Cake 13 - Korvapuusti from Finland

This week I put the ball in your court, and asked my followers via the medium of facebook “What should Bridie bake?” The response was overwhelming, and gave me a lot of food for thought.

Chris certainly wins points for the originality of his ‘4 and 20 blackbirds’ suggestion, but for health and safety reasons I won’t be climbing into hedge rows to deplete the local area’s bird population. I would also like to offer free counselling to anyone who has been affected by John’s suggestion of cottage cheese cake -it was acceptable in the 70’s.

In the end I decided to pick one that was a complete mystery to me – the Korvapuusti, suggested by my friend Marjo in Finland. Behold Finland! The country that brought us Eurovision 2006 winners ‘Lordi’, now brings us the Korvapuusti!

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought a Korvapuusti was, I probably would have guessed incorrectly that it was a small woodland animal. However, it turns out that a Korvapuusti is the tastiest roll you’ve never heard of. They’re also known as ‘Slapped Ears’, but I’m not going to go tell people I gave my boyfriend slapped ears, so for the sake of decency we’ll call them by their true Finnish name.

The only recipe I found for Korvapuusti on the internet was in American ‘cup’ format, which always confuses me. Do you use tea cups, coffee cups, or bra cups? To avoid disaster, I printed out the recipe and converted all the cup amounts into metric. Better safe than sorry I always say.

A Korvapuusti consists of bread dough flavoured with melted butter and cardamom. You roll out a sheet of the dough and then spread a filling of melted butter, sugar, and ground cinnamon on top. After this is done, you roll up the pastry like a swiss roll, cut into triangles, and put onto a baking tray so that the two dough spirals at each end face upwards. They look like a cross between a croissant and a cinnamon roll, but the taste is really quite unique.

The cardamom especially makes a Korvapuusti seem more Middle Eastern than European. It would be interesting to swap the cinnamon filling for pistachio for a real taste of the Middle East.

There is a lot of time spent waiting for the dough to rise in this recipe, but that is most often the case when cooking with yeast. This waiting game is torture for an impatient cook such as myself, but it did give me chance to hang the washing out. Once it’s in the oven it only takes 10 minutes to cook, and the result was delicious! I would be tempted to freeze them for future breakfasts if I made them again.

Join me tomorrow for ‘Rate My Apron.’ I warn you, bring sunglasses.