years after purchase, I finally tired a recipe from the book

Back in the summer of 1990 I attended the Oslo International Summer School for their Norwegian language course. The summer school comes with (or did a the time) a number of extracurricular activities for the students to introduce them to Norwegian culture. One of these was a mid-stay weekend adventure--students choose from among a variety of destinations and activities. Since I love mountains more than anything I picked the trip to the Brimi Fjellstugu, a cute timber cabin at the edge of the tree line. The place was decorated with traditional Norwegian decor, and the food I tried was yummy and very Norwegian. They had for sale a cookbook, in Norwegian, sharing the recipes of much of what they served, and since I was particularly find of both Rømmegrøt and their flat bread, I bought the book, hoping these two would be in there. Besides, the photos of the food had some of the nice carved furniture of the cabin for backdrop, so it was just plain pretty.

But soon thereafter I wound up moving to Ashland, Oregon, and was no longer able to continue my Norwegian studies, and I never got around to trying any recipes from the book. Yesterday, late afternoon, I was hungry, but feeling uninspired and didn't know what to cook. lord_kjar had driven to a small town just over three hours from here for work, so I knew he wouldn't be home for a while, so I would have time to something more elaborate if I felt for it. The first cookbook I picked up was the Norwegian one, and, unsurprisingly, after four years living in Sweden I can now easily read most of the recipes, though there are some specific words that elude me.

Now, I had been thinking in terms of dinner when I opened the book, but the photo that caught my eye was for Sviskekake med jordbærpuré, which translates to "prune cake with strawberry puree", but the cake pictured looked more like the dense Swedish style oven pancakes I am so fond of, or perhaps more of a tart (note: in the photo one can't really see the prunes--only two sort of break the surface of the cake to hint they may be there). So I looked at the recipe:

1 l mjølk
100 g smør
200 g sukker
200 g kveitemjøl
6 egg
100 g svisker, steinfrie

Kok opp mjølk, smør, og sukker, rør det lett saman med mjøl og egg. Slå røra i ei kakeform som er tett, legg i svisker. Steid i omn på 175 C i ca. 40 minutt til kaka er fast of pent brun. Kan severast både varm og kald.

Which I think means:

1 liter milk
100 g (not quite 1/2 cup) butter
200 g (~3/4 c) sugar
200 g (~1.25 c) wheat flour
6 eggs
100 g prunes, without pits

Boil the milk, butter, and sugar, stir it gently together with the flour and egg. Pour batter into a cake pan that doesn't leak, put in the prunes. Bake in an oven about 175 C for around 40 minutes until the cake is solid and nicely brown. Can be served both warm and cold.

After glancing at the ingredient list, but before reading the text, I hesitated, since, with sugar in it (and based on which section of the book it is in), it is clearly meant to be a desert, and I am not a huge fan of sweets. However, while it has the same mass of sugar as flour, it is noticeably less sugar than flour by volume, and there is far more milk or egg than either flour or sugar. Comparing this to our normal oven pancake recipe this one contains the same amount of milk, 3 to 6 times as many eggs (we vary how many we use from one time to the next), only about 1/3 as much flour, and, of course, we don't put in any sugar or dried fruit.

Then I read the instructions, and saw that one is pre-cooking the ingredients before putting it into the oven, and I wondered how that would effect things. So, of course, I had to try. I even resolved to not give into the temptation to cut the sugar, because I was curious as to just how sweet it would taste. However, I did make one change. Neither lord_kjar or I are all that fond of prunes, but we both like dried apricots. The two fruits aren't that different, so I decided to swap these--after all it was the behavior of the batter I was really curious about, and how it interacted with any dried fruit at all.

So I ran to the store and bought more milk, eggs, and some apricots, since we didn't have enough on hand to try the full recipe. Then I realized that the recipe is lacking all kinds of useful information. Boil the milk, butter and sugar for how long? Is the goal just to bring it up to temperature and stop? Or do we want to keep going long enough to trigger any of the next stages that can happen when cooking such ingredients? Do we put the hot milk etc. into the eggs and flour, or the eggs and flour into the hot milk? Or should we let the milk etc. cool before adding the eggs and flour? Add eggs one at a time as they come out of the shell, or beat them together first? Leave the fruit whole, or cut it up? set them on top of the batter, or stir them in? Should one grease the pan? Why did the author feel the need to specify the pan shouldn't leak? Does he have one which does? What size pan, anyway? The photo had it in one of those cute white tart pans, but they come in a variety of sizes, and this recipe makes more than a liter and a half of batter.

So I went with some guesses:

I decided to let it heat till it was clearly boiling, not just the first sign of simmering, but didn't leave it any longer than that.

