Ellen Svinhufvud's cake. It's almost royal.

This cake is so sweet that you'll probably have a sugar rush for a whole week after you've had this. That obviously gives an indication that it's also very good. If you're on a diet, then this is not for you either. The whole cake has over 5000 calories in it. There's no certainty of where this cake has originated, but in the current form it was officially introduced by the wife of Finland's third president. Thus the name Ellen Svinhufvud's cake.

But let's start shall we. Begin the process by separating 5 egg whites. You won't be needing the egg yolks this time. Beat the egg whites together with 200 grams of powdered sugar. Beat until the "foam" is hard and won't escape the bowl even if you turn it quickly upside down. Add crushed almonds and nuts and mix carefully. Don't use a mixer when you're adding the nuts and almonds, because that could destroy the consistency of the egg white foam.  

The mix is really good by itself , but try not to eat it all by itself. It will be needed for the cake. Spread it evenly on a parchment paper (the kind which is used for baking) which is on a baking tray. Put the tray in the oven that has been preheated to 125 Celsius. Let it stay there for about an hour, maybe a little longer. Keep your eye on the meringue so that it won't burn.

While the meringue is in the oven, feel free to treat yourself for a cup of coffee. While you're at it, make another cup for the cake. It can be pretty strong so the flavor really come through later. Mix 1,5 desilitres of coffee, 1,5 desiltres of cream and approximately 1 desilitre of sugar together. Add a tea spoon of salt as well. In the end you should have a nice buttercream as a result. 

Next you'll need 300 grams of room temperature butter. So erm... you'll need to take it out from the fridge well in advance. You can cheat a little bit like we did and put it in the microwave for a while. But not too long, because you don't want it to be boiling hot.

Now you'll need the mixer again as you need to mix the butter, coffee and cream. Don't go too fast or it'll all end up everywhere except for the bowl. And as a preparation for the finishing touches on the cake, you can now roast some almond chips. They do burn easily so be careful with them.

Once the meringue is ready, take it out of the oven and let it cool down. After it's cool, you'll need to cut it into 4 somewhat equal pieces. A pizza slicer works quite well for this purpose. After that you still need to separate the meringue from the parchment paper which can be slightly challenging. 

The next step is just like laying bricks on a wall. Place a piece of meringue on the bottom and cover that with the buttercream. Add another piece of meringue and repeat until you have used all the 4 pieces. You should still have some buttercream left as you should now ice the cake with that, so that it looks somewhat even from all sides. Throw the roasted almond chips at the cake so they'll cover the cake nicely. 

We would suggest inviting people over, because this will indeed last a long time if you're eating it alone. It can technically be frozen, but it's not at its best after that. Thus it's great for family functions where you'll have a bigger group of people together.

Recipe:

5 egg whites

200 g powdered sugar

100 g crushed almonds

50 g crushed hazel nuts

300 g butter

1,5 dl strong coffee

1,5 dl cream

1 dl sugar

1 tsp salt

1,5 dl roasted almond chips

Beat the egg yolks and powdered sugar as a hard foam. Add the crushed almonds and hazel nuts and fold them in carefully. Pour the to-be-meringue on a parchment paper on a oven tray and spread it evenly. Bake in 125 Celsius for about an hour. Let cool down and cut into four equal pieces. Melt sugar into the coffee and add cream. Mix the coffee with room temperature butter and mix. Place the pieces of meringue on top of each other, adding butter cream in between the layers. Ice the cake with the remaining butter cream and decorate with roasted almond chips.

Korvapuusti; a wonderful cinnamon bun

You know, sometimes you just want to have something sweet and there are not that many things that can top korvapuusti. The name "korvapuusti" actually has a double meaning. It of course means the cinnamon bun, but also if someone slaps you on the ear, that's also korvapuusti. So if someone wants to give you one, you might want to try and remember if you've been bad or nice to them. Kind of like at Christmas time.

You will need milk, wheat flour, butter, eggs, yeast and cardamom. To the so called filling you will need some more sugar and cinnamon. If you're baking more often, then these are quite basic ingredients so you might not even need to go grocery shopping.

Let the baking commence. Start by warming up 3,5 desilitres of milk and add 2 table spoons of yeast. If you're using the dry yeast, then the milk should be 42 Celsius. Mix the yeast with the milk and let it be for a second. Then add enough flour, around 8 desilitres, so that the dough will be still soft. Put a kitchen towel on the bowl with the dough and let it rise for half an hour. 

