Stamp of the Day: Julbak

Swedish Christmas traditions includes a big baking day - the 'Julbak', where the most common thing to make is 'pepparkakor' (gingerbread cookies).  Here on this Swedish stamp Pippi Longstocking ('Långstrump') is baking on her kitchen floor with the help of her monkey Herr Nilsson. Pippi is my favorite character in Astrid Lindgren's children's books.  We haven't made any cookies at all this year, but plan to make hazelnut bread, a family tradition from my grandmother, and maybe the kids will make some cookies too.  In Sweden ginger bread cookies are called "Pepper cookies", but they have no pepper in them at all.  I wonder how that name came about. 

Summer in northern Sweden (from EH)

Fröå mine, a coppermine in Åre, Sweden. In the bakery they make
flatbread in a woodfired oven. 'Rallarros' (fire weed) is the flower in
the foreground.

Recipe - almond apple cake from Rosendal

My mom gave us a wonderful cookbook, The Garden Cafe at Rosendal, which is filled with recipes, photos and stories from the organic garden and cafe Rosendal on Djurgården in Stockholm.  For Valentine's Eve I made one of the recipes, Apple Cake with Almond, with some slight modifications (I didn't put shaved butter on top, like the recipe says). It was dense, luscious, and delicious. 

Ingredients (American measurements):
5 eggs (an egg is an egg in the US too!)
3/4 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup vanilla sugar (can be bought at IKEA, if you don't have it, use confectioners sugar and two drops of vanilla extract)
5 oz almond paste (look in the baking section of the supermarket, Odense is a good brand)
2 tbsp cinnamon (we had extra strong cinnamon so I used only 1 tbsp)
1 3/4 cups white flour
4 large apples (I used 2 green and 2 bright red, organic is best, do not peel)
1/2 cup (or less) pearl sugar (can also be bought at IKEA)
5 tbsp butter (I didn't include this, too many calories... but it makes the cake more moist and fresh...)

Turn on oven to about 375 degrees F. Whisk the eggs, granulated sugar and vanilla sugar a lot so it turns into whitish foamy mix.  Grate the almond paste using a cheese grater (large hole size), and mix in separate bowl with flour and cinnamon.  Add the egg mix, mix in slowly. Cut apples in half, core them, and then slice very thinly. Take a round pan with removable sides and butter it and then add breadcrumbs, so the cake will not stick in the pan.  Add the mix, and then stick the apple pieces into the pan.  Put MANY apple pieces in.  I added them in a circular pattern that looked great, but I should have added more apples, will do next time (I will probably add the mix and the apples in horizontal layers next time too, then I can add more apples and maybe use a bit less egg and flour mix. Add the pearl sugar on top.  At the end you are supposed to shave off thin slices of the cold butter and add on top, I skipped this step.  I am sure it will be just more delicious if you add the butter.  Put in oven, takes about 40 min (check with toothpick to see if it is done).  Before and after photos below (click for larger photos on Flickr).  Mmmmm!

What is cooking?

Or rather, what has been cooking in our kitchen in the last month or so:

Braised lamb shanks with onions, carrots, and celery, plus fresh herbs, cooked for a very long time until the meat fell of the bone and melted in our mouths (thanks PP!). These are photos from the beginning of this dish made for Sunday night dinner.

Applesauce ('äppelmos'), 7 liters

Habanero hot sauce (sweetened with carrots), about 2 liters!:

Roasted jalapeno and roasted garlic hot sauce, but I have only a photo of the main ingredients after they were charred in the oven.  It is delicious!

Italian tortas filled with greens (many kinds, like kale, swiss chard ('mangold'), bok choy, leeks, onions), garlic, cheese, egg, and herbs and crushed chili pepper.  The dough is like a pie dough, no yeast, and we freeze them and have them for lunch.  They are so good!  Filling to the left, ready to bake to the right.

Blueberry jam on the move!

Homemade French bread:

Amazing pizza:  onion, artichokes, olives, and rehydrated Swedish yellow-footed chanterelles ('trattkantareller') fried in some butter... incredible!

The treasures of the forest

When I was in Sweden, my sister (EH) and I went mushroom picking in the free-for-all Swedish forests.  You can walk anywhere you want, not a No Trespassing sign anywhere, which is one of the best things in Sweden.  So we walked, looked, stepped over rocks and moss humps, avoided some ant trails, and picked mushrooms.  It was a bit too dry for the chanterelles (kantareller), especially my favorite brown-yellow ones (trattkantarell), but we did find some. The yellow chanterelles turned up along the road, not the in the forest, which was unexpected.


Orange-footed chanterelles collected by me! These are among my favorites.


This one you can eat, but you have to peel off the slimy layer first.  In Swedish it is called "lemon-yellow slime mushroom", citrongul slemskivling.  Not an appetizing name, but it is good.

We also found lots of Boletus (Karl Johan), and saw many inedible and poisonous mushrooms that we left to the wild boars, who had tore up the ground in many places.  The boars where somewhere else, but their marks on the earth were very obvious.  The lingonberries were starting to ripe, but still a bit too tart for my taste. In total, we probably had 5 pounds of incredibly tasty mushrooms at the end of the day.  The chanterelles ended up in cream sauce served with Canadian bacon and potato gratin - yummy.


Do not eat this, or you might get very, very sick.  This is fly agaric, an Ammonita. I have read that the vikings used this as a drug to get high on, something I do not recommend.  A Swedish man just died after eating one of its relatives by mistake, the white agaric which can look a lot like a portobello if you are not careful.


Inedible but funky mushrooms. In Swedish they are called 'fjällig taggsvamp'.

Later that day we went to Taxinge castle (Taxinge slott), also known as the Cookie Castle, because they have a fantastic cafe there with an amazing amount of homebaked cakes, cookies, and sandwiches. They also had a farmers market and gardening fair, selling everything from whimsical gardening art to lingonberries. Here are some photos from this place, and more photos from the Södertälje area in Sweden are here.


Lingonberries (lingon) for sale, $2.50 per pound.


Yellow chanterelles for sale. You can tell that these have been around for a while and are not freshly picked.  The edges are dry and broken and the color is turning more brown.  A lot of mushrooms sold in Sweden are actually from Poland. I don't know about these, but it is better to pick your own if you can.


Swedish shrimp sandwich on homemade bread.  Tiny sweet shrimps, mayo, hardboiled egg, lemon, and dill all has to be there for perfection.


Some of the delicacies at the "Cookie Castle".  This place would make Sarah happy! :)

My town- Pretzeltown!

In the last days it´s been a music festival here, called Pretzeltown. It´s a translation of the nickname my town has, "Kringelstan". In the last century´s beginning, there were women who sold their homebaked pretzels in the city and at the railway station. According to Wikipedia, their sales methods were so aggressive they were forbidden in the town streets. True or not, it´s a curiosity fact. Nowadays you can buy pretzels here, not salty, but sweet. But they are not something we usually have.

Welcome to Pretzeltown!

As promised - chile rellenos in the kitchen

Here you go, we actually remembered to take phtoos of our chile rellenos making!
Roasted chilies, stuffed with cheese, and dumped into flour.


Then dipped into fluffy whipped eggs, and put in a frying pan with hot oil. Mmm, sizzling!


And for dessert, my Tarte Tatin that doesn't look to great but tasted delicious!

OK snapshot: Clawing bread

Apropos the postings by EH below, Crawfish inspired bread seen in Sweden.
Snapshot by OK.