A Neverending Learning Process

« Hummingbird cake with cream cheese frosting and dried pineapple flowers. (yes, that's really a flower made from pineapple.) »

Since work has been making for long days at the office, seemingly the only thing I can do that's remotely interesting, aside from rant about the various unpleasantries of my current project, is bake which I put a lot more thought and enthusiasm into than may be readily apparent or wise to admit to. It's still snowing like hell here so there are worse things than staying indoors while waiting for winter to finally bugger off.

One of the more appealing parts of finding recipes and making them is researching the history behind them as well as learning new methods or techniques. Also, I enjoy making the traditional local foods as a way to get to know the culture, but reversing that and inflicting non-fennicized versions of American foods on my colleagues is both entertaining and, at times, mystifying when they don't receive something as well as I was convinced they might. It's a neverending learning process. :)

Pineapple and banana have been frequent additions to Finnish desserts and main dishes for quite a few decades now, almost to the point of being a bit of a cliché. Pineapple is popular. Really popular. So, I was thinking I'd find a cake recipe with banana and pineapple from the US and see if it would be tasty or find out if their popularity might be limited just to Finnish cakes. I found something called Hummingbird Cake, a cake that I'd never heard of in spite of quite a few sources on the internet claiming that this cake is among the 10 most popular in the US. The cake originally appeared in Southern Living Magazine, a popular magazine throughout the US in spite of the name, in 1978. There doesn't seem to be an authoritative source as to where it might have come from before the magazine published the recipe though The Food Timeline does a good job of gathering what little is known.

I suspect that the name has everything to do with how very, very sweet this cake is as well as the tropical fruits it contains. One of my colleagues spent five years living in Chicago and returned to Finland late last year and we often compare notes on our perceptions of the US and of Finland. Perhaps one of the most interesting things that both of us noticed and agree on is the Finnish sweet tooth. Candies, sweets and cakes, both of us agree, have a much higher profile in daily life than they do in the US or, at least, the part of the US that both of us have spent the greatest amount of time in; the Midwest. There have been various articles in the Helsingin Sanomat in the past few years that also tend to support this observation in that the amount of sugar consumed per capita has skyrocketed in the past few decades, possibly due to the plenitude and availability of candy. My colleagues all really liked the cake and so I had that warm fuzzy feeling of choosing/guessing well.

The cake and the frosting are easy to make, but the pineapple flowers really are a beautiful addition if you have the time and patience for them. The flowers would really be perfect if you make individual hummingbird cupcakes with frosting and a pineapple flower on top of each. People don't think they're really pineapple until they start to eat them as the core looks just like the center of a daisy. I wasn't very impressed with the way the 'flowers' looked from the original directions from Martha Stewart and had the thought that, since the center looked so realistic, why not try to cut them into flowers and was really happy with the way they turned out. I made them the night before I baked the cake, which is likely a good idea since the time may vary for the pineapple to dry out.

I don't have much of a sweet tooth, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it as it reminded me somewhat of banana bread that my mother used to make. It is a heavy cake both in that I built some muscle carrying it to work and that it doesn't take more than a small slice to get your fix. The nuts in the cake also make it necessary to have a very sharp knife to cut through the cake neatly.

Hummingbird Cake

Serves: 16
Time: about an hour for the cake + bake time
Source: Southern Living Magazine

• 3 cups or 7dl all-purpose flour
• 2 cups or 4,75dl sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 3/4 cup or 1,75dl vegetable or sunflower oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla/vanilla sugar
• 1 8oz or 225g can crushed pineapple, undrained
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1 3/4 cups or 4,25dl mashed/pureed ripe bananas
• cream cheese frosting (recipe below)
• dried pineapple flowers (directions below)

1. Preheat oven to 350F/175C. Grease and flour 2 or 3 9-inch/23cm cake pans. Mash ripe bananas in a bowl with a fork and chop pecans into small, but not fine, pieces. Set aside.
2. Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl. Add eggs and oil until dry ingredients are just moistened. Add vanilla, pineapple, pecans and bananas, stirring until combined.
3. Pour batter evenly into 2 or 3 round cake pans.
4. Bake at 350F/175C for 23 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes, remove from pans and cool completely on wire rack lined with baking paper.
5. Spread cream cheese frosting between layers and on top and sides of cake. Decorate with dried pineapple flowers. Store in refrigerator.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Makes: 3 1/4 cups or 7.5dl

• 1/2 cup or 113g butter, room temperature
• 8oz or 225g cream cheese, room temperature
• 16oz or 455g powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup or 1,2dl chopped pecans (sprinkle between cake layers)

Beat butter and cream cheese at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy. Gradually add powdered sugar, beating at low speed until blended. Beat at high speed until smooth; stir in vanilla.

Dried Pineapple Flowers

Makes: about 2 dozen
Time: about 3 hours - prepare 1-3 days in advance

• 2 large pineapples (about 1kg) (the recipe works best if the pineapples are not quite ripe).

