A baking sheet of glossy, deep yellow S-shaped saffron buns with a dark raisin set into each curl, one bun broken open to show a soft golden crumb

Saffron Buns, From Lucia Morning to the Cornish Tea Treat

Name: Saffron Buns, From Lucia Morning to the Cornish Tea Treat
Prep time: 45 min
Cook time: 11 min
Total time: 3 h
Yield: 16 buns; the Cornish version makes 10 larger buns
Cuisine: Swedish
Ingredients: 0.5 g saffron threads; 1 teaspoon granulated sugar, for grinding the saffron; 240 ml whole milk; 100 g unsalted butter, cut into pieces; 500 g all-purpose flour (bread flour in Denver), plus a little for shaping; 85 g granulated sugar; 7 g instant yeast (5 g in Denver); 6 g fine sea salt; 1 large egg, at room temperature; 32 raisins; 1 large egg beaten with a pinch of salt, for the egg wash

September 30, 2026

Lussekatter, "Lucia cats," are small Swedish buns the color of egg yolk, shiny with egg wash, each rolled into an S with a raisin pressed into both curls. They belong to 13 December, the feast of a saint whose name comes from the Latin lux, light.

Cornwall has a saffron bun too, and it is a much heavier thing. It is bigger and dense with currants and peel, it was made with lard in the old recipes, and it is eaten thickly buttered. For generations the Methodist chapels gave these buns out at their Sunday school tea treats. The two buns share a spice and not much else. The recipe below makes the Swedish bun, then shows how to turn the same dough Cornish.

Most of the work is in the saffron. Threads kneaded dry into flour leave orange flecks in a pale bun. Ground fine and steeped properly, half a gram colors about a kilo of dough right through and fills the kitchen with its smell. Burlap & Barrel's Herati saffron (shop Herati Saffron) comes as whole threads, the form this recipe is written for. The Burlap & Barrel producer guide follows it back to the growers of Herat.

Two ways to wake up saffron

Old recipes from the two countries disagree about how to treat the spice. May Byron's "Saffron Buns (Cornwall)," printed in her 1914 Pot-Luck, has you pour boiling water over two-pennyworth of saffron and leave it overnight, and Slow Food UK's entry for Cornish saffron cake says the spice has to be infused in hot water. Visit Sweden's lussekatter recipe fries the saffron for a minute in a little melted butter, promising that the saffron will taste more and better that way.

Each method has something going for it. A 2024 study in the journal Molecules (Criado-Navarro and colleagues) infused saffron in water, in oil and in mixtures of the two, at 60, 80 and 100°C. The crocins, the pigments that make saffron yellow, went into the water, along with picrocrocin, the compound behind its bitterness. Harold McGee makes the same point in On Food and Cooking: unusually for carotenoid pigments, saffron's dissolve in water. Among the conditions tested, crocins were highest in plain water at 60°C (140°F) after twenty minutes. Safranal, the compound that gives saffron most of its smell, behaved differently. The authors found that adding oil to the water significantly improved how much safranal they extracted, as long as the temperature stayed at or below 80°C (176°F). So the Cornish kettle was well suited to drawing out color, and the Swedish butter pan may help with aroma.

Warm whole milk with butter melting in it is meant to do both at once. The threads are ground with a teaspoon of sugar, whose crystals act as grit, and stirred into milk just off the heat at about 140°F. The butter goes in cold. For twenty minutes the milk takes up the color and the melting butter should help carry the scent, and by the time the steep is done the mix has cooled to about the right temperature for yeast. Once the saffron is in, don't bring the milk back to a simmer. The twenty-minute steep is the same one the golden saffron rice recipe is built around.

Two Swedish recipes set the range for quantity. Visit Sweden's calls for 1 to 1.5 g of saffron in a batch with 1.1 kg of flour, and a lussebullar recipe from the appliance maker Neff uses 0.5 to 1 g per kilo. Between them they run from about half a gram to about one and a half grams of saffron per kilo of flour. This recipe uses 0.5 g for 500 g of flour, or 1 g per kilo, in the middle of that range. That gives a deep yellow bun without pushing the bitterness that saffron's picrocrocin brings in larger amounts.

Ingredients, for 16 buns

The saffron milk

0.5 g saffron threads
1 teaspoon granulated sugar, for grinding
240 ml (1 cup) whole milk
100 g (7 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cut into pieces, straight from the fridge

The dough

500 g (4 cups) all-purpose flour; in Denver, bread flour
85 g (7 tablespoons) granulated sugar
7 g (2 1/4 teaspoons) instant yeast; 5 g (about 1 3/4 teaspoons) in Denver
6 g (1 teaspoon) fine sea salt
1 large egg, at room temperature

To finish

32 raisins
1 large egg, beaten with a pinch of salt, for the egg wash

Shop baking ingredients.

