Semlor arrive in January and refuse to leave

A semla is a cardamom bun with its top cut off, the crumb scooped out and mixed with almond paste, the cavity filled, cream piped in, the lid replaced and dusted. One is a semla, two are semlor. The word comes through German from the Latin simila, fine wheat flour, which tells you it was once notable for being made of the good stuff.

Fettisdagen is the day before Ash Wednesday, forty-seven days before Easter Sunday, so it moves. It can fall anywhere from early February to early March. That movement is why the baking year page works it out from a rule rather than storing a date.

It used to be one day, and it isn't any more

Strictly, you eat a semla on Fettisdagen and not before. People who hold that line tend to have grown up in the 1950s, when it was simply true.

Bakeries now sell them from around Christmas through to Easter, and this has become a genuine national argument. The Institute for Language and Folklore has collected written testimony on it, which is not something that happens to disagreements about pastry in most countries. One of their respondents wrote that semlor should only be eaten a couple of weeks either side of Fettisdagen, and that anything else is wrong, blasphemous and WRONG, capitals included.

I find the long season hard to object to on any ground except the one that matters, which is that a thing available for four months stops being an occasion.

Before the cream

For most of the nineteenth century the semla had neither cream nor almond paste.

Before that it was hetvägg, from the German heisse wecken, hot wedges. The bun went into a deep bowl of hot milk with cinnamon and sugar, and was eaten with a spoon. Some people still eat it that way, and if you have only ever had the modern one it is worth doing once, because the bun is suddenly the point instead of the cream.

Everyone's mental image, the cream-and-almond-paste version, became common only in the middle of the twentieth century. It is younger than the Second World War.

The king who did not die of semlor

King Adolf Fredrik is supposed to have died in 1771 after eating fourteen semlor. It is told constantly and almost every part of it is wrong.

A contemporary diary by Count Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna records what he actually ate on 12 February 1771: hetvägg, sauerkraut, meat with turnips, lobster, caviar, smoked herring and champagne. Hetvägg is one item on a long list. There is no semla in it, because the modern semla did not exist yet. No contemporary source gives a number, and the fourteen appears to have been added later by someone who felt the story needed one.

He died of a stroke. The Royal Armoury, which holds the account, points to chronic digestive illness rather than a single meal.

What is true is that the joke started immediately. A poet of the day demanded that hetvägg be exiled from Sweden for regicide, which is a better line than any of the later embellishments and has the advantage of being real.

If you make them

The bun is the whole thing. A semla is a cardamom bun before it is anything else, so a dry or under-spiced bun cannot be rescued by what goes into it. Bake them the day you eat them. The filling wants more almond paste and less sugar than most recipes suggest, and the cream should be barely whipped.

I have not put semlor on the list of what I bake yet. Fettisdagen moves, the season around it is long, and I would rather do it once, properly, on the day.