HERITAGE RECIPE: Drömtårta (Swedish Dream Cake)

My kids have been requesting that I bake a dessert--they have loved this heritage recipe series because I've been baking--something I never used to do! I don't think I've gotten any better at baking (you've seen my screw ups) but I'm learning and some things turn out really good.

This drömtårta is one of them. Holy smokes, this is amazing.

Drömtårta means "dream cake" in Swedish. And after making this, I described it to the kids like "you know, those Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls that I used to buy"? (This is really embarrassing, but before I lost the weight, I would eat a whole box of those in one binge.)

This recipe is basically a very delicious, rich, authentic, Swedish version of a Swiss Cake Roll! It's not sickeningly sweet, either--the filling is very rich, but that's mainly due to the butter. There is relatively a small amount of sugar when you compare it to the amount of butter. Because the filling is so rich, I found that one piece of this (one-eighth of the roll) was extremely satisfying--I literally wasn't even tempted to eat more.

This recipe was submitted to the Rockwood, Michigan Area Historical Society by Marion Fields, in memory of her Swedish grandmother, Gerda Svenssen.

As usual with the heritage recipes, I am going to write this out exactly as written and follow the instructions without changes or substitutions. You can read my notes for anything that is unclear. The printable version is the recipe written out with any clarifications.

Here is a printer-friendly version!

Drömtårta (Dream Cake, Authentic Swedish Recipe

Cake:
3 eggs
2/3 c. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1-1/2 tsp. baking powder
4 Tbsp. cornstarch
2 Tbsp. cocoa

Beat eggs until foamy, gradually add sugar. Beat 10 minutes. Sift together twice the salt, baking powder, cornstarch, and cocoa. Sift dry ingredients over eggs. Fold in carefully. Pour into lined jellyroll pan. Bake at 400 F for 10 minutes. Turn out on waxed paper sprinkled with sugar, leave pan on. Cool. Remove pan and paper. Spread with filling. Roll up lengthwise jellyroll-fashion.

Filling:
3/4 c. butter
1 egg yolk
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 c. confectioners sugar
1/4 c. cocoa

Cream butter with egg yolk, vanilla, and cocoa. Beat in sugar.

My notes:

This recipe was really straight-forward. I knew all of the ingredients well and had them on hand. I had to look up the size of a jellyroll pan, because I didn't know if I had one--it's a 10x15 inch size, and I was in luck!

The only thing that gave me pause was the egg yolk in the filling. I know that eating raw eggs is a no-no, so if you are concerned about that, then you'll have to find a substitution. I, however, sampled my share of raw cookie dough, brownie batter, cake batter, etc. in my lifetime, and I'm probably immune to all illness that come inside of a raw egg. (I'm kidding! About being immune, I mean--I know the risks of raw eggs.) So, staying true to the recipe, I went ahead and made the filling with the raw egg yolk.

Interestingly (to me), there is no flour in this recipe! I have no idea how that works, but it does.

Here is what it looked like, step by step:

The sifted cocoa ingredients...

Lined jellyroll pan...

The texture of the batter before adding the cocoa mixture...

After folding the cocoa mixture in...

Just before going into the oven...

I thought maybe I'd made a mistake with the filling, because it definitely didn't look like enough (what you see below is all of the filling). However, once spreading it out, it was perfect.

I'm HORRIBLE at spreading frosting on cakes because I get crumbs everywhere. I cannot, for the life of me, frost a cake without getting crumbs all up in the frosting. However, maybe because there is no flour in this recipe, the filling didn't pull any crumbs off the cake! I was still careful while spreading, but the cake stayed intact while I spread the filling.

I rolled it up and trimmed a little off the ends, so you could see the swirl...

I sliced it into eight pieces, and I think those were the perfect size. Very satisfying, but not too big.

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A Non-Post

Well, this is going to be a non-post... I have a headache and nothing I do seems to be helping. Also, I completely forgot about cooking a heritage recipe today! I picked up some groceries this morning, which would have been the perfect time to buy whatever ingredients I needed for a recipe, and I guess I just lost track of what day it is. (I hate these "non-posts" that I do sometimes, but if I skip days of writing on my blog, I'll get back in the habit of rarely writing--and I don't want that.)

Thankfully, I managed to get in my run this morning. I'll write more about that on Monday or Wednesday. I'm still working on Couch to 5K. Joey is as out of shape as I am--this is what he did as soon as we got back today (and it was only 20 minutes of run/walking):

Anyway, I am going to look through some recipes in the morning and hopefully make something tomorrow. 

Have a great weekend! 