1. Heat oven to 225F/110C. Line a couple baking sheets with Silpat or parchment paper.
2. Peel pineapples with a serrated knife (Remove "eyes" using a very tiny melonballer, or paring knife if you don't plan to use a flower cookie cutter for shaping them.) Cut crosswise into very thin slices and place in a single layer on prepared baking sheets. Bake until tops look dry, anywhere from 1 to 2 hours.  Using tongs, flip slices over and continue to cook until reasonably dry, about an hour or so. Arrange on a wire rack and leave to cool and dry a bit more for a few hours. (note: A convection oven is an advantage for faster drying so use it if you have it.)
3. When slices are cool and dry, take a small metal flower-shaped cookie cutter and press into dried pineapple. Use a rolling pin on top of the cookie cutter to press firmly. Set cut flowers aside on the wire rack. When the flowers are dry, but still a bit pliable, hold the center of the flower between your thumb and forefinger in one hand and pull the petals of the flower upwards with your other hand to give them a more realistic look.
4. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 3 days.

permalink Ω 25 March 2006, Helsinki

Bring Out Your Dead

« Kroppkakor, a.k.a. Smålandskroppkakor or body crop cakes, are pork-filled potato dumplings from Southern Sweden. »

Back when I was making spätzle, I wondered about the lack of dumplings in both traditional Finnish foods and even in the more modern array of products available at the local groceries. One person suggested that the absence of dumplings in the more traditional foods might be due to the expense of wheat and that potatoes didn't arrive until late and, even when they did, they weren't immediately popular, neither of which cast too much doubt on my hypothesis that dumplings simply must not be an appealing food for many Finns. It was also suggested that possibly Karelian pies and the Savonian kalakukko might be close enough for jazz in the dumpling category. The kalakukko is somewhat like a giant dumpling so if there were mini versions of it, then it might qualify as a dumpling, but the Karelian pies are open-face pasties filled with rice which, considering there are no rice paddies in eastern Finland, are likely not that traditional if one disqualifies various foods on the basis of cost and availability of ingredients over the past 300 years. Finns had rye, water and eggs to make dough and meat from which to make dumplings and yet, no (filled) dumplings**.

**Technically, there does appear to be one sort of dumpling soup called 'klimppisoppa' that consists of a thin broth served with dropped noodles much like spätzle, with raisins occasionally added to the dumplings for holiday flair. The recipe does not appear in Kotiruoka or any of the older Finnish cookbooks I could find and seems to be a dish limited to a small region. The few mentions of it that I could find with google seemed to indicate that it is not a very well loved dish, too. The plot thickens.

I looked to Sweden where so many of the foods considered traditional and old fashioned originated and I found kroppkakor, potato dumplings filled with pork and onions. I started poking around for them in Finnish cookbooks, especially a few that have been translated from Swedish into Finnish, and found no mention of them in spite of them being in almost every general Swedish cookbook. There were a few moments of comedy when I asked Jarkko what the literal translation to Finnish might be and he seemed confused since the 'kropp', though often translated as 'body'**, makes more sense in the 'corpse' connotation and wondered why I was interested in recycling dead bodies for dinner. Perhaps the Swedes engaged in cannibalism years ago and make these to remind themselves that people are, in fact, the other white meat. Still, even with literal and creative attempts at translation, these dumplings simply did not make the jump along with all the other Swedish foods such as lutefisk. Why lutefisk and not kroppkakor is a very curious bit of food history that no doubt has an interesting story behind it. Does this mean that Finns, and this would include the Swedish-speaking Finns (none of whom I know had ever heard of them), actually like the taste of smelly, gelatinous fish soaked in lye better than pork-filled potato dumplings? Say it isn't so.

**Kroppkakor are often translated as 'body cakes' using the literal modern meaning of the word 'kropp' which can mean either body or corpse. However, neither make much sense when applied to a boiled dumpling. With the help of a very kind Swedish speaker, it appears that the word 'kropp' has an older meaning that makes a lot more sense:

ETYMOLOGI:[till sv. dial. kropp (äv. i avledd form]
kroppa, kroppning), klimp i soppa, blodpalt, sannol. identiskt med KROPP, sbst.⁴; av mnt. krop, kroppe, ett slags bakvärk med fyllning av kött, sannol.urspr.: fylld kräva (i bildl. anv.)]

The etymology of 'kropp' appears to be related to the old German word 'kropf' and English word 'crop' where they refer to a part of a bird's anatomy that is a round pouch in the gullet which stores food for digestion. This seems to be a much more likely source for the name since the dumplings are round pouches filled with meat that are heavy and do take quite a long time to digest. It is no more appetizing than 'body' or 'corpse' but at least the name fits. :)

I figured I had to try making the dumplings to see if they tasted or looked like corpses and maybe find a reason as to why they failed to find a home in Finland. There are two main variants of the recipe; the original version, Ölandskroppkakor, uses shredded raw potatoes and the more modern version, Smålandskroppkakor, uses mashed potatoes. I opted for the mashed potato version since they're less work, produce a smoother dough (and thus a more attractive dumpling) and because we now have such wonders as plentiful chicken eggs, at least until bird flu arrives. There is a third variety that uses corn meal called pitepalt.

