Posted by: Hild @ 8:32 am
We love blautkake. This yummy Norwegian layer cake can be decorated for any special occasion and we had a Halloween party coming up. For us, a blautkake should have whipped cream filling and a marzipan cover. Hild had the idea that this time she wanted to make a half-and-half cake with a marzipan cover on one half of the cake and a more common (in North America) icing cover on the other half. The other part of the idea was to decorate it with a cobweb pattern and a huge big spider.
Note that “blautkake” translated directly from Norwegian means “soft cake” although Rob prefers to translate it as “soggy cake”. The soggier the better - to a point. Ho-hum.
Sponge Ingredients (for one 20 cm diameter cake with three layers):
- 4 large eggs
- 2 dl sugar
- 1 dl potato flour (I used corn flour and it turned out OK)
- 1 dl plain flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- melted butter to grease the tin
Decorations:
- 2.5 dl whipping cream
- 1 dl Ribena juice (or more for more blood-effect. In Norway we would have used “husholdningssaft”)
- 1.5 dl seedless strawberry jam (or more for more blood-effect)
- 2.5 dl mandarin wedges in fruit juice (or more for more bits-of-brain-effect)
- 100 gr marzipan (200 gr for complete cake cover)
- 2 dl ready-made spreadable icing (or double the amount if you do not plan for a marzipan cover)
- 2 dl icing sugar
- food and icing colouring (yellow and black would be best for our party but we only had red and black)
Directions:
Pre-heat the oven to 200 celsius. Whisk eggs and sugar until it thickens. Carefully fold in a mix of potato flour, flour, and baking powder. Fold for an even mix but as little as possible. Melt butter and grease the tin (or use any other way of greasing the tin). Pour the mix into the tin and place it on the middle oven rack. Bake it for 25-35 minutes until it is ligth brown on the outside and baked through. Leave the cake to cool for a few minutes and remove it from the tin. When the cake has cooled down, cut it into three even layers.
This is when one can try different things to decorate the cake evey time. We prepared our layers like this:
- Douse the bottom layer with Ribena. We should have used more to make the cake look more “bloody” for Halloween. Whip the cream until it thickens. Cover the layer in a mix of some of the whipped cream and strawberry jam.
- Put the second layer on top of the cream/jam layer. To make the middle layer moist, douse it with juice from the mandarins. Spread whipped cream on this layer, spread a layer of mandarin wedges and another layer of whipped cream.
- Put the top cake layer on and douse it with Ribena. Spread strawberry jam over the layer and another layer of whipped cream before covering the cake with marzipan. We only covered half the cake in marzipan. On the other half we spread the ready-made icing (vanilla flavour with some of our own red colouring. If we had had yellow colouring we could have gotten a more fun orange Hallween colour).
To make the cobweb effect we mixed icing sugar with black food colouring and some water. Note of caution: don’t overdo the colouring unless you want your guests to go home with black mouths and lips! We had planned to find an edible chocolate spider for extra decoration, but we weren’t able to find one. So the one in the final photos below is fake fake fake. The cake was definitely nam nam. Keep in mind that leaving any left-over cake covered in the fridge overnight does NOT make it any less nam nam!
Photos:
1. Dousing the second layer
2. Mandarins in the second layer
3. Dousing the top layer
4. Cobweb icing on marzipan and icing top
5. Finished cobweb icing
6. Spider guarding the cake.
Happy Easter means yummy hot-cross buns…. So here is our favourite recipe (a la Delia)
Bun ingredients:
-
Yeast mixture = 1 level tablespoon dried yeast (traditional not easy-blend) + 1.5 dl hand-hot water + 1 teaspoon sugar
-
500 g plain flour
-
1 level teaspoon salt
-
1 rounded teaspoon mixed spice (we use apple pie spice mix in US/Canada)
-
75 g currants
-
50 g sugar
-
0.5 dl hand-hot skim milk
-
1 beaten egg
-
50 g melted butter
Cross ingredients:
-
0.5 dl plain flour
-
water to make a dough that one can roll out
Glaze ingredients:
-
2 tablesppons sugar
-
2 tablespoons water
Directions
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Make yeast mixture and set aside to develop a nice frothy head
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Mix: flour, salt, mixed spice, sugar, and currants
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Make a well in the dry mixture and add: yeast mixture, milk, beaten egg, melted butter
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Mix the wet and dry ingredients gradually together and work into a smooth dough
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Leave dough to rise for about 1 hour in a warm spot
[1 hour passes… = drink at least one bucket of tea!]
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Knead the dough down to original size and make 12 buns
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Cut a cross in the buns or use the ‘cross ingredients’ above to roll out strips and attach to the buns
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Place on sprayed baking sheet and leave buns to rise again
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Preheat oven to 220 Celsius (420 Fahrenheit)
[ca. 30 minutes pass…. = more tea?]
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Bake buns for 15 minutes
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Prepare glaze by gently warming sugar and water mixture.
[ ca. 15 minutes pass… maybe save the bucket of tea to enjoy with the finished buns?]
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Brush glaze over buns as soon as you take them out of the oven to make them nice and sticky.
Now just enjoy a bun or 5 with yet another bucket of tea!!
And, as usual, some before and after photos. We tried to make the ‘cross’ both with a pastry dough and with simply using a knife and cutting deep grooves in the buns before baking them. Both works although the pastry dough approach is more visually pleasing, right?:
