Karhunvatukkalumi and Pääsiäisleipä

Yup, continuing The Challenge to cook two Finnish meals this week and I'm only on Tuesday! Like yesterday's amazing Åland Island Pancake (which I've been grazing on all day!), today's recipe is another Finnish dessert - well, two of them in fact - in short, one needed egg-whites and so it made sense to find another recipe to use the yolks up on the same day, right? As for what I'm eating today - some of yesterday's chilli con carne with some rice again! And I'll be finishing the last of the pancake too.

Karhunvatukkalumi ain't something you'll find in the recipe books because I bastardised it and Google Translated the name! The original recipe is mansikkalumi or "strawberry snow" - mansikka being "strawberry" and "lumi" being snow. I elected to use blackberries (karhunvatukka) and hence came up with the name karhunvatukkalumi ("blackberry snow"). Snows are a popular Finnish dessert and I'm reliably informed by Anja Hill's The Food and Cooking of Finland that any soft winter berry can be used, as can apples. Essentially, this is a kind of de-constructed Eton mess, in that the French meringue is present, but not actually cooked! As part of this whole challenge to myself, I'm also trying to eat things I don't normally eat and blackberries are in that category - now, I like them, particularly in a crumble, but I just don't think to buy them, let alone cook with them. Handily, it was two 150g packs for £3.00 (saving of 25%!) in Sainsbury's yesterday and so they were the cheapest option, as this recipe needs 300g, of course. I was going to just make Anja's recipe with switching her strawberries for my blackberries, but I felt sure I could add something - maybe juniper berries - so I dug out my copy of The Flavor Thesaurus (a very kind anonymous gift that someone sent to me from my Amazon Wishlist about 18 months ago - I've no idea who it was but they enjoyed my Twitter feed and sent it to me as a gift, which was lovely) and was informed that mint and rose go well with it - now, I never need an excuse to use roses (or other flowers) in cooking and rose and mint together is a very favourite combination of mine and reminds me a lot of Moroccan food - so I went ahead and added them - having tasted the end-product, I can say it was absolutely the right decision! You can make this and chill it for a few hours and then eat it fresh or you can freeze it and eat it frozen at a later date - do be warned it has raw egg whites in it and so it's not really suited to the very young, very old, pregnant or infirm - though UK eggs are pretty clean these days. I had to literally dust off my Russell Hobbs food mixer (as I had not used it in an age!) to beat the egg-whites - it's not something I could physically do by hand any more - I found even stirring the liquid ferment at the start quite hard work to be honest with my wrist-brace on. Ehlers-Danlos fucks you up in so many stupid ways.

Pääsiäisleipä is a bit of a mouthful but translates simply to "Easter bread" - yes, I know I'm a little bit early but bugger it - it looked delicious and I just had to try it to use up the egg yolks from the above dessert. I took this recipe again from The Food and Cooking of Finland and didn't really make any major modifications other than increasing the amount of raisins and cardamon used and adding a some rosewater - well, it just goes so well with cardamon and lemon that it seemed churlish not to add some! Oh and I did use mixed peel rather than candied orange peel as I could not find any plain peel in the shop. The basic recipe is a variant of the bread found in Karelia and has Russian origins and is somewhat similar to the Russian кули́ч (kulich). The recipe in the book actually calls for a kulich pan for baking it (which is basically a Russian cake pan that looks like a coffee tin and indeed, lots of people do just use a coffee tin!) but the photos in the book clearly show a Bundt pan being used and I happened to have a 9" Bundt pan from Ikea (the two-in-one Drömmar ["dreams"] pan which has a 2.6L standard base and a 2.3L Bundt base inside a 9" ring) that I've never actually used - perfect! This is not a fast recipe to make and needs not one, not two but three proving-type incubations before baking - so you're looking at about 5-6h from start to finish and you can't over-incubate those stages so you have to be pretty careful to be around the house during them. The icing in the original recipe states to use water but as I'd got a flayed lemon lying about from the zest needed in the recipe, it made common sense to use the juice from that and make a lemon icing - I added a drop of food colouring to it to cheer it up a little bit and glazed it in both yellow and white.

Karhunvatukkalumi - blackberry snow
(Serves 4)
(Total cost = £5.58; £1.40 per person)
1/2 cup water
1 tbsp powdered gelatine (this is about 2/3rds of a 12g sachet)
300g blackberries (crushed with a fork)
250mL double cream
4 egg whites
90g golden caster sugar
1 tbsp rosewater
4 fresh mint leaves

Put the water into a double-boiler and heat over hot water on the stove. Sprinkle the gelatine over the surface of the water whilst it's still luke-warm and heat with occasional stirring until the gelatine has completely dissolved and then take the double-boiler off of the pan and set to one side to cool a little.

Meanwhile, empty the water out of the pan and put about half of the fruit in and heat with stirring until the mashed fruit comes to the boil, at which point pour the gelatine solution into the pan, remove from the heat and stir very thoroughly.

