Karen and Beth Make Kransekake

Karen building the Kransekake

“Kransekake, or ring (tree) cake, is a festival tradition in Norway.  It is served at Christmas because of its tree shape, at weddings because of its impressive height and for anniversaries and birthdays because of its many layers.” –Louise Roalson, Notably Norwegian.

The McGaffeys are always up for a festival, so the building of a Kransekake has been a  Christmas tradition since I Karen and I were kids. Our mother wanted to instill the importance of our Norewegian heritage; a lifelong campaign, which included many other baked goods, Norwegian Power bumper stickers, trips to Norewegian-American cultural centers and the sacred homeland itself and a lot of politically incorrect statements about Swedes.

Ten thousand Swedes
Ran through the weeds,
Chased by one Norwegian.

    

The Norwegian cake is more like a 3-D cookie. An almond cookie dough is pressed into special tin rings and then baked.  The finished rings are popped out, or in some cases pried out, of the tin molds and stacked in a cone shape using almond icing as glue.

Kransekake tins

Tins filled with cookie dough

Uff da!

It is very unusual for Norwegians to do something wrong, but sometimes half-breed Norwegians forget the traditional ways and things don't work smoothly. If you (Beth) don't grease the tins you end up with broken pieces of cookie. In this case it is better to eat the broken bits while you make and bake new rings; trying to "glue" them back together rarely works - remember you're only 1/2 Norwegian.

A few ungreased tins resulted in
delicious, but unsightly crumbled bits

The cake is traditionally decorated with small paper Norwegian flags and icing swags using a pastry bag. Some cakes have a lot of layers and are very tall.

  

Since we only had one paper flag and no pastry bag, we opted for a holiday theme and decorated with small Christmas ornaments.

 

There are a number of recipes for Kransekake and the icing. I think there are three key elements that make the cake great:

1. It has the texture of a cookie, not a cake.
2. The cake and the icing have an almond taste as a result of using almond extract.
3. The icing is stiff and hardens within the hour, not soft and creamy.

We found the right cake and icing recipe this year to meet the criteria above and then some.

Recipes

Another UFF DA! 

Recipes coming soon, I think they are still packed up in one of the boxes I brought back from Milwaukee.