Sweets from Sweden

It was Andrew's idea to replicate Nic's Blogging by Mail event for us European food bloggers. The rules are most simple: you put together a little care package, send it to someone, and receive another package from someone else. Nothing beats the thrill of having surprise goodies land on my doormat so I had to sign up.

As Andrew's round-up can attest, all of us were graced with thoughtfully selected and/or homemade treats and Anne's package, flying to me all the way from Sweden, was no exception. Here's what she sent!

- Wonderful homemade cookies: Bondkakor (Peasant Cookies) and Daimkakor (Daim Cookies). The first kind were butter cookies with chopped almonds, while the second kind, each of them in a cute little foil tin, were crumbly-crunchy cookies with bits of Daim chocolate at the bottom. It was very hard to decide which one I liked best: I kept alternating bites and saying "this one!" before I bit into the other kind and said "no, this one!". They were all gone before the jury could come to a final decision, but fortunately Anne gave me both recipes and I will try to reproduce them very soon -- stay tuned!

- A pretty bag of Leksands mini crispbread rounds, which are excellent under a layer of salted butter (wonderful whole grain taste) and will make, as Anne suggests, a cool base for crostini with a moist topping -- smoked salmon and dill crème fraîche being a natural fit I'm sure.

- Handfuls of Marianne candy, sprinkled into the package like so many packing peanuts: the red ones are mint-covered chocolates, the blue ones mint-covered toffees, and both kinds are delicious: they begin as a hard mint candy, and they gradually soften as you work on them, revealing a tender heart of chocolate or caramel.

Not yet taste-tested but soon to be:

- Two chocolate bars which Anne chose among her favorites: the toffee-filled Plopp (love the name!), and the roasted-hazelnut-studded Schweizernöt.

- Three bars of lemon licorice and a little bag of salty licorice called Djungelvrål (Jungle howl in Swedish). The latter, as Anne explained, is a very Swedish item that most foreigners fail to, um, appreciate fully -- very intriguing and I will ask my tastebuds to keep an open mind!

- A bag of spice mix to make Swedish meatballs: the package comes with helpful instructions in Swedish, Finnish and Danish, but Anne was kind enough to translate them for me (cool leaf-shaped stickies by the way!) and also included her own recipe for basic Swedish meatballs. I hardly ever make meatballs but have no idea why because I love them, and Anne's recipe sounds very straightforward so this will also appear on our menu very soon.

Finally, Anne sent a super cute journal in which she explained all about the contents of the package and wrote down a few recipes, too (in addition to the ones mentioned above, she included a recipe for Swedish pancakes). I loved discovering it at the bottom of the box, opening it and reading her manuscript letter: this is definitely a dimension that we miss out on in the online world, a person's own handwriting is so much warmer than mere pixels!

Thank you so much Anne for this great package, and thank you Andrew for masterplanning the event!