Lime Or Lemon is 1 year old: celebrating with cinnamon loaf or cinnamon rolls transformed

Spring 2012 - April

The past 365 days have been intense with eating, cooking, reading cookbooks and food magazines, surfing through other food blogs and an enormous amount of (online) food writing, visiting farmers´market, taking pictures, talking about food, experiencing good and bad eateries, making my first pasta, discovering new ingredients like quinoa, stachys or salsify, foraging in the forest for blueberries and mushrooms, gasping and smiling at the breakfast, lunch and dinner photos my friends have sent through mobile devices, making lists of things I want to learn and cook and not the least creating a cookbook with my colleagues from various different nationalities, cooking and taking pictures for the book and trying out others´ recipes and this way getting to know their world too.

I am grateful to my friends who urged me to start a blog after dinner one night and I thought ah, why not! My sister took away the fear of the technical complexity and indeed I was surprised how easy it was. I thought I was ready to go public and share what’s going on in my head and my kitchen with others. I hope some recipes have found a new life in someone’s kitchen. 

People have dropped by at Lime Or Lemon? from 90 countries. I like to think how awesome it is that in a couple of clicks we can land in a new (food) world through internet and witness all the food bloggers creating so diverse content, sharing their work of food art and promoting cooking, healthy eating and education about food.

The top 3 most visited articles in the first year were:

Lime or lemon - what´s the difference?

Dutch delight - mustard soup 

Cocktail de pulpo y camaron, Acapulco style

The good thing about cooking for the blog is that my dinners often take place much earlier now as I need to catch the daylight for the photos. 
Special thanks to T for the inspiration and Mark and Marek for leaving the most comments.

I am happily celebrating the 1 year anniversary with one of my all time favourites cinnamon rolls but this time in a new form of a layered loaf. Looking forward to new encounters in the unimaginably rich world of food!

Cinnamon Loaf
Ingredients:

30g fresh yeast

0.5 teaspoon salt

4-5 tablespoons sugar

0.5 teaspoon cardamom powder

3dl milk, lukewarm

180g white wheat flour

240g half-white wheat flour

1 egg, beaten

100g butter, half melted

70g butter, very soft for spreading

3 tablespoons cinnamon to sprinkle

1.5 dl sugar to sprinkle

Melt the yeast with salt and 1 tbsp sugar until it turns liquid. Add the rest of the sugar, cardamom, and milk. Mix. Then add the flour, mix. Add the beaten egg and the butter and mix until the dough is homogenous for 5-10 minutes. Cover with 2 kitchen towels and leave to rise in a warm place for 1 hour. Avoid any draft.

Fit a loaf form with baking paper. Set the oven to 200°C.

Be generous with butter, cinnamon and sugar

When the dough has doubled take it out of the bowl onto a well floured surface and cut it into 2 or 3 pieces for rolling out depending on the space you have available. Roll it out into a centimetre thick layer and then spread some soft butter on the dough, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Being generous with these 3 components makes a difference in the end result. 

Fit the cinnamon dough squares into the baking form

Cut the dough into squares that fit into your baking form and place them in it.

Then repeat with the other layer of dough until finished. Place the form into the oven and cook for 45 min or until the match comes out without clean when testing.

Cinnamon loaf

The Estonian way would be to eat the cake straight away warm from the oven and drink cold milk to it. Of course if this is alien to you, choose your own favourite drink.

Cinnamon rolls transformed into a loaf