Swedish Day & other Weekend Stuff

This past weekend my brother was one of the musical directors in an operetta performed by the school where he has been teaching choir. What I didn't know was that he was also performing in the operetta as one of the chorus members. It was so amusing when I realized one of the "students" was my brother! 

During the Christmas season my mom mentioned how much she was craving peanut butter cookies with Hershey's kisses, but with all the busy-ness and other things we were baking for Christmas we never got to make any. On Friday I saw this recipe for White Chocolate Reese's Peanut Butter Blossoms and decided to make a half batch, for fun. Except I used a mixture of kisses, mini chocolate bars, mini Reese's cups, and Dove hearts. 

I didn't love this recipe. I mean, they were good, but I guess not what I was wanting. I like a chewier or crispier cookie and these were really soft and dense. Also (and this is obviously no fault of the recipe), the chocolate I used had been mingling in a bag with mint kisses and it was an unpleasant surprise to discover that a lot of the plain chocolate now has a slight mint flavor. Mint and peanut butter are not a great flavor combination, FYI.

Thanks to MLK, Jr. Day, this was a 3-day weekend! With that extra third day my cousins and I decided to celebrate Sweden (makes perfect sense, right?). We've all 3 been reading the Millennium series - which is set in Sweden and was originally written in Swedish. The last few times we've gotten together we've discussed the Swedish culture portrayed in the book: they drink a lot of coffee, eat lots of sandwiches, etc. 

We thought it would be fun to eat some Swedish food, but other than making it at home, the only option for Swedish food seems to be...IKEA. Which is kind of lame, but it was fun kind of looking at IKEA in a different light - a Swedish light. If you're really interested in trying Swedish food, IKEA has that little market with things like pickled herring and crab paste(!). We weren't that interested. So, instead we had Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, ligonberry sauce, and lots of coffee in the IKEA cafeteria. It was pretty good. 

If we had had more time I would have liked to have made Swedish pancakes! Either using this recipe or this one.