Pour into a bowl and chill "until syrupy" - the original recipe said this would take 2h, but after 2h I had a pretty solid blackberry jelly - if this happens, just mash it with a fork into a stiff purée - it makes no difference at all!

Whisk the cream until it holds in soft peaks and set to one side.

Whisk the egg whites in a very clean, dry, grease-free bowl, slowly adding the sugar every 30s or so until you have a stiff French meringue that holds in soft peaks.

Add the rosewater to the blackberry mixture and shred the mint leaves by hand and add those too and mix by mashing with the fork. Add this mixture to the French meringue with constant stirring. Next, with gentle stirring, add the remaining half of the crushed fruit and then fold in the cream, ensuring the mixture is fairly homogeneous.

If you can resist eating it straight out of the bowl, put it into serving bowls and chill for 2h and then eat immediately, or, do as I did and pack into freezer-proof containers and freeze for serving frozen at a later date.

Pääsiäisleipä - Easter bread
(Makes about 12 servings)
(Total cost = £7.76; £0.65 per serving)
720mL 1% fat milk (I used UHT as always)
2 sachets of "fast acting" yeast (this is the type with nutrients added so that it grows more quickly)
7 tbsp luke-warm water
800g plain flour (you may need a further 50-100g
225g unsalted butter (cut into slices)
4 egg yolks
200g golden caster sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp cardamon pods (crushed in a pestle and mortar immediately before use)
3 tbsp candied mixed peel (4:1 ratio of orange to lemon peels in the one I used)
1 lemon (peeled with a potato peeler and the pith scrapped off of the inside of the zest, which is then cut into 1cm pieces; juice needed for the icing)
2 tbsp rosewater
90g raisins
75g chopped almonds
200g icing sugar
3 tbsp hot water
1 drop egg-yellow food colouring
1 drop pink or red food colouring

Begin by heating the milk over a very low heat until just warm to the fingertip. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, slake the yeast and 4 tbsp of the warm water until homogeneous and to this, add about 2 cups of the warmed milk. Leave the remaining milk to one side to cool at room temperature until needed. To the yeast mixture, add 200g flour and blend with a fork until smooth. This now needs to be left for 45 minutes in a warm place for the yeast to start to ferment and wake up - I set the oven at 50°C for about 15 minutes and then turned it off and put the bowl in the oven with the door open. It bubbles up quite a long way but stays quite sloppy after this initial ferment.

Take it out of the warm place and set to one side whilst you melt the butter in a small pan and separately beat the egg yolks into the caster sugar until smooth and evenly coated.

Knock-back the fermented flour mixture by stirring briskly and mix in the egg-sugar mixture until no lumps of it remain. Add the salt, cardamon, lemon zest, raisins and almonds together to the mixture and mix briskly again to distribute, followed by adding the rosewater and the melted butter - at which point it will look like a troublesome oil-slick and you will probably assume (as I did) that it's all gone horribly wrong and won't ever right itself - fear not!

Mix in the remaining milk and finally add 600g flour in about 3-4 instalments, ensuring it's thoroughly mixed in each time. Anja suggests at this point you will have a "stiff dough" - not in my book. It was more a sticky, very soft dough - so I added another 50g or so of flour to try and thicken it up - this didn't really work and it stayed really quite sticky indeed but I did manage to kneed it somewhat - which you then need to do - I did this in the bowl as it was so sticky, but it did managed to kneed it for about 5 minutes around the bowl and it did get smoother, but remained very sticky. After it has been kneeded, it needs to prove for 1h somewhere warm - this time, I used the top shelf of the airing cupboard as the immersion was on.

Grease a Bundt pan (9" diameter) with butter and sprinkle the base with a little more caster sugar and leave until the dough is ready. After the proving is over, knock the dough back with your hand - mind rose a lot but didn't really knock back all that much - and transfer to the cake pan. You can apparently use a few large kulich pans instead, but I don't have one - I think a large standard 10" cake-pan would work perfectly well. You now need to prove it again in the pan for 1h - mine went back into the airing cupboard!

About 15 minutes before the end of the second-proving, pre-heat the oven to 180°C (160°C for fan-ovens) and lower the shelf to the middle and put a baking tray under it - I did this "just in case" and turned out to be a smart move as there was some mess! The bread will rise a LOT in the oven, hence the need to lower the shelf! When the second-proving is over, put the pan into the oven and bake for about 1h, or until a skewer comes out clean and the top is golden brown - I found the top was quite a dark brown before the inside was fully cooked to be honest but I took it out of the oven at exactly 1h. Cool in the pan until completely cold and then remove from the pan carefully.

To make the icing, blend the 100g icing sugar with the juice from the lemon and a drop of yellow colouring and separately blend 100g icing sugar with 3 tbsp hot water and 1 tbsp rosewater and a drop of red or pink colouring. You can drizzle them over the finished bread but I painted the top with the lemon icing and the outside and inside of edges with the rose icing as I wanted them to set like a glaze overnight and help keep it a bit more fresh.