Mjuka pepparkakor and kinuskikaka

Finnish caramel cake

Finally, a couple of recipes from the charming Fika by Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall that I can’t rave about, though both were still pretty tasty.

1. According to Brones and Kindvall, soft ginger cookies (mjuka pepparkakor) are “nice and thick, most often spread with a layer of butter and topped with a slice of cheese.”

Spicy cookies with butter and cheese? Weird! Just my kind of thing.

The batter was easy to mix, rich with molasses and vigorously spiked with black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Baked, the cookies are substantial, dry, and extremely spicy. They aren’t too delicious, which is to say, you can eat one with pleasure, feel satisfied, and stop. It’s a feature, not a bug, the built-in stopping mechanism, one we undervalue here in America where foods are salted, sweetened and/or infused with fat to the point of rendering them totally irresistible. Everyone is always trying to engineer the ultimate chocolate chip cookie, the ultimate burger, the ultimate fish taco. I believe this is one reason we’re a chunky people.

There was nothing ultimate about these ginger cookies. They were middling delicious, if that.  I spread them with butter and added some little slices of cheddar cheese, wrapped them up, and took them with me on my errands yesterday. They kept well for a few hours in the glove compartment of the car and were eaten in a San Rafael, California parking lot at two in the afternoon. Hardly ideal lunch/fika conditions, but those ginger cookies made a very satisfactory, enjoyable, and cheap meal.

That said, I won’t tell you this is a culinary experience you absolutely must pursue because it’s so obviously not. 

Diet food? In a way, yes. 

2. The Fika caramel cake (“sweet and decadent and not for the lighthearted”) is made using a Finnish recipe and I served it for Sunday dinner. The cake itself is a dense, delectable, marzipany confection that you’re supposed to blanket with caramel sauce. To make this caramel sauce, the recipe instructs you to simmer cream and brown sugar for 30 to 40 minutes, but I hadn’t simmered the sauce for 15 minutes before it grew alarmingly dark and seemed on the brink of burning. I took it off the stove and let it cool a bit before pouring it over the cake where it hardened into a granitic slab of shiny toffee that couldn’t be cracked neatly with a heavy knife or at all with human teeth.  Everyone ended up with a mangled slice of cake and jagged shards of rock-hard caramel on their plates. I doubt this is how it’s done in Finland; a few adjustments to the caramel sauce recipe might yield better results. Next time, I’d cook the sauce very, very slowly.

Today’s fika was a peanut butter smoothie from Jamba Juice using the gift card they gave me at the oral surgeon’s office. My poor mouth had a gruesome experience this morning, but I did as I’d resolved and requested the nitrous right off the bat rather than waiting until I was about to have a panic attack. I always go in wanting to seem strong, but real strength means asking for what you want and need immediately. With nitrous, it really wasn’t that all that bad. Like something hideous happened to my mouth, not to me.

They told me I can’t exercise for 48 hours. In every cloud, a silver lining.