Fall arrives this week, but you would not know it from my kitchen window. The afternoons are still hot, the light is still long, and the garden has not gotten the message either.

So I am holding onto the last days of summer with a pan of sun buns.

Solskinnsboller are Norwegian. The name means sunshine buns, and they are named for the small pool of custard that sits in the center of each coil like a bit of sunshine. Soft cardamom dough, cinnamon butter folded through, a spoonful of vanilla custard in the middle. They look like little suns, which is exactly what I wanted on the counter this week.

The original is a yeasted bun, and I wanted to see what a wild levain would do with it. The dough is enriched with milk, sugar, egg, and butter, with ground cardamom from about twenty pods carrying the flavor. A little whole spelt goes into both the levain and the dough for depth.

The shaping is the fun part. You spread cinnamon butter over half the dough, fold the clean half over it, cut the slab into strips, twist each strip end to end, then coil it. After the final proof, you press a well into the center of each coil and fill it with cold custard just before it goes into the oven.

Makes eight buns.

This was the part I thought about most. I wanted the lift and the quiet depth a wild levain gives, without a sour note competing with the cardamom, cinnamon, and custard. Sourness would have fought everything else in the bun.

A sweet stiff levain solves that. It is built low in water and given sugar, so it ferments gently and keeps the bacteria that create sharpness in check. Mine is 25g mature starter, 25g whole spelt, 25g all-purpose flour, 25g warm whole milk, and 10g sugar, built over four to six hours at warm room temperature until it is puffy and domed.

The one rule: use it ripe, not past peak. An overripe sweet levain is exactly where the sour note creeps back in. I build mine in the morning and mix in the afternoon.

You can bake these the same day, but I would not. After mixing, let the dough rise for an hour or two on the counter, then refrigerate it overnight, up to two days if you need the time.

Cold dough rolls out cleanly, which matters a great deal when you are working butter through it. It also fits a relaxed morning far better than a recipe that asks you to start at dawn. Let the covered dough sit out about an hour before you roll.

I baked these twice, and the recipe on the blog is what the second bake taught me.

Measure the salt carefully. The dough takes one teaspoon, not one tablespoon. I reached for the wrong spoon on the first bake, and the buns were a bit too salty. I should have weighed the salt.

Use a lighter hand with the filling than you think you need. My first amount was generous to a fault. It oozed out of the coils and scorched on the parchment. The 70g in the recipe is right, and on the second bake, only one bun misbehaved.

Chill the folded dough before you shape. Twenty to thirty minutes in the refrigerator firms the butter and keeps the filling from seeping while you cut and twist. I did this on both bakes and would not skip it.

This was one of our Bread Baking Babes bake, hosted this time by Karen's Kitchen Stories. It is always worth seeing the other Babes' versions, since we all take the same recipe and make it a little different. Their posts are linked at the bottom of mine.

Fall will get here on its own schedule. Until then, there is still a little sunshine to bake into something.

Happy baking,
Cathy, Bread Experience

P.S. If you make these, tell me whether you went same-day or overnight. I am firmly on the overnight side now, but I would like to be talked out of it.