My first batch of dough was an utter disaster since I used a slightly dodgy recipe I found on the net. You remember only when you make a batch of potato paste that there is little difference between the nasty, gummy potato dough and wallpaper glue. I then swore off the recipes in English I found on the net and started hunting for recipes in Swedish which resulted in a few that were much, much more successful. Essentially the basic formula should be 1 pound/500g potatoes, 1 egg, and 1 cup/2.5 dl flour which doubles easily.

Like anything that is deceptively simple in appearances, there is more to boiling a potato than just dropping it into boiling water. Cooking the potato without it becoming soggy and/or gluey can easily become a fool's errand. I dislike peeling hot potatoes so I usually peel them first, put them into a pot with water, stick it on a burner and forget about it until it boils over or I begin to smell something burning. I can bake, but basic cooking stuff eludes me. After a couple of batches where the potatoes started to disintegrate in the pot I began to think that there really must be a secret to this task only marginally more complex than boiling water. I found that the potatoes disintegrate when you boil them at too high a boil which causes them to bump around vigorously and break apart. I suppose that this should have been obvious, but what is obvious if not elusive and often overlooked? The starch in the potatoes is a temperamental substance. Try taking a hand blender or a food processor to a boiled potato sometime if you'd like to see just how much fun you can have with starch that has been released from its cells.

Boiling the potatoes with their skins on is best as it will help keep them from becoming soggy which results in using more flour and gummy dough. You'll want to rice/mash them while they are still piping hot so that they can release a bit of moisture through the steam. I was already unnaturally fond of my potato ricer, but when I discovered that you can cut the unpeeled potato in half, drop it cut side down into the hopper and squeeze the potato out without the peel, I wondered where it had been all my life. I've been unable to find anything about the history of this gadget or even how it came to have the unlikely name of 'ricer', but wherever the inventor may be they have my enduring admiration for such an elegantly simple human-powered, multi-purpose kitchen tool. If you make real mashed potatoes with any frequency at all, buy one of these things tomorrow. Julia Child also gushed a bit about her German potato ricer with priceless audio of her extolling its virtues. I'm going say "ssshhoooommmm!" every time I rice a potato from now on. :) Another great masher is the OXO square masher which produces a less gluey texture than the usual squiggly masher.

Once you have the dough prepared, use immediately as it tends to get very gummy and unworkable if left to sit for any amount of time. There are many ways to get to the same meat-filled ball, but the easiest seemed to be the log of dough that is sliced into 12 parts, flattened, filled, sealed and formed into a ball. As for the filling, there are many different variations though allspice does appear to be very common and, frankly, is an often forgotten spice. I tried a few different combinations of fatty pork scraps, bacon and ham and found that using all or mostly ham had a much better colour and flavour than the others. Chopping the filling into a paste with a hand blender made filling and eating the dumplings much easier so I highly recommend it. I've also seen variations using salmon and vegetables that look pretty tempting as well. It might be fun to make a batch of them for halloween and decorate them to look like eyeballs, too. :)

The recipe makes 24 dumplings that will feed you for at least a few days since I'm not sure most mere mortals can consume more than 4-6 of them in one day.

Kroppkakor / Smålandskroppkakor / Body Crop Cakes / Pork-filled Potato Dumplings

Makes: about 24 golf ball-sized dumplings
Time: about 90 minutes
Special tools: potato ricer, big pot for boiling

Filling:

• 1 large onion, diced
• 200g or 7oz meaty or lean bacon
• 200g or 7oz good ham
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• black pepper
• white pepper
• allspice

Dough:

• 1kg or 2 pounds potatoes, boiled and riced/mashed
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 4.75 dl or 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon white pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt

1. For the Filling: Place a bit of butter or olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan and sauté the onion until soft. Add ham and spices to taste. Turn down heat and allow to simmer for about 20 minutes. Allow to cool, transfer to a deep bowl and chop finely to a paste with a hand blender. Set aside or refrigerate overnight for better flavour.
2. For the dumplings: Fill deep pot with cold water and potatoes. Add a generous amount of salt. Bring to a boil, turn down heat and simmer potatoes for about 20-25 minutes. Drain, slice potatoes in half, and place each potato half, cut side down, into a potato ricer, removing the peel from the hopper after ricing each potato or peel with a knife and mash with a hand masher (Do not use hand blender) into a large bowl. Allow the potatoes to cool for 10-15 minutes. Beat eggs lightly and pour over potatoes. Add flour and knead by hand until the dough forms a smooth ball. Use dough immediately.
3. Divide the dough into two parts. On a smooth surface, shape each part of the dough into a long cylinder about 12-inches/30cm long. Slice dough into 12 pieces, each 1-inch/2.5cm wide . Flatten each piece into a circle about 10cm/4-in in diameter. Scoop about 1 tablespoon of filling into the center and proceed to seal the meat inside the dumpling by pulling the dough up in three places and pinching the three seams. Spackle any holes with small bits of extra dough. Gently shape the dumpling into a ball with your palms. Place finished dumpling on a lightly greased baking sheet and repeat until you have used all the dough. [ see illustration of the whole process of making the dumpling. ]
4. Boil water in a deep pot and gently lower a few dumplings into the water. They are ready when they float to the surface which takes about 5 minutes. Lift out of the water with a slotted spoon (there is a special wooden tool in Sweden just for this task called a kroppkakeslev which is a long-handled wooden spoon with five holes in the spoon to drain the dumplings) and place in a baking dish or serving platter. Keep them warm in the oven until ready to serve. Repeat with all the dumplings until all are cooked. Serve with melted/clarified butter and lingonberry or any other tart red berry jam. You can also refrigerate or freeze them and microwave or pan fry them to reheat. They make excellent leftovers.

