Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday and we have plenty of treats for mothers: pansy bars, LOVE bars, truffle filled figs as well as boxes filled with sweet treats. We also have a great variety of bean to bar chocolate bars: Wisconsin Butter, Berry and Rose, Lillehammer, regional bars and very dark chocolate bars. In other words, we have lots of ways to show your love this Mother’s Day.
Peace, good health and joyous celebrating, Tracy
Happy Easter! Early spring flowers are starting to pop up everywhere. We went from heavy wet snow to 80 degrees nearly overnight. But I hear more spring like weather is coming in a couple of days. Yeah!
We have served Rusty Dog Coffee for the last several years. We love their coffee and them. Now they have gone and made us their most recent Top Dog coffee house. Wow and golly-gee. Thank you for the honor and thank you for the best espresso I’ve ever tasted.
This is a great opportunity to tell you about their coffees. Their espresso is so good you can drink it straight, really! For our dark roast we carry their Beignet coffee, which is a wonderful blend of a dark roast and chicory. I chose this blend because it is delicious and goes so well with bakery made with butter; as well as it being a Scandinavian in America tradition. The medium roast and the decaf were also chosen because they go really well with all butter bakery. As a person who regularly drinks decaf, I can tell you that this decaf is not an after thought; it is really good coffee.
Once again we are honored to be featured by Madisons Best Roaster, Rusty Dog Coffee. And only a bit fretful, being brought up with the Scandinavian saying, “The tallest nail gets the hammer.” Hopefully you will see me as being more grateful than bragging.
Peace and good health, Tracy
This morning we are having a heavy late winter snow storm. It feels closer to Christmas than Easter. But Easter is only two weeks away. We have: truffle bunnies, marshmallow duckies, buttercream eggs, Easter eggs filled with treats and many more items. You might want to wait until tomorrow to come shopping, the roads are terrible.
This would be a better morning to stay home, stay cozy and check out what Brennen has been doing on our Tik Tok page. The last couple of weeks he is featuring desserts that are very Sjölinds, the Princess cake, almond tart and chocolate tart. The Princess cake is a traditional Swedish birthday cake. It looks a bit wild with it’s bright green marzipan covering and bright pink almond cream layer but combined with the sponge cake and vanilla whipped cream it’s so delicious. The almond tart is also a Scando speacial dessert. It is a shortbread crust filled with moist almond cake filling, elegant and wonderful. And then there is the chocolate tart, ooh la la, enough said.
I had a friend that moved to the west coast many years ago and she said that what she missed most about the midwest were the stormy days. She said, “The west coast has the tyranny of good weather. You always feel like you should be doing something.” So grab a good book, find a fun movie or make a really long phone call and snuggle in. It’s a cozy day.
Peace, good health and stay safe, Tracy.
As I mentioned last Update, Helene and I are working madly at getting Easter products ready to go on the shelves; some will be appearing at the end of this week at the store downtown. In the evenings I have been making paper flowers for the Easter feather tree. I finally finished the feather tree yesterday and will be bringing it downtown this week.
Feather branches are a Swedish custom at Easter time. Why? I don’t know anymore than I know why a Christmas tree. Like most customs given to us from our ancestors, I imagine the customs started from someplace simple. A desire to dress up our homes for a holiday with something that we had on hand or something we could easily get or make. Branches from the winter tree and bush trimming and feathers from either fowl hunting or the coop; die the feathers (yellow most popular) and tie (or hot glue) the feathers to branches and put them in vases. I get my feathers from a craft store, make paper flowers, add a few little chicks from my craft stash, hang some bells to ring in Easter attach it all to a wire tree I got from a friend of mine and tah-dah, my version of an Easter tradition.
If I can figure out how to load a photo on to this site I’ll show you what the feather tree looks like. Otherwise you’ll need to come and visit us in Mount Horeb.
Peace and Good Health, Tracy
I find myself working alone most of the time. What started out as social distancing for COVID reasons has turned out to be what works best for my chocolate making cohort, Helene, and I. I am an early morning person and Helene is more of an afternoon person. This is working for making chocolate and sweets, both take up a great deal of space, but not so great for socializing. To beat back the loneliness I’ve been listening to more music and of course podcasts. One of my favorite podcasts is “Phoebe Reads a Mystery”. Phoebe not only reads mysteries but a good deal of classic literature. This winter one of the books I listened to was “Little Women”. It’s so cozy to be crafting and have someone reading you a story.
I am looking forward to having more people around when we have the drive-thru in this factory space open again; until then it’s like Mr. March from “Little Women” says, “We work while we wait, to make good use of hard times.” I’m working on Easter candies right now. They will be on the shelves shortly.
Peace and Good Health, Tracy.
Semlor Saturday is here!
Semlor is a cardamon bun filled with grated almond marzipan and vanilla creme. So delicious! In my Scando-centric opinion, much better than a cream puff. I know these might be fighting words in Wisconsin where at the State Fair the cream puff is king; but given that we are a small shop serving so few I hope you will forgive me.
We will be serving semlor today thru this coming Tuesday. This coming Tuesday is called Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday depending on which tradition you come from. We will bring semlor back during the six weeks of the Easter season, maybe more if there is the demand.
Semlor is a symbol of where my worlds collide. My mother’s parents were born to Scandinavian immigrant parents hence the semlor and my dad’s parents were Episcopalian, hence religious traditions. Semlor is my attempt to combine celebrating Shrove Tuesday (what Episcopalians call Mardi Gras) and the tradition having something wonderfully decadent before the lenten season starts, Ash Wednesday. Enjoy!
Peace and decadent fun for the next few days,
Tracy
Sooo…it’s been a while since I’ve given an update. I don’t know about you, but after thinking COVID was going to last weeks and then turned into years I grew very weary of giving updates when I didn’t really know what was happening. Well I’m ready to start updating again. Not a lot has changed in the last year, COVID-wise, however we are finally ready to start thinking about the future here at Sjölinds.
Many have asked when we will be reopening the Factory. We would love to but because of the uncertainty of the labor market and supply chain issues that are still relevant we are going to wait on that a bit. (and Chris and I have really loved having one day a week off)
We are going to start the on-line store again. We will keep you updated when we get closer to getting it up and running.
We will also be starting to post on our website and a few social media sites, thanks to our new social media mastermind, Brennan!
As always,
Peace and good health to you all,
Tracy
Well, the beginning of summer was great; no masks, people everywhere in a more positive spirit and a sense that everything was about change. Unfortunately, it hasn’t changed in the direction we had hoped. We are back in masks again and plans to open downtown have been delayed, again. Just a few weeks ago I was so sure that we would be able to reopen downtown that I had my family helping me dust, vacuum and rearrange the tables and chairs. (I’m starting to wonder if I’m cursed. I seems every time I get downtown ready for people to come back in the Covid numbers go in the wrong direction. What am I supposed to do?)
So now we are busy getting ready for school to start, making treats for fall and finding all the chocolate molds for Christmas. Maybe…by…Christmas…
Peace and Good health to you all, Tracy.