Today I baked pulla (Finnish coffee bread). On Friday we're supposed to have a meeting in Ruge, coordinators and teachers disussing work at Ruge, and everybody is supposed to bring somehting to eat. I know that my coworkers would be interested in trying something Finnish. In fact, I think they thought I'd make somehting Finnish for the Cristmas party we had at Ruge, but baking was just too difficult to arrange back then.

I knew that it would not be a piece of cake to bake here. I'd been thinking about baking since Christmas. Once I even went as far as buying flour and butter. I was determined to bake for Christmas even though I could not find any cardemom or yeast at the supermarket, but in the end it turned out that baking for Christmas was a mission impossible in Mcbo. I kind of gave up on the idea until my sister Ulla brought some cardamom and yeast from Finland when she came for a visit in January. And since I have felt for sometime already that the countdown for my departure has begun, and I have to seriously start doing all those things(/all that baking :)) that I want to do before returning to Finland.

So today I bought flour and butter again and started experimenting. I brought the wrong kind of flour, used a brownish sugar that smells different from white, and used powdered milk for baking for the first time in my life but managed to bake. The pulla/coffee bread does (surprise surprise) not taste like the pulla I've baked in Finland, but It's edible and I'm going to serve it to my friends whether they like it or not.