I’m very excited to have a recipe to share with you today, from the brand new English translation of Bakeland: Nordic Treats Inspired by Nature, by Marit Hovland. When Greystone Books got in touch and very kindly offered me a review copy, I jumped at the chance to check this book out. Bakeland was originally published in Marit’s native Norwegian, and it’s a book I spotted on the shelves of my local bookstores while living in Norway. I’m thrilled that the English translation will make this book accessible to a much wider audience, because I find it to be a rather unique book among the man ..read more

Somehow, in my years of baking – before, during, and after living in Scandinavia – I had never before made the classic Scandinavian Christmas cookie: pepparkakor, as they’re known in Swedish (spelled pepperkaker in Norwegian), which are thin, crisp ginger snaps. When my friend Liv invited me to take part in a Christmas cookie exchange, I saw the perfect opportunity to remedy that situation. I mentioned in my last post here, months ago, that we were getting ready to leave Norway. It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realize how settled you feel in a place until you leave it; in September we ..read more

Hello, July! It took a long time for summer to come to northern Norway, but by mid-June Tromsø was finally fully green again, with wildflowers growing out of every nook and cranny they could squeeze themselves into. The rare warm, sunny days here are such an incredibly special treat, and I’m grateful to have enjoyed a few of them (in between the more frequent chilly, grey, and rainy ones). With those warm summer days in mind, I had a recipe published last month in the Norwegian American for chilled overnight oats. I love oats, and berries are one of my favorite things about summer, but when t ..read more

If you’ve been reading this blog for a little while, you may know that I occasionally contribute recipes to the Taste of Norway section of the Norwegian American, a bi-weekly paper based out of Seattle that is America’s only remaining Norwegian-American newspaper. This paper has been published continuously (under a few different names over time) since 1889, and now they need our help. If you, like me, are interested in cultural heritage and Scandinavian-American culture, I hope you’ll read on. If you’re unfamiliar with the paper, you can read a little bit about it on their ..read more

Now that Easter is approaching, what better time to write about a treat traditionally consumed on Shrove Tuesday? (I’m poking fun at my own tardiness here, *wink, nudge*.) I first learned about fastelavnsboller, or semlor as they’re known in Swedish, from a Sweden-loving friend who was visiting Seattle and wanted to know if I knew where to find any. I hadn’t heard of semlor, so I sadly didn’t have any advice, and I also had no idea at the time that they were associated with the period before Lent – although today, in largely secular Scandinavia, they are often consumed throughout the first fe ..read more

It’s been a little quiet on this blog but this time, it’s not because I haven’t been baking! It just turns out that a lot of things fall by the wayside when you’re also writing a master’s thesis. So I’m working to catch up on a few things! One Saturday in February, my friend Anna came over for some tea and knitting in the afternoon. We’d both been feeling the winter blues a little bit, but these thumbprint cookies from Fika, called syltgrottor in Swedish (or “jam caves”), definitely helped raise our spirits. Fruit and jam types of cookies were never my favorite growing up – I wante ..read more

  This past fall, Beatrice Ojakangas published her new memoir, Homemade. Unsurprisingly, it falls into the combined memoir/cookbook genre – one I have enjoyed in the past, though upon reflection I haven’t actually read too many of them (when you find your favorites it can be hard to move past them, you know?). Nonetheless, I was really looking forward to this one when I first heard about it. For those who don’t know, Ojakangas has published an astoshingly diverse array of cookbooks throughout her life, including the one that led me to start this blog: The Great S ..read more

My latest piece for the Norwegian American is out now, and this one’s special: it’s a joint piece with my friend Christy! We worked on this piece together for the annual gift guide, so our recipes are for simple gifts from the kitchen. My contribution is a quick recipe for a staple in my kitchen, lingonberry jam, and Christy provided recipes for homemade vanilla sugar and the slightly more unusual cardamom syrup (which I’m dying to try). You can find the recipes for all three right here ..read more

There’s a very narrow window here in northern Norway when the grocery stores have Norwegian apples available, rather than the (pretty sad) imported ones we find throughout the rest of the year. My husband and I were delighted to find that we could find domestic Gravensteins at the store when this window opened last year, so when it came around this time, I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to bake an apple cake. I wanted to try another recipe from Fika, so as I thumbed through the pages I decided on the fyriskaka, which they describe as a “classic apple cake.” The recipe ..read more

Hello after a long unintentional pause! As usual with this blog, I didn’t mean to go so long without posting, but life sometimes has other plans. I broke my shoulder just a few days before my last post in March, and that definitely derailed my year to a degree – but I’m beginning to get back into old routines again and have even done a bit of baking this weekend. More on that soon, but first I figured I’d mention two pieces I wrote in the past few months for the Norwegian American (previously known as the Norwegian American Weekly). The first is a recipe: A simple fennel slaw for su ..read more