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Friday Night Photos

I figured I'd do a different sort of Friday Night Photos today. On Wednesday, my Aunt Mickey and I went over to my mom's house so we could go through old photos and I could learn about my ancestors. I'm not so much interested in the "where did I come from?" stuff, but I am very interested in stories--I want to know all about the lives of my grandparents and great grandparents.

We just barely touched the surface of it on Wednesday, so we are going to get together again. My aunt told me to hold onto the photos; I plan to try and figure out who a lot of the people are before then. (I have a free two-week trial of Ancestry.com, so I'm trying to get as much info as I can in that two weeks!)

Even though I don't know who a lot of these people are yet, I am super intrigued by the photos! I believe they are from the late 1910's and early 1920's (my mom and aunt think that the little girl in a lot of the photos is my grandmother, who was born in 1914. So that would make sense.

Anyway, if old photos don't interest you, you'll want to skip this post. But if you find them as fascinating as I do, here are a bunch of them!

This first photo is probably the only photo that exists of my grandmother with her parents. Her dad was, in my grandma's words, "a bum". Haha! Unfortunately, he chose not to be a part of her life. She was an only child, and her mom insisted that her grandchildren call her "Aunt Jule" instead of "grandma"--apparently, she did not want to feel old!

And I'll end this post with this beautiful picture of my grandma! (Who I affectionately know as "Gobby".)

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Book Review: 'The Guest List' by Lucy Foley (and June book pick)

As you know, I'm doing a year-long Friends-themed read-athon. Each month, there is a book prompt based on a character and/or quote from the old Friends TV show. Participants choose a book to read each month based on the prompt.

The prompt for May was: "The One with the Proposal" - Read a book about a wedding.

I didn't even know where to start looking for a book about a wedding--a book that would interest ME, anyway. Luckily (or not), Amazon was right on top of that--and one of the recommended reads for me was 'The Guest List' by Lucy Foley (Amazon affiliate link). It was a psychological thriller--a genre that I love--about a murder at a wedding. It had over 40,000 reviews and was Editors Pick for Best Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense. Perfect!

Unfortunately, because it was so popular, there was a long waiting list for it at my library. (I borrow the Kindle versions of books from the library; I don't like to buy books because I rarely read them twice. I rarely have to wait for books, unless they are very popular.) Nevertheless, I added my name to the waitlist and hoped I'd get it in time. Well, I was still 26th in the queue (of 5 copies) at the beginning of May, so I had to bite the bullet and buy the book. I hoped it would be worth it!

I won't post spoilers here in case you'd like to read it, but I will say that I was totally disappointed to have wasted my money on this book. Usually, I do a book giveaway when I love the book, but I struggled to finish this one, so no giveaway this month.

I hesitate to call this a review, because I'm not going to get into all the details... but here is a short list of my notables about it:

Positives:

- It's written from multiple characters' points-of-view (I love books like that) as well as jumping around in time. (However, the title of each chapter tells you who is narrating and when it's happening, so it wasn't confusing to me.)
- It's a murder mystery, but you don't learn who was murdered (or who did it) until the last 20% of the book. That made it somewhat unique.
- Ummm...

Negatives:

- It took FOREVER to get to the point where any sort of action happens. This made it very hard for me to want to pick it up.
- It was predictable. However, I've always been good at picking up clues, even the ones that seem like nothing. So maybe it wouldn't be predictable to others.
- I found the description of the celebration to be obnoxious--SO MUCH DRINKING. I've been to a lot of weddings, but I have never seen anything like what was described of the wedding in this book. I found that it actually took away from the main points of the story--it felt like a filler.
- The story was far-fetched and cliché, in my opinion. Kind of like a bad teen horror film (and I actually like bad teen horror films, so that was probably a bad analogy!).

Without giving spoilers, that's about as much as I can say. I don't usually like to criticize things ("if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all") but since this is my opinion for a book review, I'm just being honest. This has a lot of good reviews on Amazon, though, so my opinion is definitely in the minority.

For June, the 'Friends' Read-athon prompt is:

Rachel: "I wasn't supposed to put beef in the trifle!" Read a book about a mistake or misunderstanding.

First, I LOVED that episode of Friends. And Rachel's misunderstanding with the trifle was hilarious-- I actually bought pajamas stating all the layers of Rachel's special dessert ;)

It's kind of hard to choose a book like this without reading spoilers--so I basically just had to base it off of the title or description of the book. For months, the library keeps prompting me to check out a book that I'd requested, but I've been clicking "notify me in two weeks" over and over--I've been reading other books, so I was putting it off. (It goes to the next person on the waiting list, and then the library asks me again if I'd like to check it out when it's next available... so I wasn't holding up the queue!)

It's called 'One of Us is Lying' by Karen M. McManus (Amazon affiliate link). Here is the publisher's description:

Pay close attention and you might solve this.

