Kransekake
This was one of the “bakes” I was looking forward to making since we started this journey. I had given the pans to Aubrey as a Christmas gift and we still hadn’t made one. Our knowledge of the kransekake was based on The Great British Baking Show and The Holiday Baking Championship. We watched as the contestants rolled or piped their dough into the molds. Some went over board on the semolina and others chose not to use it at all. Our favorite part of the episodes was when the contestants turned out the rings and then struggled to try to find the correct sizes (now that we’ve made it, we know there is a better way) and half of them failed.
The kransekake is a traditional Danish and Norwegian confection, usually eaten on special occasions such as 17th of May and New Year’s Eve. In Denmark it is exclusively eaten as part of the traditional New Year celebration. The word literally means “wreath cake”. Most cakes have 18 rings that are stacked on top of each other with each consecutive ring being slightly smaller than the previous ring. The ingredient list is about as limited as it can get. If you are gluten free and/or dairy free, this cake is perfect for you!! It was such a pretty dessert we decided it needed to be made when we were having company. It was a great centerpiece for our Easter table!
We used Paul Hollywood’s recipe for ours and made minor substitutions. We used 1/4 tsp. almond extract and 1 tsp. vanilla. We also used colored candy melts for the “frosting” because I don’t care for royal icing…it’s too crunchy as far as I am concerned.
Ingredients
- 500g ground almonds
- 500g icing sugar, sifted
- 4 egg whites, beaten
- 1 tsp almond extract
- oil for greasing
- semolina for dusting
- For Decorating
- 3 egg whites, beaten
- 600g icing sugar, sifted
- red food colouring paste
- red edible glitter
- green edible glitter
- silver edible glitter
Method
- Tip the ground almonds and icing sugar into a large bowl. Add the egg whites and almond extract and mix to a dough with your hands. Cover the bowl with cling film and chill for a minimum of 2 hours but preferably overnight.
- Lightly oil the kransekake moulds and sprinkle with semolina, shake off the excess semolina. Preheat the oven to 375F. Divide the dough into 6 pieces. Divide each of the 6 pieces into 3 pieces of increasing size, one small, one medium and one large. Roll each piece into finger thick lengths and sit them in the moulds. Join the ends by squashing them together.
- Repeat with the remaining pieces of dough until you have 6 moulds each containing 3 circles of dough. Bake for 10 mins, until golden. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the metal moulds until hardened then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
- For the icing, whisk the egg whites in a large bowl until frothy. Add the icing sugar to the egg whites, a spoonful at a time, and fold in. Beat the icing until it is very stiff and white and stands up in peaks. Spoon half of the icing into a separate bowl and colour red with food colouring paste. Spoon into a piping bag fitted with a small plain writing nozzle. Spoon the white icing into a separate piping bag fitted with a small plain writing nozzle.
- To assemble the Kransekake, sort the cooked rings into sizes. Pipe a few dots of white icing onto the base of the largest ring and stick it the centre of a serving plate. Pipe the white and red icing in a zig zag pattern around the ring. Sprinkle with red, green and silver edible glitter.
- Place the next size ring (working from the biggest ring to the smallest ring) on top of the iced ring, (The piped icing will help it stay in place.) Pipe red and white icing around the ring in a zig zag pattern and sprinkle with glitter. Repeat the process with all of the rings, working in decreasing circles until you have a tower of 16 iced glittery rings.
Our Experience
This was another recipe that we didn’t feel we should try sugar substitutes on our first try. We made the decision to cut back on the almond extract and add vanilla. Our first bake, the bakewell tart, was very strong on almond flavor and the majority of our testers didn’t like it at all.
We measured the almonds and sugar directly in the bowl using the kitchen scale. We usually prefer to weigh our ingredients and the recipe included the weights which made it very easy. We used almond flour while some recipes called for blanching and grinding the almonds. Once again, after making the bakewell tart, we gained an appreciation for store bought almond flour.
We’ve had a lot of recipes lately that have used portions of the eggs. Today, we used the whites instead of the yolks. We have a lot of egg whites in the freezer but weren’t sure if they would work as well as fresh in this recipe so we didn’t risk it.
