Honey Tea Buns

If I had had the ingredients, this is what I would have cooked rather than rock cakes as a promising accompanyment to my cups of tea. Honey tea buns. It pretty much describes what I am looking for.

Unfortunately, it is just a gussied up scone :-(

The ingredients required presumably over a basic scone recipe (although I have not checked) were ground ginger, orange rind and honey. However, these things barely affected the flavour. I ended up topping the halves with jam, butter and jam and finally honey in order to round off the blandness of the taste of scone.

If I knew I was going to be cooking scones, I probably would have tried to make clotted cream and gone for what is classed where I grew up, as devonshire tea. Cream and jam on scones with a pot of tea.

But this attempt at finding a good tea accompanyment was definitely educational. It left me with the feeling I wanted something more biscuitlike. The rock cakes for instance, although small, were definitely on the right track. Perhaps if I made larger sugar bun sized versions of those. Although that would be very high in calories.. the rock cakes were around 180 calories for two small cakes which together weighed 50 grams. So looked at from that perpective, the rock cakes are a good size for having one or two as an indulgent snack during the day.

Polish Sausages

One of the many foods I have been missing since I moved to Iceland, are normal sausages. I can find salami, which are actually pretty good. Spanish sausages, which have that the same icky mouth taste as you get when you walk near where a cat has sprayed. But there are no normal sausages in sight.

I do most of my shopping at Bonus, a supermarket which is the cheapest in Iceland -- for what that is worth. Most of the time the vegetables are already off, if not then fairly well along their way to being off. And more often than not what I am looking for just hasn't been restocked or is no longer available. Which leads to me really scrutinising the shelves to make sure I haven't missed it. And that led to me finding these sausages.

The ones I initially found were bratwurst sausages. And I fried a couple up. Not a good show. They had a hard taste, if I had to guess what it was, I would say the nitrates used in making them. But since I am a glutton for punishment, and because I really want to punish myself with a full on english breakfast, I bought these polish sausages as well today.

On Saturday morning it is going to be sausages, bacon, beans, eggs and buttered bread. I can't wait.

Rock Cakes

Most of my baking efforts are aimed at finding something decent to eat with a nice relaxing cup of tea. In this case, what I really wanted was sugar buns. Not having a recipe for them, or much in the way of ingredients, what I did could cook were rock cakes. I pictures large hefty buns which became more and more satisfying as they got a little stale (the best kind of "cup of tea" snack).

What actually ended up being baked were these tiny walnut sized "cakes"...

Still, they were tasty and just as good the more stale they got. Next step, find a recipe for something like what was called sugar buns back in New Zealand.