Method

Grind the saffron. Put the threads and the teaspoon of sugar in a mortar and grind until you have an even orange powder with no whole threads left, about a minute. Without a mortar, crush them in a small bowl with the back of a spoon. Any threads left whole will show up as streaks in the finished buns.
Steep it in milk and butter. Warm the milk to about 140°F (60°C). That is hot to the touch and steaming, with no bubbles at the edge. Take it off the heat, stir in the ground saffron and drop in the butter. Leave it for 20 minutes, stirring now and then. The milk will turn a startling yellow and the butter will melt. Before going further, check the temperature. It should be no warmer than about 110°F (43°C). If it is hotter, wait, because milk that is too hot will kill the yeast.
Mix and knead. In a stand mixer bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, yeast and salt, and set about 50 g of the flour aside. Add the saffron milk, scraping in every bit of color, and the egg. Knead with the dough hook on medium-low for 8 to 10 minutes, or about 12 by hand. The dough should end up smooth, springy and slightly tacky, pulling away from the bowl but still clinging a little at the bottom. Add the reserved flour a spoonful at a time only if it stays sticky. A soft dough makes a soft bun.
First rise. Cover the bowl and leave it somewhere warm until the dough has just doubled: 60 to 90 minutes at sea level, 45 to 60 in Denver. Press in a floured finger. If the hole stays and fills back slowly, the dough is ready.
Divide and rest. Turn the dough out onto a barely floured counter and cut it into 16 pieces of about 60 g. Roll each into a tight ball, cover with a towel and leave for 10 minutes. The gluten relaxes during this rest, so the ropes will roll out instead of springing back. Meanwhile, cover the raisins with warm water so they plump up and are less likely to scorch.
Shape the S. Roll each ball under your palms into an even rope about 12 inches (30 cm) long. Coil one end toward the center clockwise and the other end counterclockwise, keeping the coils snug, until they meet in the middle. Set the buns a couple of inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets, eight to a sheet. Drain the raisins and press one deep into the center of each coil, down to the parchment.
Proof, and heat the oven. Cover loosely and leave until the buns are puffy and about half again their size, 30 to 45 minutes at sea level, 20 to 35 in Denver. Don't wait for them to double. A fingertip pressed gently into the side should leave a dent that springs back slowly and not all the way. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 425°F (220°C) with a rack in the middle.
Egg wash. Brush each bun with the beaten egg, getting into the curls and taking care not to let it pool on the parchment. Push back down any raisins that have risen during proofing, because an exposed raisin burns.
Bake. Bake one sheet at a time for 8 to 11 minutes, turning the sheet halfway through, until the tops are glossy gold and the undersides evenly golden. If you have a thermometer, the center of a bun should read about 190°F (88°C). A lussekatt left in a minute too long goes from soft to dry. Move them to a rack and lay a clean kitchen towel over them while they cool, which keeps the crust soft.

In a Denver kitchen

At altitude, yeast dough rises faster, and overproofing is the main danger. Colorado State University Extension recommends less yeast and warns that dough left to rise past double bakes into a heavy, dry or collapsed loaf. That is why the ingredient list gives 5 g of yeast for Denver instead of 7 g, along with shorter rise times. Go by the fingertip test, not the clock. The dry air also dries out flour, so both CSU and Utah State University Extension say a dough may need more liquid. If yours feels stiff after five minutes of kneading, add a tablespoon or two of milk. CSU also suggests flour with at least 12 percent protein for yeast breads at elevation, hence bread flour in the list. The Denver altitude cooking guide explains why all of this happens.

In Denver's dry air, bag any buns that won't be eaten by evening as soon as they are cool, or freeze them.

Why it went wrong

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix or prevention
Pale buns with orange specks	Threads not ground, or steeped briefly in cool milk	Grind to a powder with sugar; steep 20 minutes in milk that starts near 140°F
Bitter taste	Possibly too much saffron; saffron's bitterness comes from picrocrocin	Stay near 1 g per kilo of flour, and weigh it rather than guessing
The S unwound or the buns spread flat	Overproofed, which happens quickly at altitude, or the coils were rolled loosely	Proof until puffy, not doubled; coil snugly into the center
Small, dense buns	The saffron milk was too hot when the yeast went in, or the kitchen was cold	Check the milk is 110°F or below; give the dough a warm place and more time
Dry and crumbly the same afternoon	Too much flour at kneading, or a minute too long in the oven	Keep the dough soft and tacky; pull the buns when they are golden, not brown
Black raisins	Raisins left sitting on the surface	Soak them, press them to the parchment, push them back in before baking

Devil's cats and the longest night

The name is older than the saffron. According to the Nordiska museet in Stockholm, Sweden's national museum of cultural history, the bun probably came from the Netherlands and northern Germany, where a sweet wheat Christmas bread called duivekater was baked. Dutch people probably brought it to Gothenburg in the seventeenth century. To Swedish ears the name sounded like dyvelskatter, devil's cats, and only when the buns became attached to 13 December were they renamed lussekatter. A Church of Sweden parish in Ystad notes that the older forms dövelskatt and dyvelskatt survived in some regions, that the origin of the name is still not fully settled, and that some tie "lusse" to Lucifer rather than Lucia. The Dutch have a story for their loaf too. The bakery museum at Zaanse Schans, which is named after the duivekater, says the bread replaced a pagan spring custom of sacrificing a tomcat to ward off the devil. It is a good story, best told as a legend.