While the dough is rising, you can beat 2 eggs with 200 grams of sugar until its nice and foamy. Add 210 grams of warm butter. You can warm it up in microwave, but don't heat it up too much. Together with the butter you can add also 2 teaspoons of cardamom and 1 teaspoon of salt. Mix everything together. It tastes really good already at this point, so make sure you don't eat all the dough before you get to the actual baking.

Now that the dough has had enough time to rise, add the mix that you just prepared a moment ago and start kneading the dough. You'll need to add more flour to make the dough firmer. For this dough we ended up adding 5 more desilitres of flour, making the total count 13 desilitres. You might make it with less or you might need a bit more. You know that the dough starts to have the right kind of viscosity and consistency when it doesn't stick to the bowl and your hands like its life depended on it. Don't be afraid to get a bit rough with the dough first; it can handle it.

Next we'll need a space on the table where you can continue with the baking. Sprinkle some flour on the table and drop the dough on it. Start rolling it into a sheet of short. At first you can do this by hand, but later on you will need a rolling pin. Try to make the sheet quite square, 30 x 60 cm ideally. You'll need some more flour most likely, because otherwise the dough will stick to the rolling pin.

Let the sheet set for a moment and in the meantime you can melt some more butter and spread it over the sheet. Mix 100 grams of suger and 2 tea spoons of cinnamon and sprinkle the mix on top of the buttered sheet of dough and try to do it evenly. Roll the sheet into a roll and turn it so that the "seam" is on the bottom. Cut pieces from the roll that kind of resemble triangles. Ideally they'd be 2 cm wide from the narrower side and 4-5 cm from the wider side. Turn them so that you have the narrow side on top and press it down with your thumbs.

Set them on a oven tray, on a baking sheet. Make sure they have enough space to expand to all directions. Spread them with egg and melted butter mixture and sprinkle with pearl sugar. Put the buns in the oven that has been pre-heated to 200 Celsius and bake them about 10-15 minutes. Take them out and let cool enough so you won't burn your mouth and enjoy. They really are delicious.

Recipe:

3,5 dl warm milk

200 g sugar

2 eggs

210 g butter

2 tbsp yeast

2 tsp cardamom

approx. 13 dl wheat flour (not the finest sort you can get)

For the "filling" 100 g sugar and 2 tsp cinnamon

1 egg and 2 tbsp of butter to "egg" the cinnamon buns

Pumpkin soup; perfect for Halloween season

Since it is the autumn and Halloween just took place, what could be a more suitable food than pumpkin soup. Granted, it's not perhaps the most traditional Finnish food, but let's go with the flow and the season anyway. The unfortunate thing is that Halloween has already passed, so the chances are you don't have extra pumpkins lying around.


Nevertheless, you need pumpkin for the pumpkin soup, so a trip to the grocery store it is. You need 1 kilo of pumpkin and can thus leave the bigger ones for Cinderella. She needs to get to the ball somehow anyway, so let's not sabotage her big night, shall we. Other ingredients include 2 deciliters of cooking cream, 2 stalks of celery, one middle-sized onion, one apple and spices. Salt, nutmeg, cinnamon and paprika will do nicely.



Start by cutting the pumpkin in four pieces; first cut it in halves and then the halves into halves. Just be careful as the pumpkin can put up a bit of a fight. Scrape off the seeds and put them aside. Don't throw them into the bin though as you can still use them as well. Once you've scraped off the seeds, cut the pumpkin pieces into smaller pieces. Put them on a pan or an oven tray and roast them in 250 Celcius for 20-30 minutes. Let them cool off afterwards.



While you have the pumpkin pieces in the oven, you can clean the seeds. The easiest thing is to just put them on a kitchen towel, fold it and rub them "clean". Put the seeds on a oven tray, season with canola oil, salt and chili powder. Once the over is free again, roast the seed in 200 Celcius for about 10 minutes. The roasted seeds are perfect snack as such or you can have them with the soup.

Then back to the soup. You need to chop the stalks of celery, onion and apple. Sauté them with some butter or margarine for a moment. Add approximately 5 deciliters of water and let it set for a brief moment.

And back to the pumpkins. Now that they have cooled off, peel them and put them in a blender. Add also the chopped celery, onion and pour all the water, that you added to the pan after sauteing. Pour in also 2 deciliters of cooking cream. Once the soup is nice and velvety, season it with salt, nutmeg, paprika and a bit of cinnamon. And remember, if you like thinner soup, feel free to add water or cream.