There were a lot of dry ingredients for such a small amount of liquids. It eventually gets incorporated, but it took awhile. I still think I would have used the paddle attachment had the recipe not specified the dough hook.
Paul Hollywood hadn’t said to use the dough hook. (I’m still not sure he was correct.)
That’s it…almond flour, sugar, egg whites, and some extract. We tasted the raw dough and thought it was pretty sweet.
It was a lot like Play-doh. We tried to pipe it into the molds but it was just too thick….we were going to have to roll them out by hand. We didn’t measure out the dough as specified in the recipe. We just took scoops of dough and started rolling. That might be why we had so much left over, but, when they cooked in the molds, they puffed up and would have been touching if they had been any bigger.
The molds need to be greased and dusted with semolina. We didn’t have semolina and we remembered someone on The Holiday Baking Championship used cornmeal, so that’s what we went with. We used Pam olive oil to grease the pans.
We saw recipes that said the dough could be piped, but this dough was far too thick to do so. One blogger suggested slightly heating the dough to help with piping but we didn’t want to risk cooking the eggs and reluctantly started rolling dough.
smaller one, you could just use a fraction of the grooves.
The molds are each slightly different in size but the rope used to fill the groove is always the same diameter.
Once the cakes are cooled it is time to assemble. We recommend organizing the pans from largest to smallest. Starting with the largest ring, take the outer ring out, flip it over and use that ring for the base. Attach it to the plate using your icing (whatever kind you are using). We decorated each ring before putting the next one on. After you have decorated the first ring, take the outer ring from the next largest pan, flip it, and center it on top of the largest ring and decorate. Continue going down to the next size pan and use the outer ring first. Once you’ve gotten the outer rings assembled, go back to the largest pan and use the middle ring. Continue going down to the next size pan and use the middle ring. Once you have used all of the middle rings, go back to the largest pan and use the center ring. Continue going down to the next size pan and use the last ring. Doing it methodically like this will ensure that you have the correct rings with little effort.
We selected pastel colors for Easter/Spring and alternated the colored icing on each ring. We put the candy melts in bowls and cooked them in the microwave for a few seconds until they were melted. We then spooned the candy into zippered sandwich bags and cut the tip off to allow for piping.
The kransekake is eaten by pulling the layers off, breaking them, and sharing with others. The top few layers could be eaten by one person but once you get past those, they are a lot bigger than you think and there’s just something about sharing that makes it more than just a dessert.
We had quite a bit of dough left over so we rolled them out and cut them into 3″ cookies. After a comment was made about them looking like fingers, I decided to have a little fun. 🙂
(It puffed up in the baking so nobody thought they were eating a finger).
What we liked.
Since we served this to a group, we had more than 5 taste testers this week! Altogether, it received a 15 out of 15 (we sent the bottom 4 rings home with family for some who couldn’t make it, so possibly higher than that).
First, there’s the look. Who wouldn’t love such a festive dessert? Changing the frosting and decorations based on whatever you are celebrating would be really easy. It would be such a pretty Christmas tree with a dark green icing. It could also be made smaller (a full size one will feed a lot of people) just by making fewer rings.
Next, the cake was so unique texturally, in fact, I would have called it a cookie. It was crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. It was almost addictive. I’ve only eaten one macaron in my life, but this cake reminded me of that. Another blogger compared it to a meringue texture (I’ve never had a meringue). I was surprised that it wasn’t too sweet because the dough was quite sweet. We were really glad we changed the majority of the extract to vanilla since we had so many people eating it. Almond flavoring is strong and not an overall favorite. The vanilla candy melts added a creamy sweetness that the royal icing would have never produced, so, we were glad we made that change as well.
What we would change.
We have decided that we will make more of these and probably won’t change a thing! I think we will spend more time thinking about our decorations next time. Many of the examples we saw online had flags, flowers, candy, and other items stuck to the sides. It would be really fun to decorate as a group.
I may try to make it with some sugar substitutes. It serves a lot of people, so we may also try to make a smaller one in the future depending on where we are serving it.
What we learned.
The construction of this was a fun experience even though we were assembling it quickly on Saturday before we had our Easter dinner (everybody leaves early on Sunday so we eat on Saturday). We figured out how to assemble it quickly without the issues we saw the contestants on TV have.
Until next week, Happy Baking!