into the muffin cups.
• Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with grated cheese.
• Sprinkle with smoked paprika.
• Add a large frozen prawn on top – if available.
• Bake for about 25-30 minutes.