permalink Ω 21 March 2006, Helsinki

Nyetwork

« Moving the earth. »

Lately, I begin to look forward to Friday by late Monday afternoon. The weeks pass slowly and the weekends fly by in a flurry of laundry, cleaning house and dog walking. My project from hell at work just keeps grinding on and on and on, wearing down my patience for and my interest in technology. Or, at least, the janitorial side of technology. After thinking about the jobs I've had over the years, every single one has had at least one guy who knows just enough to be dangerous and subsequently breaks systems in new, previously unimagined ways. Clean-up on aisle 6. Bring the mop.

The introduction of the Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) in Solaris 10 is a wet dream for guys like this as it is both new and powerful enough to lay waste to a fresh system in less than an hour. When I think of the SMF, I have a mental image of a committee of engineers hovering around the unholy birth where there emerged a hairy, middle-aged, very unattractive guy to the horror and delight of all. Never before have I seen a system that asks for the system maintenance password on the console, only to keep right on booting to multi-user with services like cron and syslog somehow in a 'disabled' state. I still have no idea which combination of services this person disabled in a spate of paranoia over security to achieve this level of system fuckitude and I'm not entirely sure that I want to know. Soon we'll see a Solaris 10 system exploit that quietly disables the 'boot' service, thus rendering a system unbootable on the next reboot. Nifty.

I'm sure that the engineers at Sun thought it was a brilliant idea to streamline the somewhat cryptic and mysterious system processes for the pretty GUI jockeys who wouldn't know a command line if it bit them in the arse, but what used to be simple is now a baroque labyrinth of XML, rc scripts with 'methods' and databases that have the power to cripple your system without even trying. The services will list their dependencies, yet won't warn you what services depend on THEM so that when you disable a service you can, in fact, unwittingly disable half of your system. What's the point of having a database with dependencies if it doesn't work in both directions? I suppose that feature is only available in the java-based management GUI that I can't use.

Here it is 2006 and we're still using metal tape, have UFS filesystems that max out at 1 inode per MB in filesystems over 1 terabyte, have OS tools that are essentially worthless on filesystems over 1 terabyte, etc. and they're redesigning something that has worked well for over a decade? I'm sure ZFS is going to be ready for production any year now. Sure. The folks who buy into the whole 'Web 2.0' and internet 'revolution' would probably be a lot less enthusiastic if they saw the bowels of the systems that are still remarkably similar to the big ugly boxes from the 1970s, if only a whole lot smaller. The 'revolution' is how much money people are making off the suckers who have bought into the hype. It's amazing that Google is worth billions while running on a platform that has not improved dramatically over the past two decades, we've just gotten better at making it look more sexy on the user end. A large number of cheap PCs clustered together is still just a bunch of cheap PCs. Too much money has been invested in infrastructure and in software and vendors are going to milk it until there is no other option but to move forward. It's much like gasoline powered automobiles where ubiquity, infrastructure and financial interests have kept us driving cars with the same or less fuel efficiency and the same form factor for the past 60 or more years. It seems only crisis will force a revolution in design.

I've been reading Company lately and have been enjoying its satire of American corporations. At one point in the book, management lays off all of IT and the network goes down.

Throughout the building, Zephyr Holdings is slowly getting back to full operating speed. Not because the network has been fixed; oh no. The east wing of level 19 remains a barren wasteland. No server lives there. No hub can flourish in 19's harsh, inhospitable conditions. Dry, gasping network cables search for data they will never find. IT is dark and dead and will not recover.

But there is work to be done, network or no network. Two weeks ago the network went down; soon after Senior Management assured the company it would have the problem fixed within a few days; now everyone is realizing it is never going to happen. Work-arounds are springing up everywhere you look, like new grass after rain. In the absence of e-mail, employees are discovering the art of speaking into phones. They are realizing that discussions that previously required three days and six e-mails can, with phones, be settled in minutes. Spam and computer viruses, both of which IT claimed were unsolvable problems, have vanished. The plague of e-mail jokes, funny at first and then not, has been eliminated. The pressure to forward chain letters under threat of personal catastrophe has lifted. In-boxes no longer fill with desperate sales pitches from co-workers trying to shift their cars, or kittens.

