(Runebergin torttu resepti)

For me, the favourite day of the year is, of course, 6th February, the day I was born. Second favourite? 5th of February because it was the birthday of another great Finn, Johan Ludvig Runeberg. I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth and on Runebergs day, we have this seasonal delicacy called, to everybody’s surprise, Runeberg’s Cake. If I was to name my favourite cake, this would be it. Looking at it, it doesn’t look or soundlike anything special but the secret is that it’s made with rum. In my case, lot’s of it.

Ingredients:

200 g butter (soft but not melted)
2 dl sugar
2 eggs
2 dl plain flour (I actually use whole meal)
2 dl bread crumbs
1 dl ground or crushed almonds
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cardamom
1.5 dl rum

Topping:

Raspberry jam
icing sugar
lemon juice

Method:

Whisk butter and suger into a foamy mixture. Add eggs while continuing to whisk.

Mix dry ingredients together and add to rest of the dough. Mix well. I add a dash of rum at this point if the dough feels dry.

Normally you’d use a specific cylinder shaped cup-cake tin to bake these but I normally just bake them a loose base 22 cm round cake tin. Easier to share.

Bake for 15-20 minutes at 200°C.

Once out and cooled down, moisten the cake with plenty of rum. You should probably water-down the rum just a little bit. Do this either with water or apple juice.

Decorate with raspberry jam and icing.

By the way, this was the cake I made last summer for the Big Lunch cake competition so it’s award winning. You should try it!

Two things that saved my neck yesterday:

1: I was working on a recording audio and we had just written the script in TextEdit from notes gathered on A4′s. Only 20 minutes to finish, with absolutely no possibility to extend the time (for reasons I can’t explain here). You can probably see where this is going even before it started? So my MacBook craps out on me when pressing ‘stop’ after about five recordings. No mouse, no keyboard, no response and no time to waste. Reason why I almost panicked, was that of course I didn’t remember to save the text document after creating it. That was the major issue, it would take about 15 minutes to re-write the document, so it could be very tight to get it finished.

I was literally blinded with joy when TextEdit launched and automatically recovered my document. Blinded. I had no idea auto-recovery actually works on non-saved documents, too. Brilliant.

2: The other occasion I was saved in was at The Finnish Church in London. Not in the conventional way as you might expect from being in a church but by replenishing my coffee supply. As you know I go through a lot of coffee and about a week ago I ran out. Since moving to the UK about 5 years ago, I’ve maybe bought three or four packs of regular ‘British’ filter coffee and thrown all of them away. Rubbish. Buying it from a normal supermarket was not an option.

If you happen to be in South London or have some time to spend, I’d recommend visiting the church. They have a small shop selling Finnish products like coffee, rye bread and tons of different candy, a cafe and a proper Finnish sauna. The shop, by the way, to me is a bit like visiting Ikea Food Market is for a Swede. Except the produce is not aftermarket and 2nd class. You do pay for quality.

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In other news today, Hannes Heikura, the photojournalist, won the Finnish news photo AND the photographer of the year competition, again. Have a look at his work here. He’s good.

–kristian

As a side note before posting my year 2007 finale article, I’d like to mention that I’m writing it in Café Europa in Tampere. The cup of coffee pictured below costs about the same as the cheapest cup of crap anywhere in London. For this place, it’s also the cheapest. It’s from Guatemala and it is absolutely beautiful. This adds to the short but growing list of reason to move to Finland. At the moment I’m handling the lack of good coffee in Britain quite badly; quick calculation reveals that I transport roughly 22 kilograms (yes, kilograms, not pounds or ounces) of the drug in my luggage when flying back and forth per year.

–kristian

I just broke the glass jug for my Moccamaster coffee maker. This has made me really depressed. If you don’t know, Moccamasters are the best coffee makers there are. They’re also next impossible to get in the UK (see here). This is what I’m now left with (see below). At least I don’t have to make coffee for anyone else now.

To cheer myself up a bit, I decided to do something I’ve been dreaming of doing for quite a while now. Check it out:

I feel so pure and clean now.

–kristian