The Nordic Baking Book

Product Information

The recipe was really simple and I was surprised to find that I could make it with all my store cupboard essentials. It also required no equipment which was another reason I chose it as I don’t have any fancy food mixers/processors to hand. The prep work took around 30 minutes so was exactly as the recipe predicted. I had to substitute ‘soft wheat flour’ for plain flour so it’ll be interesting to see whether this has an effect on the final shortbread. I also swapped out ground ginger for cinnamon as a personal preference. Once the dough is made you simply roll them out into logs and pop them in the oven. There are, however, two issues with this book. While there are a lot of beautiful landscape photos, there are not nearly enough pictures of the actual baked goods. Some of the recipes are complicated, and it would have been nice to see some of the steps along the way, and in some cases, the completed product.

Kladdkaka is a relatively recent addition to Swedish cake culture. Its origins are a bit unclear and the accounts on where it came from are as colorful as they are conflicting," he writes. "One can also assume without going out too much on a limb that the unleavened, very gooey and soft cake of today is the result of naturally occurring cake evolution. Someone had a really good recipe for chocolate cake, perhaps a brownie one, or why not something more central European in style? The same person, in the heat of the moment, forgets to add baking powder only to realize his or her mistake halfway through the cooking process. They then remove the undercooked cake from the oven and they are astounded by its deliciousness." Speaking of yeast, for future reference, to convert fresh yeast to instant, multiply by .33. A 50g chunk of fresh equals 16.5g which I’ll call 5 tsp of instant yeast. 25g of fresh is about 8g or 2.5 tsp instant. The Nordic version of French Toast sounds like the ideal recipe for a weekend breakfast. It consists of toasted slices of bread, soaked in freshly made wheat flour batter. Then fried in butter over a medium heat before coating with a cinnamon and sugar mix. No gluten Free Recipes Bake the gingersnaps for 12–15 minutes, until they are cooked, but not dry. Once they start to brown a little around the edges they are generally done. Leave to cool on the baking sheet before moving. Chewy caramel shortbreads Kolakakor/kolasnittar (Sweden) A second issue is the way the index works. It's a bit of a mess. I had a hard time finding the Swedish recipes by name, the way things are organized. For example, if you go to the bread section, you won't find Honokaka, but you will find a generic English title of "soft wheat and rye cakes." Not helpful!

Other cookbooks by this author

This sounded more interesting than your average apple cake (well, I was sold at “cardamom”, frankly). There was no photo in the book against which to judge my effort, and to be honest I had no end of trouble with this one in my high-elevation kitchen. I found the batter to be very stiff and dry, and the first two attempts, despite some elevation adjustment, did the classic “let’s rise too fast and then collapse in the middle” thing. The third try finally came out more like I think it should. Sliced almonds on top are optional, but a nice touch, and I went a bit further and sprinkled granulated sugar on top once out of the oven. While the dough is rising, make the filling by mixing all of the ingredients together in a bowl. Step 3 This was a very lovely read. This is my first introduction to Magnus Nilsson, and he did not disappoint. He has an enjoyable writing style that is informative. This book has just about every Nordic baking recipe you could imagine. In a twist from the usual cookbooks, Nilsson includes gorgeous pictures of various locations across Scandinavia. I looked at some of the recipes I'm familiar with making, and the recipe ingredients and amounts seemed consistent. Beat the butter, sugar and syrup together in a bowl until light in colour. Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda and ginger by sifting them together, into the bowl. Beat again until fully combined. I was scouting around for something to do with some leftover marzipan (besides just eat it outright) and eggs, and found this one bookmarked in the book but not yet tried. (And then discovered it had been 8 months since I last tried something new in this book. That is undoubtedly a result of spending a lot of time the last year plus with MasterClass.) Anyway, this cake is heavenly, and not just because it is called a Lemon Moon. Moist, buttery, and very lemony. I’ll admit I broke the cardinal “make it the way the recipe says the first time” rule, poking some holes in the finished cake and drizzling limoncello in it before glazing. Definitely a keeper.

Normally with cook books, you dive straight to the index to see what to bake first, but with this book, it's essential that you read ALL of the introductory chapters. These include; Divide the chocolate mixture into 20 equal-sized portions and roll into balls with your hands. Let them drop directly into your desired coating and roll them around to coat evenly. Subsequent poking around on the internet resulted in similar recipes that seemed to bear out my amount of yeast and flour, and used beer plus malt extract. So I don’t know if there was a missing ingredient in the printed recipe that would have magically made it turn out better, or what. My second attempt was a mix-and-match with one of these other recipes, replacing the plain wort with a 12-oz dark beer (porter this time), with additional dry malt extract, and adjusting the amounts of the flours. Worked better, although at my high elevation I may have to reduce the amount of yeast slightly.Nilsson has two versions of glögg in the book, this one and a non-alcoholic version. The alcoholic version looks a lot like sangria, with sliced lemon and orange in it – if you can ignore the cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom. It has a delayed-gratification thing going for it as well, as it sits for at least a week before you warm it up and serve. I’ll return here with an update once I’ve actually sipped it. I know, this should be a wintery holiday kind of drink … but in this time of COVID-19, airport rules apply, if I want glögg in summer, by golly… I came to the Nordic Baking Book, by Magnus Nilsson, in a roundabout way. I’d been scouting around for a recipe that approximated an Eberhardinentorte, a luscious cream-filled layer cake with a marzipan coating, that we’d enjoyed at Schloss Pretzsch in Germany. The closest I found was Nilsson’s Prinsesstårta, or Princess Cake, in an article on bloomberg.com that discussed his Nordic Baking Book and published the recipe. Magnus Nilsson, the Swedish chef behind Faviken, has put together 700 recipes from across the Nordic region including the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Finland. The recipes run from traditional and well-known to weird and lesser-known. Nilsson takes the reader through how to create each recipe in an accessible way, organizing the recipes by food type for ease. It’s a big, beautiful cookbook full of great information that’s actually useable.