I decided to beat together the eggs and flour first, mostly because I wanted to avoid lumps of flour in the batter, and adding flour to hot liquid without wetting it first with a cool one is a good way to get lumps. Besides, this gave me something to do while waiting for the milk etc. to heat. I didn't cool the milk, but did take it off the heat, and then poured in all of the beaten eggs/flour at once.

I decided to chop the fruit into small chunks, both to finish filling the time while waiting for the milk to heat and so that it would be more evenly distributed throughout the cake. However, based on other types of cake recipes I have tried, I thought it would be ok to sprinkle the fruit on top and let it sink in during baking.

The other question was about cake pan--I have one of those white pans, but I checked, and while it easily holds the first liter of liquid, the full batter wouldn't fit, and I don't have two in that style. I do, however, have a much larger, thicker brown ceramic pie plate I inherited from my step-dad that was *just* big enough to hold it all, so I went with that.

While it was baking I also mixed up some dinner and put it into the other oven to bake, and then made the strawberry puree while I was waiting (that recipe I will stick on at the bottom)

So, how did it all work:

When I described adding the flour and eggs "all at once" what I really meant was "pour in most of it, and stir quickly, since the eggs were already starting to cook and the batter was turning rather fluffy, then scrape in more of the batter, and stir again, then add the last little bit and stir again". If I had had someone else present then I probably would have had one stirring the whole time while the other scrapped the eggs in. I think I am happy with the texture result from this step (and really enjoyed licking the bowl), so I would be willing to take this approach again.

Was it too sweet? Nope, not for a for a desert--it is about as sweet as I ever want my deserts to be--it has about 8% sugar by volume (not counting the fruit sugar), and that is plenty, without over doing it. However, I am curious to try it again with zero sugar (and no fruit) to see how this approach compares with our oven pancakes.

How about that fruit? Chopping it was a good idea, but I should have stirred it in. The pieces never did sink into the batter, but stayed perched up on top, and while the rest of the cake was only starting to get brown they were already crossing line into rather black.

Pan size? Too deep! It took much longer to bake to set than I would have wanted--not only did the fruit over cook, but the top is browner than I would have preferred. I think next time I will use the large rectangular pan in which I bake oven pancakes so that the batter is thinner and cooks more evenly. Or I might make only a half recipe and try that white ceramic tart pan, since that would be prettier.

In actuality, I don't think I actually let it set as well as the recipe called for through baking alone--when it was already quite brown, and I was thinking it was nearly set enough I decided to just turn off the oven and let it finish setting in a cooling oven while I waited for the other food to finish baking in the other oven.

As a result it was still warm when we sat down to eat (three hours after deciding to try the recipe), and one needed a spoon to serve it, since it didn't really hold together yet. However, I like that texture (and, indeed, liked it just fine before it went into the oven, too), it just didn't look like what was in the photo. However, after leaving the rest of it sit in the fridge overnight, this morning I could cut a slice, pick it up and eat with my fingers if I wanted. However, it is good with that strawberry puree, so instead I put it in a bowl and ate them together with a spoon for breakfast. While this is sweeter than my normal breakfast, it is no where near as sweet as the sugar cereals I ate as a child.

And, before I forget, that strawberry recipe, since they do go so well together, especially when the one is warm and the other cold:

Jordbærpuré

500 g friske eller frosne jordbær
1 ss melis
1/2 sitron utan skal og stein

Vask og reinsk bæra. Ha det i hurrtigmiksar/food-processor saman med melis og sitron. Mos till puré, press pureen gjennom ei sikt. Set pureen kjølig, med lokk, til han skal serverast.

which I think means:

500 g fresh or frozen strawberries
1 tablespoon powdered sugar
1/2 lemon without peel or seeds

Wash and (hull?) berries, put them in a food processor together with the powdered sugar and lemon. Process till it is a puree, press the puree through a sieve. Put it in the fridge, with a lid, till it is time to serve it.

I did only half a batch, since there are only the two of us. I didn't have any fresh lemon, so I just used a tablespoon of lemon juice. I used frozen berries (which I had washed and hulled before freezing), so I just tossed them into the food processor still frozen, which meant that it took a while, and a fair bit of scraping to get it to transform into shush instead of fluffy ice bits. We never did get it liquidy enough to press it through the sieve before the rest of the food was ready, but neither of us mind the seeds, so we left them in.

Just like with the cake (which an American might call a custard, and which could also be called a pie in Swedish, since their word for pie doesn't require a crust), this wasn't too sweet--that isn't much sugar compared to the amount of berries, yet I think I would have enjoyed it without the sugar, too.

PS, thank you to northernotter for translation help yesterday!