On my little excursion to Denmark recently, I had a day in Helsingør (the home of the castle where Shakespeare set the play Hamlet) where it was open to me to just, you know, go to Sweden for cake.

I admit, it was meant to be lunch, but when I got on the ferry (also called Hamlet!) for my 20 minute ride to another country, I got hungry and had a Swedish sausage-inna-bun, putting paid to the whole idea of lunch-lunch.

On the ground in Helsingborg (after probably going through the wrong entry lane at the ferry terminal where I didn’t see a single border agent and therefore got no stamp in my passport), I went on a cake and photography raid. I’m such a modern day Viking. I wound up at Fahlmans, which is a very distinguished Konditori, with a clear testimonial being a permanent queue of 10 or so would-be patisserie plunderers at the counter. I knew I was on to something. And when it came time to pick what to order, it was a no-brainer. Princess Cake. I’d known about Princess Cake for a while. When you are a cakeophile with a Pinterest problem you tend to find out about things like this. Martha Stewart had a gorgeous tiffany-blue one on her website. My IKEA cookbook Fika has one in there too, and my brand new (purchased in Copenhagen) book “Swedish Cakes”  by Jan Hedh (which also had great things to say about Fahlmans) called it the most common cake in Sweden (though I’m sure he meant it in a good way).

After all this press, I was keen to find out about this quintessentially Swedish Cake. And Fahlmans didn’t just have one option – they had two. There was a green marzipan version with an apple filling, and a pink one with a jam filling. Tricky. I knew that the green marzipan was traditional but hadn’t heard of apple inside. I went with jam.

It was good. Light, creamy, kind of like eating a vanillary cloud. Well worth a 40 minute round trip to Sweden.

Upon my return to antipodean shores, and after the conclusion of Pie in July, it turned out to be my (official) turn to make morning tea at work. Guess what I made?

Here is the journey in pictures.

Princess Cake (Prinsesstårta)

Makes a 23 cm round cake. The assembled cake will keep, refrigerated, for 2-3 days. The sponge can be frozen (tightly wrapped) for a month.

Sponge cake

ingredients

3 eggs
130g caster sugar
62g plain flour
62g potato flour
1 tsp baking powder

mixing

Prepare a 23cm round  cake pan by lining the base and sides with bake paper as shown.

Beat the eggs and sugar together until very light and foamy. Sift the flours and baking powder together and sift over the egg mixture. Fold in carefully with the back of a large metal spoon, taking care not to deflate the mixture. Pour into the prepared tin and gently level the surface. Drop the tin a couple of times to help release any large bubbles trapped in the mixture. Bake the sponge cake at 175 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Do not open the oven during the baking process. When the cake is done it should be well risen and slightly pulled away from the walls of the tin. It will still “whisper” slightly, and if you press the top gently with a finger it should make a soft hissing noise like collapsing foam.

Cool the sponge cake in the tin, then remove and peel off the paper.

Vanilla Cream

ingredients

2 egg yolks
150mL milk
150mL whipping cream
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp potato flour

4g leaf gelatine
200mL whipping cream, extra

mixing

Combine all the ingredients apart from the gelatine and extra cream in a medium saucepan. Mix until smooth. Cook the mixture over a medium heat, stirring constantly with a wire whisk until the mixture thickens and only just begins to boil. Remove from the heat. Soak the gelatine in cold water for about 5-10 minutes while the custard is cooling. Squeeze the excess water from the gelatine and add to the still warm custard mixture. Stir the mixture until the gelatine is completely dissolved. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.

Whip the extra cream until stiff peaks form. Add about half a cup of the custard mixture to the cream, then fold this mixture into the custard (you can use a whisk if you like, but use slow, gentle movements).

You are now ready to assemble the cake – you need to work relatively fast on the first part of the layering because the temperature of the whipped cream in the Vanilla Cream will start to make the gelatine set!

Assembling the Princess Cake

ingredients

300g good quality marzipan
1/2 cup good quality raspberry jam
300mL whipping cream
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 tsp vanilla powder
2 tbsp icing sugar
a little green food colouring gel and a little pink food colouring gel
20g good quality dark chocolate, optional
icing sugar for dusting

assembling

Remove about 40g of the marzipan from the bulk of the block and colour it pink. Colour the rest a pale green. Roll out the green marzipan between two sheets of baking paper until it is about 3mm thick and about 38cm round. You will need to flip the papers over and peel the baking paper off the marzipan several times during the rolling process to help the marzipan to roll out evenly. Keep the marzipan covered until needed. Use the pink marzipan to make a flower – the traditional topper for a Princess Cake. To make a rose, make a three dimensional teardrop shape about 1cm high, then take pea size pieces of marzipan from the bulk marzipan and press out with your fingers into thin ovals about 2.5cm in diameter. Wrap each oval in an overlapping manner around the central teardrop piece. As the flower gets bigger, let the “petals” fall open more. If your fingers get sticky, wash and dry them well and coat lightly with a little coconut oil. Sit the rose somewhere safe to let it air-dry.

Cut the cold sponge cake into three even layers – they should be about 1 cm thick. Place the bottom layer of the sponge cake onto a round cake card and spread with the raspberry jam. Spoon about a cup of the Vanilla Cream over the jam and spread out evenly. Top with the middle layer of cake. Spread the remaining Vanilla Cream over the middle layer, mounding the cream in the centre of the cake slightly. Top with the top layer of cake. Refrigerate the cake for at least half an hour.

Whip the cream, salt, vanilla powder and icing sugar until stiff peaks form. Spread a little around the sides of the cake, and the rest over the top of the cake, again mounding the cream in the centre. Smooth as evenly as possible.

Lift the marzipan round by rolling it loosely onto the rolling pin, then carefully unroll over the cake, trying to ensure that it sits on the surface with an even drape on all sides. Gently ease and flatten the ruffled edges towards the sides of the cake and trim with a sharp knife. Use the trimmings to make three leaves for the rose.

If you want, you can leave the decoration at that and just dust the Princess Cake with icing sugar before serving.
Otherwise, you can pipe a pretty boarder of melted chocolate onto the cake. The following instructions is a very rough guide to tempering chocolate. You can do it without a thermometer if you need to, but the result won’t be as predictable. The aim is to make the chocolate crack nicely and have a glossy finish with none of that ugly white “bloom” caused by fat setting at the wrong temperature (chocolate looks simple but is very complicated!).
Chop the chocolate finely and melt half of it over hot water. When the chocolate is completely melted (about 48 degrees), tip the rest of the chopped chocolate in and stir until this has melted as much as it can (the chocolate will be about 27 degrees). Then, carefully heat the chocolate and stir until the chocolate is just smooth. Don’t let the chocolate get warmer than 32 degrees.
Load the melted chocolate immediately into a prepared piping bag (paper ones are best – see the step by step pictures below).

Snip off the tip so there is a 1-1.5mm hole. Pipe a border around the cake. Don’t worry too much if it looks shaky or might not be perfectly even, if you look closely at my border you will see it has both of these characteristics (I’m hopelessly out of practice!) yet the finished cake still looks pretty gorgeous.

Yum. So decadent, you wouldn’t want to eat this every day – yet my colleagues were all surprised how light it was. Best eaten with a nice cup of coffee on the side.

In Sweden.
Enjoy!xxx