Joululimppu, Finnish sweet (Christmas) bread

I'll start with this:
I've decided I should draw the art for the last part of my story myself, as it seems waiting doesn't help. Also I have been lazy with Steem, but now I'll instead give you a bread baking post!

This is one kind of traditional Finnish bread, limppu. This limppu is more specifically joululimppu, Christmas limppu. It is somewhat sweet and it has some specific spices to give it flavor. There are other kinds of limppu, like ruislimppu which is rye limppu and typically has no sweetness in it.

The Christmas eve was one month ago, so this is a grand time to start baking Christmas bread!

Ingredients:
6 deciliters of buttermilk
50 grams of yeast
1-2 teaspoons of bitter orange peel
1-2 teaspoons of fennel seeds (crushed)
1 teaspoon of anise seed (crushed)
1 deciliter of scandinavian dark syrup (can be replaced with american light molasses)
4 deciliters of rye flour
10 deciliters of wheat flour
1 teaspoon of salt

I prefer not to use deciliters when I'm baking, but this recipe worked well with me. The issue with using capacity measures is that they're not as precise, but even by weighting the flours the humidity of the flours would affect the outcome.

So the flour amounts are always approximate amounts of flours.

The baking process:
If your fennel and anise seeds are whole, you should start by crushing them.

Then proceed to warming up the buttermilk to "hand temperature", which is around 36 degrees celsius.
This is great though as even if you'd use another temperature system than celsius degrees, you still know how warm your hand is.

If you have any hands that is.

You can mix the yeast, syrup and spices (except the salt!) to the buttermilk. On the photo below you can see my wonderful assistant helping me to mix it all.

Add the flour to the liquid and start mixing. I prefer using a machine to help you mix instead of mixing it with your hands, as to get a proper viscosity from gluten you need to mix it enough. Have the machine mix the dough for approximately 15 minutes on low speed.

After the 15 minutes, add the salt and increase the speed a little bit, then continue for 5-8 minutes more.

The minimum amount I'm aiming for is 20 minutes, but I tend to go a bit over it, but I have avoided going over 25 minutes (in total).

I have no actual clue if this is the best way to do this. I'm assuming this might vary based on the machine and the speed you are using.

Letthe dough to rise for around 30+ minutes, until the dough is approximately double in size.

This beauty is the ball of dough it became after rising in the peace.

Now we'll cut up the motherfucker dough.

Let them rest under a cover for 30+ minutes again until they can expand once again.

When they have been rising, you can heat up the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

However, at this point you can do the magic trick to the bread:
Mix some dark syrup (or american light molasses) and water, then spread this over the bread before baking.
I'm using a silicone brush for baking to do this so I can spread it evenly on the bread.

Bake the bread for approximately 40 minutes in the 200 C oven.

Enjoy the (sticky?) tasty, soft and syrupy bread.
Find love.

You can bake and have this limppu whenever you want, not only on Christmas. You can find bread like this around the year in Finland so it's not actually just a Christmas bread even though it's most common at Christmas.