Swedish Visiting Cake

 

It’s month two of Around The World in 12 Dishes and we are visiting Sweden (see yesterday’s post on Swedish Midsummer). This works for me as we are trying to arrange a house swap in Sweden next summer, so it gives me a good opportunity to poke around on Pinterest and see what I can find. I confess that, despite knowing several Swedes, I know very little about Swedish things beyond Ikea. If you asked me to name Swedish food, I could have come up with:

Ikea meatballs

Gravadlax

Pickled Cucumber

Ummmm.

See? Actually, I can add Princess cake to that list, but only because a Crown Princess was recently born in Sweden and a mother at school, who is Swedish, told me that she had made the traditional cake to celebrate the occasion. Princess Cake was my first thought when I was looking for recipes for the Challenge- I assumed that most other people would go down the meatball route. But have you seen what’s involved with a Princess Cake? Don’t get me wrong, those things are beautiful, but there’s a good reason there hasn’t been a need to make one for the past 30 years!

Which sent me back to the drawing board, by which I mean the Pinterest board. And before you could say ABBA, I found the perfect cake: Swedish Visitors Cake. It is a dream to make, and both The Little Misses enjoyed eating it, so I’m confident I’ll make it again! I adapted it, as I had an excess of pears to use and a lack of almonds and have printed my adaptation of the original below:

Swedish Visiting Cake  Recipe by Dorie Greenspan Baking: From my Home to Yours, via Bella Eats

Ingredients
125g  unsalted butter, melted and cooled
200g  sugar
Grated zest of 1 lemon
2 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
200g plain  flour
2 pears, peeled, cored and sliced

Method
Preheat oven to 180C. Grease a springform 9 inch cake tin.

Mix lemon  zest into sugar with your fingers until sugar smells warm and lemony.

One at a time, whisk in the eggs until well blended, then add in salt and vanilla and almond extracts and whisk further.

Carefully fold in flour.

Finally, fold in melted butter.

 

 

Arrange pears in the base of the cake tin, then cover with batter, smoothing down with a spatula. Sprinkle the top of the cake with a teaspoon of sugar.

Place the tin on a baking sheet and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until golden and pulling away slightly from the edges of the tin.