To transfer documents from one location to another, workers tighten their shoelaces and stretch their legs. People pass each other in the corridors, papers in hand, exchanging happy greetings. Their brains dizzy from unexpected exercise, they stop to chat and laugh. No one realized there were so many people in Zephyr. Until now, you never saw them. Until now, most people arrived at work, planted their buttocks in a chair, and the twain didn't part until five thirty. Now the corridors are like maternity ward waiting rooms, filled with excited voices and good cheer. Lower-back pain is clearing up. Color is rising. Workers find each other more physically attractive. And nobody receives suspicious looks for leaving the department anymore, not so long as they're clutching a sheaf of papers.

Network - what was that thing ever good for?

What, indeed.

pic via

permalink Ω 21 March 2006, Helsinki

As Good As It Gets

« A lovely almond cake topped with soft, caramelized apples, ice cream and golden caramel sauce. »

I've noticed lately that, as work gets more stressful, I've been baking nearly every night when I'm not so tired as to fall asleep on the sofa by 10pm. I'm not entirely sure why, but it keeps me out of the pubs and (mostly) out of trouble.

I was leafing through the hefty The Professional Pastry Chef after having so much success with the semlor/laskiaispulla and found a recipe for an apple and almond cake. I became suspicious of the author as I found a lot of almond-based recipes as I was browsing and wondered if he might be from somewhere around here since nobody loves the almond quite as much as the Nordics do. I've come to think that almonds and berry jams are foods worthy of their own food group in the Nordic region. There needs to be an annual almond festival and a monument erected to pay homage to the most revered nut. Apparently, "Chef Bo", (Whom I have affectionately dubbed "Chef Bo[rk Bork Bork]") is in fact Swedish. His cookbook is ace which is likely why he doesn't have a show on FoodTV and a line of his own merchandise as he's too busy actually working in the field to be a celebrity.

I have made this recipe four times in the last two weeks and not a single cake has made it into the office which might indicate how absolutely terrific this cake is. The soft, sweet apples partnered with the ice cream, caramel and light almond cake is a really amazing taste sensation. It looks pretty, too. I tried several different brown sugar variants and found the 'farina' sugar to be the best as it appears to be somewhere between light and dark brown sugar. The original recipe asks for dark brown sugar, but the molasses overwhelms the delicate flavour of the apple and the almond cake. If you don't have ramekins, you could probably use sturdy coffee mugs with straight sides.

One caveat is that you shouldn't allow the apples to cool too much before adding the filling since I discovered after taking Otava out for a long walk between baking stages that if they are too cool, the filling doesn't bake properly and you slice the cake only to find uncooked almond goo on the inside. I could ramble on about how good these are, how easy they are to make and that everyone should enjoy the wonders of a cake this good fresh from the oven at least once in their lifetime, but I'm working against a deadline this week and am too tired to be entertaining so you're left to your own devices on this one.

Caramelized Upside-Down Apple and Almond Cakes

Makes: 6-8 cakes depending on the size of your small ramekin
Special tools: ramekins, a.k.a. annosvuoka (small, round ceramic dishes), that have about 250ml/1 cup volume
Time: about 2 hours
Source: The Professional Pastry Chef

• 150g or 5oz light brown sugar or raw sugar
• 100g or 7 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• about 6 medium golden delicious or granny smith apples (about 1 apple per ramekin)
• vanilla-almond filling (see below)

1. Grease the inside of the ramekins with butter.
2. Cream the brown sugar, butter, cinnamon and nutmeg until smooth and lightened in colour. Divide the brown sugar mixture in half and spoon about a tablespoon into the bottom of the ramekins. Place the ramekins on a baking sheet and set aside.
3. Peel the apples, trim off the ends, cut in half crosswise, remove seeds with a melon baller or the end of the peeler and proceed to slice apples crosswise into thin slices. Place one slice into the bottom, pressing it down over the brown sugar mixture. Layer more slices in the ramekins, filling them almost to the top and filling any holes where bits of core were removed. If any slices are too wide for your baking dish, gently pare away the excess with the peeler. Brush a bit of the brown sugar mixture over the top apple slice so it doesn't dry out.
4. Cover ramekins with a sheet of aluminum foil (to keep the splatter of the butter to a minimum) and bake at 190C/375F for about 30-40 minutes or until the apples have cooked down to about half of their original volume. Remove from oven and set aside to cool for at least 30 minutes to an hour. When cool, take a sharp knife and run it around the sides to remove any caramelized sugar. Brush a small amount of butter on the sides before adding the almond filling.
5. Place the vanilla-almond filling into a pastry bag with a large plain tip. Pipe the filling on top of the baked apples, dividing it evenly among the forms. (Use a ziplock bag with a corner cut off if you don't have a pastry bag as you want to disturb the apples as little as possible when placing the almond filling.)
6. Bake at 190C/375F for about 20 minutes or until the filling is just baked through and light golden brown on top; be careful not to overbake the cakes, which will cause them to become tough and dry. Let the apple cakes cool until you can pick the ramekins up with your bare hands.
7. Run a knife around the inside edge of a warm cake and unmold onto a plate. Serve with a scoop of vanilla or cinnamon ice cream and caramel sauce.