No other book on Nordic baking is as comprehensive and informative. Nilsson travelled extensively throughout the Nordic region - Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - collecting recipes and documenting the landscape. The 100 photographs in the book have been shot by Nilsson - now an established photographer, following his successful exhibitions in the US. I let the hard work of kneading to my work horse of a Kenwood mixer. After that, rolling out the dough, spreading it with softened butter, then dusting with castor sugar and cinnamon, filled my kitchen with spice bliss. The result was sublime. And according to Michelin star-winning chef Magnus Nilsson, who estimates that he eats kladdkaka roughly once a month, it always turns out way better at home than it would in a professional kitchen. So much here to discuss. This recipe intrigued me because it said I needed a liter of “brewer’s wort”, which apparently is readily available in Sweden. After scouting around online and enlisting the help of my friend and beer-brewer Tom, I bought a pound of dry malt extract (concentrated brewer’s wort) for a traditional dark beer. The recipe said it made four loaves, so I mixed up just a half liter of wort and started the dough…only to decide that the proportions in the recipe seemingly had some errors, as that half liter of liquid was supposed to suffice for 1.25 kg of flour (about 2.75 lbs). Uh, no way. And the yeast amount seemed to be far too little – only 1.25 tsp of instant. So too much flour, can deal with that, but what about the yeast? Certainly there was no yeast in my wort. I wound up halving the flour, doubling the yeast, and hoping the spice amounts were ok as is, and came up with a pretty acceptable pair of loaves, although I think they should have been a touch sweeter. Take #2 No other book on Nordic baking is as comprehensive and informative. Nilsson travelled extensively throughout the Nordic region - Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - collecting recipes and documenting the landscape. The 100 photographs in the book have been shot by Nilsson – now an established photographer, following his successful exhibitions in the US.Shape the dough into two logs a bit shorter than the width of your baking sheet. Place the logs on the prepared baking sheets and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden. The logs will spread out considerably during the cooking. Unwrap the chilled dough and place it on a lightly floured work counter. Shape into a long log and cut into 25 slices. Shape each slice into a little ball, then place on the prepared baking sheets, flattening them gently with the palm of your hand.

Combine the butter, sugar, vanilla sugar, cocoa powder and salt in a large bowl and work with your hands until well combined. Add the oats and continue working until they are just combined. Nilsson is a Swedish chef whose restaurant Fäviken has received abundant praise for its innovative Nordic cuisine, which uses locally sourced ingredients. He's been profiled on The Mind of a Chef and Chef's Table. In his newly published The Nordic Baking Book, a compendium of regional baking recipes, Nilsson speculates as to the origin-story of kladdkaka, which started to appear in Swedish cookbooks and magazines in the mid-1970s. Yes, some of the recipes in this book are complex, but there are actually many simple recipes too. If you are looking for the easiest starting points, I recommend: the porridge section (pp. 242-251), the muffins (pp. 366-370), most of the soft cakes section (pp. 399-435), coconut dreams and coconut pyramids (p. 324), chocolate oatmeal balls (p. 388). As for the bread recipes, I think the easiest ones are the small wheat buns (p. 115) and rundstykker (breakfast buns, p. 116). Such a large book as The Nordic Baking Book with so many recipes and information is worth paying the extra price for. There are recipes with regional variations of the classics, some with a modern twist, and Magnus's family recipes. Don't go straight to the Index Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl until fully combined, then transfer to the prepared vessel.An Icelandic classic that is eaten all year under the same name. Nilsson says the old-fashioned version only has raisins in it, but more recent recipes include both raisins and chocolate. Needless to say, I chose chocolate. It was very nice with morning coffee. I used a slightly smaller loaf pan (8.5 x 4.5″ vs 9×5) and had to bake it considerably longer that he stated, more than I’d have thought. The hardest part of this Cinnamon Buns recipe was de-seeding and grinding down the required 2 teaspoons of fresh cardamom seeds to flavour the dough, in my Mortar and Pestle. Well worth doing. Line-drawn illustrations help to develop confidence, particularly the shaping of doughs, wrapping and knotting buns.