Hello everyone! Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Between work and school, Trace and I have just been extremely busy these last couple of weeks. To make up for not posting last week, we ended up making two recipes this week.
Viking in origin, cake was originally called kaka in Old Norse. It’s definitely not the most appealing word, considering it sounds like another word (caca) which is typically usedwhen describing something gross. Although debatable, I personally think this reason alone could be why we call it a cake today. Whether saying cake or kaka, both terms refer to the same thing: a baked flour confection sweetened with sugar or honey.
Cakes go back a long way in history which has allowedpeople today to have access to to the many different ways one can make a cake. Cakes didn’t start out round and spongy, they were actually more like a loaf of bread that was just sweetened with fruits and honey or other spices. Gingerbread cakes and fruitcakes were the most common during the early middle ages. It wasn’t until the late middle ages going into the renaissance that large, puffy cakes covered in frosting became more common. One thing that is certain though is that Europe and North America later on have always been at the center of cake making and baking.
The recipe for blod kaker is one I found on Pintrest. While it isn’t a terrible recipe, it definitely had some flaws which required some quick thinking on my part to make sure the kaka would in fact become a cake.
This is the recipe I found on Pintrest. While it doesn’t sound bad reading it quickly, when you break it down, you can see that there is no mention of oil or butter, milk or water, or what temperature to cook the cake. We already had the oven preheated to 400 for the other recipe so this was fine and the half-hour marker seemed to work okay as it turned out, not burnt, in the end.
When mixing the ingredients as stated though, you run into a problem. You can keep mixing and mixing but everything stays grainy and dry because there’s just not enough liquid to make an actual batter. I feel this might be because it says to use 5 egg yolks and not 5 whole eggs. Instead of using up anymore eggs I decided to throw in some water and oil into the mix. This ended up doing the trick and we had a smooth batter we could dump into the cake pan. I would say about 1 T. of oil and about a cup of water was used. Just enough to get the mixture smooth but not so much that it became watery.
Although it’s hard to tell from the picture, the cake ended up turning out fairly thin, maybe rising only a couple of inches in the pan. This could be because I used a spring-form pan but I think it had a lot to do with not using whole eggs. The cake is supposed to be a filled cake, which in this case means cutting it into two or three layers and putting a filling between those layers. But, with it being so thin, I wasn’t really able to make it filled.
Instead of following this recipe again, I would probably follow one that will help the cake rise more. While I feel this recipe does fit with the time, as it is thin and more coarse like 13th Century cakes supposedly were, the recipe itself was somewhat vague and requires the person following it to know a bit about baking to get it right.
Despite the flaws, the cake itself actually tasted really good. It wasn’t too sweet but sweet enough to sate a tooth. Instead of putting the raspberry filling we bought in between the layers as originally intended, I ended up mixing the filling with the whipped cream and frosted the cake with that. It gave the cake a nice dark pink, almost maroon, color and complimented the cake flavor well.
My phone died before I could get a final picture of it all frosted so this will have to do:
Clipart kaka is yummy
That’s all for right now but I’ll be sure to post the other recipe on here later today.
Thanks for reading!
-Val and Trace-