Vanilla-Almond Filling

• 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar or the seeds of 1 vanilla bean added to the granulated sugar
• 55g or 2oz granulated sugar (about 1/2dl)
• 80g or 3oz almond paste
• 80g or 5.5 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 80g or 3oz bread flour (about 1.5dl)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1. Sift the flour with the baking powder. Set aside.
2. Place the vanilla sugar and granulated sugar in a mixer bowl with the almond paste. Beat together and add butter gradually to avoid getting lumps in the batter. Cream the mixture together for a few minutes until it is smooth and light in colour. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, scraping down the bowl as needed. Add flour mixture to the batter on low speed, mixing just until it is incorporated.

Fortified Caramel Sauce

Makes: about 2 cups/4 dl
Time: about 20 minutes

• 225g granulated sugar
• 40ml or 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon light corn syrup
• 180ml or 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 25g or 1/4 stick butter

1. Place the sugar, water and lemon juice in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil. Brush down the sides of the pan with a clean brush dipped in water. Add the light corn syrup. Cook over medium heat until the syrup reaches a golden amber colour (about 5-10 minutes).
2. Remove the pan from the heat and add the heavy cream carefully. Stand back as you pour in the cream, a little at a time while stirring constantly, as the mixture will splatter. Stir to mix in the cream. If the sauce is not smooth, return the pan to the heat and cook, stirring constantly, to melt any lumps.
3. With the pan off the heat, add the butter. Keep stirring until the butter has melted and the sauce is smooth.

permalink Ω 15 March 2006, Helsinki

Tunnel of Fudge

« The cake. The icon. The Tunnel of Fudge. »

Nordic Ware is celebrating their 60th anniversary this year. Nordic Ware is perhaps best known for the tube pan called a Bundt® pan. Forty years ago, Ella Rita Helfrich submitted a recipe to the Pillsbury Bake Off Contest that used a Bundt® and mysteriously formed a soft fudge core inside a chocolate cake. The cake won and launched not only the Bundt® pan into the mainstream, but helped to create an icon of hospitality for the next decade. I can't think of a single party or social event in the 70s that didn't include a Bundt® cake of some sort or another. Cake mixes were all the rage and with the Bundt® pan, anyone could turn out a pretty cake in an hour with little effort.

I suppose that the advent of gourmet food, a.k.a. Nouvelle Cuisine, in the 80s caused the cakes fall from grace as America discovered pine nuts and blackened anything. Even now, with all the prancing TV celebrity chefs who seem to appeal mostly to those who don't cook, the cakes are seen as too simple, too pedestrian, too 70s that even a chocolate wine port sauce couldn't sex up enough. Food snobs killed the Bundt® cake. It was an unjust execution.

Food fads come and go, but classics like the Bundt® pan are always around for those who tire of silly trends and return to the tried and true. For the 60th anniversary, Nordic Ware has created a special anniversary edition of the Bundt® that is a little bit larger than the ones presently made and, best of all, it also features a set of handles, that were inexplicably removed years ago. It's a pity that H. David Dalquist, the man who, with his wife, created the Nordic Ware company and the famous pan, died early last year and will miss the celebration. The Washington Post featured an article, Let Them Eat Cake, that is a wistful epitaph of the creator of the cake pan that no kitchen should be without. I know it's just a cake pan, but no other tube pan is quite the same as the classic Bundt®. It's an icon. It's a cake. It's a memory of a time when the cake was the safest option on a buffet table filled with cheese balls and jell-o.

To celebrate, I thought I'd make the infamous "Tunnel of Fudge" cake that was so incredibly popular when the cake mix for it was introduced. I originally tried it in my Nordic Ware 'cathedral' Bundt® pan a month or two ago, but my impatience turned the cake into a chocolate volcano spewing molten goo as Jarkko and I tried to stent the flow surging forth from the fractured cake. I tried it again in a regular tube pan with a bit more patience with much more success. Impatience is not a virtue.

The tunnel of fudgy goo in the center of the cake is a wonder of baking chemistry as a large part of the butter, sugar and cocoa are driven inwards by the heat of the pan. It's a very dense, slightly dry around the edges, and very chocolaty cake that is best enjoyed with a large glass of milk. Happy 60th birthday Nordic Ware! Forty-five million Bundt® pans are out there, lurking in the dark reaches of kitchens around the world, waiting for their owners to remember the joys of simple, lovely Bundt® cakes.

Tunnel of Fudge Cake

Serves: 16
Prep Time: 35 min (Ready in 4 hr 30 min )
Source: Pillsbury

Cake:

• 1 3/4 cups or 4.2dl sugar
• 3,5 sticks or 400g margarine or butter, softened
• 6 eggs
• 2 cups or 4.75dl powdered sugar
• 2 1/4 cups or 5.5dl all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup or 1.75dl unsweetened cocoa
• 2 cups or 4.75dl chopped walnuts (NOT optional)

Glaze:

• 3/4 cup or 1.75dl powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup or 3/4dl unsweetened cocoa
• 4 to 6 teaspoons milk

