Eken Bageri & Kökscafé

Rating: 3 out of /5

Eken is a new bakery and café from Stefan Ekengren, who is joint owner of Hantverket which is just next door.

My semlor were packed into a nice plain white cardboard box with simple Eken branding in the form of a sticker. Bit of Swedish for you: "Eken" translates as "the oak". And "Egengren" as "the oak branch".

The two semlor I bought were quite different in size. One was 137g, 8cm tall and 9cm wide. The other 118g, 8cm tall and 7.5cm wide. That's a 15% difference and places one of them as medium and the other as medium-small.

Visually, there's a neatly trimmed round lid that's noticably smaller than what was cut off from the bun. A gentle dusting of icing sugar. Visible, good sized chunks of fresh cardamom, and seemingly plenty of it. The cream though has lost a little of its definition. The almond paste is a caramel colour, a bit of a yellowish-brown hue. It's a noticeably different colour to "normal".

Picking it up, it feels light for it's size. The first two bites contain a good hit of cardamom that gradually intensifies. There's lots of cardamom and lots of cream, and even lots of cardamom in the paste. I can feel the texture of almond, but the filling has a really intense whack of cardamom. The Cream has a good taste and is soft and fluffy.

Going back to the paste, it has an initial caramel twang before the taste moves over to cardamom dominance. What I'm missing is the taste of almond. There are some finely chopped nuts in there, but the flavour of them gets buried by the cardamom. Eken describe the filling as almond brittle (krokant) which is what lies behind the initial caramel taste.

There's also not an excessive amount of filling. This explains the lower weight for a semla of this size. Taste wise, the amount of paste is probably right. But paste wise, I was running low at times. With the fact that the almonds are understated, the overall result is just a little unbalanced.

A good semla, and the rest of the menu at the café looks great. I'm going to be coming back for breakfast!