On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.

    Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.

    Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.

    Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.

    Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.

    And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High’s notorious gossip app.

 

Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention Simon's dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn’t an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he’d planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who’s still on the loose?

Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.

It's a young adult book, described as "Pretty Little Liars" meets "The Breakfast Club". Sounded interesting, and the title/description seemed like it fit the book theme for this month. I'll write about it when I'm done--hopefully it will be better than 'The Guest List'!

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Hide and Seek

I have had such a busy (but fun) day. This morning, I went to my mom's house, and my Aunt Mickey joined us. We went through old photos and my mom and aunt told me stories about my family (since I started the heritage recipes series, I've gotten really interested in learning about my grandparents and even a generation or two older--it's so interesting!).

My Aunt Mickey had some really amazing photos of when my grandmother was a little girl--they were taken on a farm, where I believe my grandma was visiting her grandparents. It's so cool to see what everything looked like back then! There are some photos of a couple dozen men building a barn--there are piles of trees that they'd milled into the lumber to construct the barn--and it's mind-blowing. I'm going to take photos of the photos so I can share some of them, but I will save that for another day.

Almost as soon as I got home from my mom's, I went to Brian and Becky's house to babysit Luke and Riley. Brian was on a trip and Becky had an appointment, so I volunteered to go over and sit with the kids (although, with a 2- and 4-year old, there is never much "sitting"!). Eli came with me so that he could fish behind their house.

Jerry stopped by there for a little while before going to work and we played hide-and-seek with the kids. Luke and I hid together while Jerry and Riley came to find us, and then vice versa. I think Jerry and I had as much fun as the kids did! Here is a photo of Luke and I hiding under this big spongy pillow-thing:

That's all I'm going to write for today. Little kids are so exhausting! But so cute. And man, they grow up too fast. Anyway, I want to veg with my book and then go to bed.

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Transformation Tuesday #29

Usually when I write Transformation Tuesday, I feel like it was just yesterday that I'd posted one. However, it feels like FOREVER ago that I last shared one! I think because this past week was super busy, the days felt longer. Anyway... I couldn't come up with a common theme for this week, so here is a variety of transformations--enjoy! I have a couple left in my inbox, so if you sent me one and haven't seen it yet, I'm not ignoring it--promise ;) 

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This is our rescue dog, Maggie May. My aunt runs a rescue here in Michigan. Every couple of months they pull a van-load of dogs from a high-kill shelter In Kentucky, bring them up here, and find homes for them. Maggie gave birth to 9 puppies in the shelter and lost them all due to parasites. When Maggie arrived at the rescue a couple days later, my aunt said she knew right away that she was a really special dog. She called us to come and meet her, and we took her home. The ‘before’ picture is from the ride home the day we met in 2018. The ‘after’ is a current photo.

- Rikilynn, Michigan

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Here is one of my "mini make over" projects. I liked my old valences but they didn't do anything to brighten or cheer up my living room (which is actually a big living/ dining area). I ordered this fun midcentury design fabric to fit with the vibe of the house but inject a bit of "happy". I think it does just that!

- Deb

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A few years back we were able to purchase an apartment for our family's vacations. Nobody seemed to like it very much when we bought it, it was very outdated and had very small rooms crowded with furniture. We made it work for us with a lot of paint, furniture from Ikea and decorations from home goods. I am proud to say I hauled all the decorations in my suitcase all the way from PA to Spain where the apartment is. (and no, I didn't bring the fridge and washer with me to Spain, they were not included in the sale and we had to buy new ones).

- Monica

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This is my bathroom renovation from 2018. It’s the original bathroom from 1987 when my townhouse was built and I hated it every morning! This is my first home; I had been a renter for 20 years and I’ve never redone ANYTHING EVER!! The redo has made me so happy and every morning I feel like I’m at a fancy hotel getting into the shower! The barn door has been a great feature too and I found a local woodworking guy to make it for me. 

- Stacy, Virginia 

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Rikilynn, I'm THRILLED that you adopted Maggie after such a trauma--how sad that she lost her babies! She looks so happy and healthy now. What a lucky pup!

Deb, I LOVE the fabric you chose for the valences! It's definitely something I would have picked out. It definitely brightens up the room.

Monica, I am absolutely stunned at the differences in those rooms! The kitchen cabinets are amazing--I love the colors you chose.

Stacy, I can totally understand how you feel like you're in a fancy hotel each morning--what an awesome job you did on the remodel! I especially love the shower floor.

Thank you so much for sharing! I'm down to just a few transformations left in my inbox, so please send me some this week. To submit a transformation, just send me a before picture and an after picture to: katie (at) runsforcookies (dot) com. Don't forget to include your name and a description of your transformation!

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