Bullets of Butter

« Runebergintortut / Runeberg cakes »

( See also the 2006 Runeberg Cake update where I try again and manage to make some pretty decent cakes.)

February 5th is Runebergin Päivä and every year little bullet cakes topped with jam and rings of icing start appearing a few weeks after the Christmas holidays are over to commemorate the the national poet [who wrote in Swedish] J.L. Runeberg [Lovely website. Requires Flash]. I had never tried the cakes because I'm not particularly fond of cavity inducing sweets and Jarkko had warned me off of them. On a whim I bought a package of them at the grocery one evening and tried one for the hell of it and found it to be not too horribly sweet and rather tasty in spite of the handicap of being mass produced and subsequently a bit on the dry side.

So, I consulted my copy of Kotiruoka and was intrigued by the use of bread and cookie crumbs in the recipe. I looked at other recipes for the cakes and found them suspect by comparison due to many of them using margarine instead of butter. Unless you have serious dietary requirements which bar you from enjoying butter occasionally, any recipe for a confection that calls for synthetic fats [exception for pie crust and pastry dough] should be held suspect since they are not the same as butter and, given I'm a chemist, I consider them to be far worse for you than butter when used in moderation. Many of the recipes also omitted the gingerbread cookie and bread crumbs or tried to tart up the recipe with various other ingredients. The Kotiruoka recipes are decidedly not fancy, very traditional and trustworthy recipes. Considering just how far off the English versions are from the original Finnish recipes, it's a pity there isn't an English translation for the bible of Finnish cooking. I made four different variations, including the original and had a few willing victims taste them and pick the one they liked the best.

The Problem: Runeberg cakes are a traditional confection for Runberg's Day on 5 February in Finland. They are generally regarded to be either too dry or too sweet when rum or liqueurs are added to moisten them.

The Goal: To make a traditional Runeberg cake that is not quite so dry without resorting to adding liqueurs for moisture.

The Solution: Part of the dryness problem stems from the fact that most people rely on bakeries to provide the cakes and, especially if they are purchased in the grocery, they dry out fairly quickly in the winter air if not sealed well. The combination of bread crumbs and gingerbread cookie crumbs also soak up much of the available moisture. I went back to the classic recipe in Kotiruoka and found that it calls for jam topping before and after baking which most of the other recipes and the bakeries don't do. The jam supplies a bit of extra moisture during baking. I also added a bit of fruit juice to complement the jam of choice and to add a bit more moisture without making them soggy.

Runebergintortut - Runeberg Cakes

Makes: 12 regular or 8 large bullet-shaped cakes
Preparation time: approximately 1 hour
Special Equipment: Runeberg forms or straight-edged muffin pan [ dimensions: 5.7cm/2.3in wide and 5.5cm/2in deep ]
Source: Kotiruoka, pg. 411

Ingredients

• 150g | 1.5 sticks butter
• 1.5 dl | 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 dl | 1/2 cup ground or finely chopped almonds
• 1.5 dl | 3/4 cup wheat flour
• 1.5 dl | 3/4 cup bread crumbs [korppujauhetta] (optional: substitute 1/4 cup gingerbread cookie crumbs)
• 1 tl | 1 teaspoon baking powder
• .5 dl | 1/4 cup cream
• 2 tablespoons orange juice (optional)

Decoration

• raspberry jam or marmalade
• 1 dl | 1/2 cup confectioners sugar
• about 1/2 tablespoon water

Apple-walnut variation

Substitute full fruit apple jam [chunky] in place of the raspberry, apple juice for the orange juice and use finely chopped walnuts instead of almonds.

1. Mix dry ingredients [ flour, bread crumbs, gingerbread crumbs (if used), baking powder ] together and set aside. Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well. Add cream and dry ingredients. Stir vigorously until smooth and thick. Fold in nuts.
2. Pour the batter into muffin cups or greased popover/straight-edged baking pans. Fill the cups 2/3 full [about 1/3 cup]. Press floured fingers into the batter to create a divot in the top and fill with raspberry or apple jam.
3. Bake in an oven pre-heated to 395F/200C for about 15 minutes. Remove the forms/remove from the pan and decorate the cakes when cool. Add more raspberry jam to the top of the cake. Mix the confectioner's sugar with water until it becomes a thick paste. Pour or pipe the icing into rings around the jam.
4. If gingerbread crumbs are used in the batter, you can spice it up with 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon of cloves.

The classic shape of the cakes are squat and bullet-like from the straight-edged forms [5.7cm/2.3in wide and 5.5cm/2in deep] but those less fussy about how they look may use a muffin pan with paper cups, bake-proof ceramic coffee cups/small souffle cups or even small tomato paste cans [they're smooth] with the bottom removed. Finding these special forms locally in the country where they are traditional at this time of year is surprisingly difficult. I did eventually find them at Stockmann for 2.50 euro/ea. Apparently few bother with making their own or making them with the forms. Outside of Finland/the Nordic region, the closest ready-made pan is the Nordic Ware Crown Muffin Pan. The advantage the forms have over the muffin/popover pan is that they lift off of the cakes instead of having to tease them out of the muffin pan, 6 at a time, without mangling them. If using the muffin pan, allow extra time to cool since they are a bit more fragile when they are warm.

Creaming the butter and sugar together and then adding in the eggs is, perhaps, the most important step in this recipe. I reluctantly purchased one of those Braun hand held mixers last year and have rarely used my standing mixer since. It's perfect for this job as the purpose of creaming the butter and sugar together is to get a bit of air into the mixture. The original recipe doesn't state how much of the gingerbread cookie crumbs to use but I found a 1:3 ratio of cookie to bread crumbs to be the best. After adding in the dry ingredients you will have a thick, porridge-like batter that won't ooze out from beneath the cake forms. Add the fruit juice last.

Grease the pan and forms well and pour about 1/3 cup of batter into each form. Press the batter into the form with a moist spatula and smooth the top and edges since the batter retains much of the shape after baking and it will look ragged if not smoothed out before. Place a small blob of jam on top of the batter in each cup. The directions in the original recipe call for using floured fingers to make a depression for the jam, but I didn't find that this worked very well and used a wet spoon with some success or just shoved the spoon with jam into the batter without bothering to make a divot first. I found the latter to work better since the jam didn't bubble up quite as much during baking. Once they're done baking and have cooled, decorate and eat. The cakes do travel well if packed properly and I will note that the square clear plastic boxes that some of the butter cookies are sold in [in Finland] will hold 9 cakes perfectly.

My attentive assistant and discriminating taste-tester seemed to prefer the cakes where I used the gingerbread cookie crumbs from the original recipe version although claimed that the batch I made without gingerbread but with added orange peel and orange juice tasted 'more like the Fazer' version of the cakes. I subjected 8 test subjects at work to a blind tasting with 4 samples; 3 of mine and one from a Fazer control. Again, the gingerbread cookie crumb variety was popular as was the apple variation. Interestingly, several picked the Fazer control which may be due to baseline normal for this annual traditional cake as they liked the variations very much as well. The apple variety could also be good to make all year as it's not so closely associated with Runeberg's day.