Hello, world. Dianna from Paper Tiger here. Over there I post my artwork and crafts and inspiration, and while I would consider baking a “craft,” I’m taking on a project of such a magnitude that I felt like it needed a blog of its own. So, this is a baking blog.

My friends know that I’m a rather into all things Scandinavian, particularly Norwegian, and for this reason I am very lucky to live in Seattle, a city with a Scandinavian heritage. I moved here a year ago, and my parents came out to visit me for the first time in June. I took my mom up to Ballard to see the Nordic Heritage Museum with me, and my mom being a huge fan of gift shops, we couldn’t leave without a few books and trinkets in hand. Mom was kind enough to buy me my very own copy of Beatrice Ojakangas’s The Great Scandinavian Baking Book (we also got a copy of Terri Shea’s Selbuvotter, but that is a topic for my other blog). One of the first things I did was sit down and look through every recipe in the book. Mom marked a few she wants me to make when I come home next Christmas, and I marked a whole heap of ones I wanted to make right away.

And that’s where this here blog comes in. I figured that thegreatscandinavianbakingbook.wordpress.com would be a monster of a URL, so I opted for the (slightly) shorter cardamom and cinnamon. Two delicious spices frequently used in Scandinavian baking recipes, and two of my favorites in general. I have no plans to bake my way through the entire book or anything like that, but I plan to document here the recipes I do try.

First up will be the Norwegian Cinnamon Wreath, or klippekrans, which I baked last month and then took to a rock show…