C is for Coffee and Cakes

Theme ~ Swedish Rhapsody

Oh, my American friends.....so you think you drink a lot of coffee and eat way too many goodies here? Well, you are small time compared to us Swedes. Swedes love their coffee and what goes with it. In my childhood home, my mother boiled coffee. She would put water in a stainless steel coffee pot and  add coffee grounds to the boiling water and then let it cook. This produced a very strong and really good coffee. I doubt anyone makes it that way now.

 

For my mother's generation, coffee had to be served in dainty china cups with very thin rims. A friend of my mother's visited me here and refused to drink coffee from my all-American coffee mugs. So this was taken very seriously.

Usually, when you had your afternoon coffee or when company came for coffee, you would serve cookies and cakes on pretty plates, like the one above. This was also a serious business. And any time you stopped by a Swedish home, you would, and I'm sure you still will, be offered a cup of coffee.

These dishes belonged to my grandmother.

A few examples of various coffee breads.

Another little dainty coffee cup of mine.

This may be a Danish with raspberry or strawberry and vanilla filling.

This is a Swedish modern cup that a friend gave me last time I visited there. It's so Swedish looking that I'm showing it off again. Yes, it's one cup with a different pattern on each side.

Finally, all around town, any Swedish town, there are these coffee houses, called konditorier. At the counter, there's a display of cakes, cookies, and what we call coffee-bread. The smells greeting you as you arrive in a konditori are just wonderful and the temptations are too much for any normal human being to handle, of this I'm sure. So while you are imagining these temptations, I leave the letter C.