1. Heat oven to 350F/190C. Grease and flour 12-cup/28dl Bundt® pan or 10-inch/25cm tube pan. In large bowl, combine sugar and margarine; beat until light and fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually add 2 cups powdered sugar; blend well. By hand, stir in flour and remaining cake ingredients until well blended. Spoon batter into greased and floured pan; spread evenly.
2. Bake at 350F/190C. for 45 to 50 minutes or until top is set and edges are beginning to pull away from sides of pan. (Since this cake has a soft filling, an ordinary doneness test cannot be used. Accurate oven temperature and baking times are essential.) Cool upright in pan on wire rack 1 1/2 hours. Invert onto serving plate; cool at least 2 hours.
3. In small bowl, combine all glaze ingredients, adding enough milk for desired drizzling consistency. Spoon over top of cake, allowing some to run down sides. Store tightly covered.

permalink Ω 10 March 2006, Helsinki

Venus Flytrap

« Fnar! Fnar! Beware my terrifying kirkkovene! »

For those who love languages, studying them is always a rich source of amusement as well as insight to how other cultures think and regard themselves. Slang and euphemism are at the forefront of popular culture which often have meanings that you can understand even without a firm grasp of the language, but defy even the fluent or the native speaker when it comes to translating them into another language while keeping the same meaning. In this gap between meaning and translation, comedy reigns supreme.

Since today is 'National Women's Day' in Finland and we are celebrating 100 years of women having the right to vote, I'll pick one particularly amusing euphemism for the female anatomy that really doesn't translate; kirkkovene. Kirkkovene, when literally translated, means 'church boat' which is a wooden boat along the lines of a rowing scull for eight with oars. OK, so then you start to think, well, what does a cooter have to do with a boat full of pious, rowing guys on their way to church? It doesn't seem like it has a lot to do with gettin' to know a lady much, much more intimately than, say, reading the bible together.

Right, so at this point I ask Jarkko where the connection between a rowboat and a hootchie might be so he gets out a piece of paper and draws a picture that looks like a Keith Haring sketch of a happy coffee bean, looks up at me and says, 'get it?' He saw a coy allusion to a woman's naughty bits and I saw something more like a carnivorous tropical plant with an appetite for flies:

I sure hope my pookie doesn't look like that. Of course, I haven't really spent much quality time staring at it contemplating what it reminds me of. This might explain why Finnish guys seem to complain about not getting laid very often as, damn, I wouldn't get near something that looked like that either as it might chomp my dick off. That wouldn't be much fun, would it? Maybe Finnish guys could think less about wooden boats and more about flowers like Georgia O'Keeffe did to evoke the same image. Boats are supposed to be phallic. :)

Soft, pastel coloured petals suggest an inviting and friendly entity instead of the gnashing teeth of the venus kirkkovene flytrap unlesss, of course, you're into that sort of thing. :)

Pure linguistic comedy gold.

permalink Ω 8 March 2006, Helsinki

German Comfort

« Baked spaetzle ala Finland with sausage, aura cheese, pineapple, vegetables, sour cream and caramelized onions. »

Surprisingly, my baking apparently isn't deadly enough to raise Jarkko's 'bad' cholesterol levels much at all in spite of only using butter, the much demonized clogger of arteries along with eggs. Since he seemed to get a bit enthused at the prospect of my baking more savoury dishes, I thought I'd try a bit of variety since you can't live on dessert alone. I also have sworn off the company cafeteria so the leftovers make for a far more tasty and less deadly lunch. I've lost four pounds in four weeks just from foregoing lunch in the cafeteria and having a sandwich at my desk instead. I went through the line the other day and saw a vat of green gunge in a glistening pool of green oil that was supposedly the vegetarian option. It's fascinating how food services can serve food that is simultaneously swimming in oil and tasteless. It's a difficult job making food for the masses, but some try harder than others to make it palatable. I figure that if I can lose four pounds just by avoiding the deadly lunch downstairs, I could probably lose 20 in the same amount of time if I gave up bread, but that ain't going to happen.

My mother's family was from the Alsace region of Germany and I grew up loving the spaetzle she used to make for its hearty and comforting simplicity. I had a heaping plate of them in a brewpub in Prague and seriously thought about ordering a second helping. The tasty noodles are lovely just with a bit of butter and pepper, but apparently parts of southern Germany also bake it together with cheese and onions to liven it up a bit. I thought that if you can put cheese and onions in with spaetzle, why not add meat and vegetables and make it a whole meal? To give the dish a decided Finnish flair I substituted aura blue cheese for gruyere and added chopped pineapple and sausage. After an afternoon of walking across the snow-covered sea, which is like wading through a sub-zero, white Sahara in hell, it was a welcome meal that I'm sure I ate more of than was good for me, but couldn't help myself. :)

I'm curious as to why Finnish cuisine seems to lack dumplings or noodles like spaetzle. Russia and the Baltics have a reasonable variety of them as do the Germans and most of Eastern Europe. All these cultures influenced Finnish food to some degree so why didn't dumplings catch on? Perhaps I just missed them on the buffet while I was frozen in horror staring at the vat of butter mixed with caviar as I suspect there is some unwritten rule that every country must have its own national dumpling or noodle.

