The four Sundays before Christmas Eve everybody in Sweden and Denmark celebrates Advent. We eat saffron buns called Lussebullar (in Sweden) and æbleskiver (in Denmark) and drink Glögg, which is a kind of warm sweetened christmas spiced wine with almonds and raisins.
With Luise being pregnant we wanted to have an alcohol free glögg. You can buy this in a supermarket but they are always to sweet for us, therefore we made our own. We found an unsweetened blackcurrant juice which we cooked with ginger, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods and cloves, and served it with nuts and sliced orange. It tasted great!
Tomorrow it’s third of advent and we are invited over to some friends. The plan was to bring our own glögg but now we have drunk too much of it so we’ll save the little that we have left until we get back home …
Warm Christmas Glogg
1 bottle
100 cl water
2 cm fresh ginger
2 cinnamon sticks
6 cardamom pods
6 cloves
4 cups fruit juice (unsweetened) we used blackcurrant sweetened with apple and grape
3 tbsp honey (if your fruit juice tastes sour)
50 g almonds (blanched)
50 g walnuts
100 g raisins
1 orange (thinly sliced)
Boil water, ginger, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods and cloves for 15 minutes and keep it in the fridge over night.
Add the fruit juice, boil it for 30 minutes, remove the spices and the glogg is done. Add chopped nuts, raisins and orange pieces and serve it warm with a cinnamon stick. Cheers!
You can of course replace the fruit juice with red or white wine.
Tip: blanch almond: Boil a pot of water, dump in the almonds, wait for the water to boil again, let them boil for about a minute, pour off the water, and rinse with cold water, and drain. The skins will slip right off if you pinch them.
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