The saffron came much later. The Nordiska museet dates saffron in these buns to the end of the nineteenth century. Saffron baking itself is older in Sweden. Lena Kättström Höök, a curator at the same museum, told The Local in 2018 that saffron buns were a status bake by the 1600s and appeared at the funeral feasts of important people. So the saffron bread is old and the saffron cat is fairly new, and the saffron lussekatt spread as Lucia Day became a national celebration in the twentieth century.

The date matters too. In Swedish folk belief, the night before Lucia was a dangerous one, when supernatural beings were about. Linköping University and the Church of Sweden both explain that under the Julian calendar, the longest night of the year fell between 12 and 13 December. That held until 1753, when Sweden adopted the Gregorian calendar and the solstice moved to around 21 December. The feast stayed where it was. The Nordiska museet's oldest record of a white-clad Lucia calling on a household in the morning dates from 1764, at an upper-class estate in western Sweden. The custom spread through university towns from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Lucia a Stockholm newspaper chose in the late 1920s helped carry it across the country.

The Cornish bun

England once grew its own saffron. Crocus fields around the Essex market town of Chepyng Walden prospered so much in the sixteenth century that the town took the spice's name, and it is still called Saffron Walden. The Saffron Walden Museum puts the crop's peak in the 1500s and its end in the 1700s, and puts the decline down to the harvest's heavy labor, since it can take thousands of flowers to make a few ounces of dried saffron. Slow Food UK, which lists Cornish saffron cake in its Ark of Taste of endangered foods, tells the same story from the kitchen side. Saffron was used widely in British cooking between 1600 and 1700, then faded as other spices took its place, except in Cornwall.

Cornwall kept it in its bread. Slow Food UK records that saffron buns were first eaten with clotted cream on Good Friday, and were later taken up by the Methodist chapels, which were strong in Cornwall, for their tea treats. These were the yearly Sunday school processions with banners and musicians, followed by games and tea. The Cornish local historian Tony Mansell traces the tea treats to the Sunday schools that seem to have first appeared in the county in the late eighteenth century. In the west of Cornwall the large fruited saffron buns of the chapel outings became known as tea treat buns, and they appear in the Cornubian and Redruth Times by 1893.

Making it Cornish

Slow Food UK lists the basics of Cornish saffron cake as flour, sugar, fruit, fat (traditionally lard), yeast and saffron. It is usually baked as an oblong loaf, sometimes as buns or a round. Byron's 1914 recipe adds currants, grated lemon peel, Demerara sugar, half a teaspoon of mixed spice and two eggs. Here is how to move the dough above toward it:

Replace 30 g of the butter with lard, and the granulated sugar with Demerara or light brown sugar.
Add half a teaspoon of spice to the flour: a good grating of nutmeg, such as Burlap & Barrel's Stone Nutmeg (shop Stone Nutmeg), and a pinch of cinnamon.
After the first rise, pat the dough out and knead in 125 g currants and 50 g finely chopped candied lemon peel by hand, just until they are evenly spread. A mixer crushes the fruit and streaks the crumb.
Skip the S and the raisins. Shape 10 round buns of about 110 g, flatten them slightly, and proof as above.
Bake at 375°F (190°C) for 18 to 22 minutes. With more sugar and fruit near the surface, these brown faster than they cook through at the Swedish temperature.

Eat them thickly buttered, and for Good Friday, do as the older Cornish custom did and serve them with clotted cream. A Cornish bun also takes well to the toaster the next day.

Serving and keeping

Lussekatter are at their best within a few hours of baking, still slightly warm. Coffee is the obvious partner, and the Swedish fika guide covers the coffee break itself. A pat of cold butter works on either bun. So does a lemon-and-saffron marmalade such as Brins (shop Brins Lemon Saffron Marmalade), which repeats the saffron in the bread. For a longer run of Christmas baking, the marzipan stollen recipe uses a similar enriched dough but works the other way round, improving over weeks where a lussekatt lasts a day. Buns that won't be eaten that day freeze well for a month in an airtight bag. Warm them from frozen for five minutes in a 300°F oven and they come back soft.