 

Recipe:

  1 kg pumpkin

5 dl water
2 dl cooking cream

2 stalks of celery

1 middle-sized onion

1 apple
3 tbsp butter/margarine for sauteing

Salt

Nutmeg

Paprika
Cinnamon

Lemin särä; the oldest traditional food in Finland

Whew, we're starting with a big one. Lemin särä is supposed to be the oldest of the traditional foods in Finland. At least the oldest that we have records of and where the recipe is still somewhere. It was recently selected as the new export of Finnish food. This wasn't anything official though, but the national broadcasting company had a theme week on one of their programs and that was focusing on... surprise surprise, traditional Finnish food. People could vote on their favorite and this food was the winner of that.

It's name comes from two things; the place where it has originated (Lemi) and the trough that is traditionally used to prepare it. The through (also "särä") was made of a big piece of birch tree, that you gouge until it resembles a trough. After you have that, you are supposed to soak the trough in salted water for one full week. After that you will still treat it with the tallow of a lamb and put it in the after warmth of a wooden oven before it is ready for use.

For the actual food you will need 1 kilo of mutton and 1 kilo of potatoes. In the traditional recipe you would put the meat on the trough and put that in a wooden oven in 200 Celsius for several hours. After some time you'd add the potatoes and let them bake in the same trough and soak the taste from the mutton. That's a very very simplified version of it all.

 

That's not very practical in a modern kitchen however so we had to think of something else. We soaked the mutton in salted water for 2 hours, then gently dried the surface of the mutton with a paper cloth. After that put the mutton in a smoker bag. If you have a smoker, that works well too. Put the bag in the oven that has been pre-heated to 300 Celcius. Let it be there for 15 minutes and then lower the temperature to 200 Celsius and let the mutton be there for 25 minutes.

Take the mutton out of the smoking bag and put it on a casserole. Pour all the meat juice from the bag with the mutton, because it has plenty of flavor now. Put the casserole back into the oven in 150 Celsius for approximately 2 hours. Remember to baste the lamb with the meat juice every now and then so it won't go dry.

After 2 hours, take the casserole out, pour all the meat juice in a pot. Add the potatoes to the pot and cover them with water. Cook until the potatoes are half-cooked. Season with salt. In the meantime, put the mutton back into the oven, so that it doesn't get cool. Cover it with foil so it doesn't get dry.

Once the potatoes are half-cooked, add them to the casserole. Pour all the liquid from the pot on the mutton and potatoes and put back in the oven, still in 150 Celsius, for another hour and a half. Now you have successfully made your first Lemin räsä. Enjoy.

Recipe: 

1 kg mutton

1 kg potatoes

water 

salt
1 smoker bag

New beginnings

Hi y'all and welcome to the new blog. This blog will be centered around Finnish food and especially somewhat traditional Finnish food. I've experienced the question "So, what's traditional Finnish food?" quite often and I have to admit, I haven't always even known what to answer. Of course I knew the things that even some foreigners know, Karelia's pastries, reindeer in different forms etc. But of course there's so much more to the traditional Finnish cuisine than that.

It took a random Friday night a couple of months ago when me and my flat mate (the one doing the cooking) were grocery shopping and suddenly thought about doing something traditional for once. We decided to try rye bread from scratch. After a couple of minutes there were already a lot bigger list of things that might be fun to try and fast forward a bit more and we came up with the idea to start a blog about it.

A quick glance showed that there wasn't much blogs, let alone active ones that focused on that subject. That's how Perinneruokaa prkl was born. We did start it in Finnish, but kept on thinking that we need to get the information out also in English. In the end a separate blog seemed like the best option and as a result... well, here we are.

Let's take a short introduction also on the people behind the blog. Antti (that's me), the one doing most of the blogging, is a wannabe-blogger and as a daily job working for an international association operating also in Europe. He's travelled around a bit, having lived over 4 years in total abroad. Mika, the one doing most of the cooking, is a future-cook who is currently following his dream and getting the correct education to match his passion.

We'll keep updating this blog at least once a week, but since we're a bit ahead with the Finnish one, you have the possibility to affect what will be published and when. Go ahead and take a look of the other blog and let us know what you want to see in this one and we'll try to make it happen. Be prepared that the food vocabulary can get just a little bit creative every now and then, since that vocabulary is not the most familiar to me yet. But I'll improve, I promise.

But now, we'll start planning on which recipe will be published on this site as the first one.

Let us know your thoughts, wishes and feedback.

Yours traditionally,

Antti & Mika