Baked Spaetzle ala Finland

Makes: 6 servings
Time: spaetzle - 20min, assembly - 20min + bake time
Special tools: spaetzle maker, pizza pan with holes or colander

• 1 batch of spaetzle (see recipe below)
• 350g or 12oz sausage (e.g., kielbasa) or meatballs
• 150g or 5.5oz crumbled aura blue cheese
• 200g or 7oz frozen peas or root vegetables
• 150g 5.5oz drained pineapple chunks
• 1 small tub kermaviili or sour cream
• 1 medium onion, sliced and caramelized
• salt and pepper

1. Prepare spaetzle and set aside.
2. Brown sausage or meatballs in a skillet or your casserole dish. Drain fat. Cut onion in half lengthwise. Chop crosswise into thin slices and cook in meat fat or olive oil until soft and brown.
3. Combine meat, blue cheese, vegetables, chopped pineapple, sour cream, salt and pepper in a covered casserole dish. Stir in spaetzle. Top with caramelized onions.
4. Bake at 200C for 30-40 minutes. Serve hot with blue cheese garnish and mustard.

Spaetzle

Makes: about 4 cups
Time: 20 minutes

• 4 eggs, beaten
• 2/3 cup or 1,6dl milk or water
• 1 teaspoon table salt 
• 1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper finely
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg 
• 3 cups or 7dl unbleached all-purpose flour 
• 4 tablespoons butter, room temperature

1. Beat eggs, milk, salt, pepper and nutmeg in a medium bowl. Whisk in flour to form a thick, smooth batter. Allow batter to rest for 10 minutes.
2. Heat water in medium saucepan to a boil. Set a clean bowl with a small amount of butter in the bottom nearby for the cooked spatzle.
3. (If using a spaetzle maker) Spoon a small portion (~1 dl) of the batter into the the square container and with the grater resting on the pan rim, move the metal container quickly back and forth along the grater until the dough has been pressed through the grater into the boiling water. Transfer spaetzle that float to the surface to the warm bowl using a slotted spoon or strainer. Repeat until all batter has been used. (If you don't have a spaetzle maker, you can use a pizza pan with holes, or anything else with similar holes, and a spatula.)

permalink Ω 7 March 2006, Helsinki

Medical Mystery Porn

« Avanto, a.k.a. a hole in the ice for swimming after sweating in a superheated sauna. If whisky, sauna and swimming in ice cold water doesn't cure what ails you, nothing will. »

I've recently become very addicted to the TV series House starring Hugh Laurie which has begun showing on Canal+. Aside from the soft-hearted doctor with a protective misanthropic shell, I find it ironic in this day and age, where trained medical staff are in short supply all over the world making it nothing short of a miracle to get more than a few minutes of a doctor's time, that this sort of medical mythbusters show is a popular format. Quincy worked on dead people, not live ones, so it's a bit of a new angle to focus purely on live people who have acute symptoms. In reality most medical facilities are so overworked and understaffed that figuring out the obvious is a difficult task, much less the esoteric and elusive. Porn draws you in by appealing to your imagination to fulfill your deepest desires, but only inside your head.

I've had a chronic headache for more than a month now that feels like I have a bench vice squeezing my head inwards from the temples. I went to the dentist again and had the second dentist tell me that the first dentist in the public sector must not have been very good as he noticed the problem with the tooth that had been bothering me just by listening to me describe the problem. He spackled my tooth which cured the toothache, but did nothing to alleviate my headaches. I never thought I'd ever be disappointed to be denied a root canal. I had my glasses and eyes checked just to be certain my new glasses are not causing the problem. Nope. So I watch House and fantasize about seeing a doctor who might have much more luck in figuring out what is the cause of these horrible and constantly present headaches which aren't bad enough to hide motionless in a dark room, but make me feel dazed and tired with a touch of ice pick through the back of my eyeballs. Soon I may consider self-trepanation in lieu of hoping for a cynical diagnostician to find a cure.

And while Finland is still moping about losing to Sweden in ice hockey on Sunday, Sweden also beat Finland in noting the arrival of bird flu which ultimately means that it is already here, and likely has been here since last summer, but it hasn't yet been found. I haven't seen any of the medical mythbuster shows take on the scary prospect of an avian flu pandemic likely because it is quite a bit more serious and real than losing an arm to an allergy or getting bubonic plague from a frozen indian corpse thawing in a mountain meadow. Before the presence of the virus has even been confirmed in Finland, Finnish farmers of game birds are apparently threatening to go around the forests and shoot all the wild birds in a futile attempt to protect their own stock. Just imagine how crazy and panicked things will get when people start dying. The WHO has been cranking up the tension on this potential pandemic for a couple of years now and yet it is difficult to imagine what will happen if and when it really comes to pass since the amount of information we have been told about the disease is rather limited aside from the "Where in the world is bird flu?" reports detailing which country has found bird flu in the past week. Warm weather will be here in a few months and with it all the birds who flew south for the winter. I'm already imagining birds getting shot and clubbed en masse in the streets. Are people prepared for the worst-case scenario?

permalink Ω 1 March 2006, Helsinki