Krumkakes: or, Culinary greetings from Norway!

Today, we are taking our Norwegian wafer iron to its home turf! Or at least, we're culinarily bringing it to its home. I'm not about to jet across the ocean with a waffle iron in my carry-on. Though I would if I had a few buckets of money weighing down on me.

Krumkakes 4 eggs 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour (if desired, replace ½ cup of the flour with whole-wheat) ¾ cups butter, melted Splash of vanilla Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted) Spices to taste (cardamom,* lemon zest, cinnamon, etc) Lightly beat eggs. Mix in everything else in order given. Cook on a krumkake iron brushed with melted shortening (it really does work better than cooking spray). When done, form into a cone shape by rolling around a wooden spoon handle or (they also make wooden cones specifically for this) as soon as you get them off the iron. When serving, fill with whipped cream or fruit. *I am informed by others that these must have cardamom in them.

For those who know as little as I do about basic Norwegian phonics, I should note that you don't pronounce "krumkake" like "crumb cake." If Google Translate is to be believed, you pronounce "krumkake" like this:

I was showing off my pizzelle iron online (as one does), and soon someone said they had a krumkake iron very much like it. This soon turned into several people showing pictures of the various working antiques living in their kitchen cabinets. (It was a good day.) I mentioned offhand that I had a krumkake iron but had never made its namesake recipe, nor did I have a recipe to make. Someone promptly responded with this, saying it came from their "great-grandma's nursing home treasury."

We decided to start the recipe by cleaning out the pantry. I don't know where this stuff came from, but no one has wanted to use it.You're supposed to mix it with sour cream and use it as a fruit dip. No one around here ever has the patience to set up a presentational fruit tray.

Those ornamental sugar crystals look pretty, but no one wants gritty waffles. So I pulverized it. The resulting powder tasted like powdered raspberry candy, which is not surprising since the main ingredients are sugar and dried raspberries. 

Not all of my friends were impressed by my use of natural fruit flavoring. One person asked me "Are you making food for crested geckos?"

When I was reading the directions, I thought this looked functionally identical to the pizzelle recipe. So I asked the person who sent it: are you supposed to beat the eggs into a cloud of foam as one does for pizzelles, or do you just stir them in? The answer: No, just whisk them for a few seconds.

Without the extended egg beating, our krumkakes were as easy to mix as brownies. You just put everything into the bowl one ingredient at a time, and stir after each. After about a minute, we had some absolutely delicious batter. It was so runny that I looked into the near future and saw a hot ruinous ooze coming out the sides of the iron. But since I know nothing about Norwegian cooking, I figured the batter was probably as it should be. I therefore resisted the temptation to add more flour to correct it.

Having made our batter, we put it to the side so we could clear the counters, heat up the iron, and melt the shortening for brushing onto it. Speaking of shortening, I'll never know why the shortening the clings to the side of the bowl never melts in the microwave.

If you look around online for a pizzelle iron, you inevitably bump into the term "krumkake." A lot of people sell "pizzelle or krumkake" irons, which made me think they were two names for the same thing. I've seen some people say that Italian pizzelle irons have deeper ridges than the shallow grooves cut into Norwegian krumkake irons. In other words, a pizzelle iron makes waffles, a krumkake iron makes engraved cookies. But other people can't see the difference between the two. As for myself, I'm just happy to make the recipe this iron was meant for.

During the few minutes we spent getting everything ready, our krumkake batter hardened into an unexpectedly firm cookie dough. Instead of pouring it out, you could scoop it with a spoon and it would (mostly) hold its shape. You just never know when you'll be glad you followed the directions instead of acting like you're smarter than whoever wrote out the recipe.

And so, in very short order, we arrived at the big moment: getting batter onto the iron. At this point, I would like to thank whoever wrote up Fante's pizzelle webpage, because it has the most helpful instruction I've ever found for making these: "Use a knife to push off dough from spoon." That one sentence, inserted as a parenthetical note on their recipe handout, has spared me from constantly wiping sticky batter off my fingers every time I've made anything on a stovetop waffle iron.

Our first krumkake was nicely cooked, but it turns out that I shouldn't have placed the batter on the center of the iron. It didn't spread backwards at all. So when making krumkakes, you might want to put the batter towards the back of the iron instead of right in the middle of it.

Our recipe tells us to "roll around spoon handle or cone while hot, and fill with whipped cream or fruit." Some quick searching told me that you can buy little wooden cones for wrapping these on. But since I don't have one, I used a spoon handle instead. It turns out you need to get these things wrapped up the instant you get them off the iron. Because the krumkake seemed so fragile, I let it sit for a few seconds to firm up. As a result, the cake cracked when I tried to roll it up.

Our second one, which we rolled up as soon as it fell off the iron, came out much better. But in full disclosure, I must note that the edges were singed.

But with happy practice, we eventually got it right. Behold the tubular perfection! I later found out that these are supposed to be shaped like cones, not pipes. But at least my inauthenticity was photogenic.

At this point, I had the idea of trying to get a more cone-like shape. As you can see, the krumkake cracked even though I had already racked up several minutes of experience in making them. 

The krumkakes may look like it fell apart at the fissure as soon as I tried to move they, but they proved surprisingly sturdy.

The person who shared the krumkake recipe also sent this helpful photo of rolling them on a spoon handle. It turns out that with a little practice, you can get cones instead of cannolis even if you don't have a cone to roll these onto. (And if your first attempts end up torn and malformed, they'll still taste good.)

And so, instead of rolling my krumkakes around the business end of the spoon, I tried using the handle. After all, the recipe says to use the spoon handle (even though the wide end of the spoon seemed more logical to my non-Norwegian self). Counterintuitively enough, you get better cones with the narrow end of the spoon than with the end that is a flared out. But in full disclosure, I had a lot of malformed krumkakes before I got it right.

After getting our cone-rolling technique right, these things were just so darned pretty.

 

And of course, I wanted to make a few of these as flat cookies just to see what they're like. Anyone following along at home should know that if you're not rolling your krumkakes up, you can't hide when they end up a bit off-center like this:

However, even if your cookies fall short of aesthetic perfection, anyone who complains has either inadvertently offered to make them for you, or has just announced that they don't want cookies.

As I was tasting these, I thought that a bit of whole-wheat flour might go well with the flavor. I'm not trying to pretend we can turn krumkakes into health food-- even if you put fruit in them at the end. I thought that like Mrs. Kahn's Banana Cake, a bit of whole-wheat flour would add a nice flavor undertone. And... it does. The krumkakes with a little whole-wheat flour came out more substantial and just a bit nicer. 

We don't have any cream (whipped or otherwise) in the house, and I didn't think to go to the coffee shop and try to cadge any earlier in the day. And so, we went with fruit instead. Blueberries and raspberries have been one of our more routine splurges. It's easy to say that we need to cut the budget on snacks and chips, but it's hard to argue in favor of eating less fruit. 

However, if I wanted to put fruit in my krumkakes, I would need to find something different to wrap them around. I had to cram and stuff the blueberries in. You might think that the cookies cracked when I was trying to insert fruit with brute force, but they're sturdier than I expected. 

I was telling a friend of mine that I was finally making the recipe that my krumkake iron was meant for. He said that I must put cardamom in them. 

 

I've never purchased cardamom in my life, and it cost $10 per shaker at the store nearest to me. And so, the next time I was in a city with a large-sized Asian supermarket, I went to the spices and found cardamom for a lot cheaper. Naturally, I had to open the bag and smell it as soon as I got into the car. I didn't recognize the scent at all. Given how often cardamom shows up in pumpkin spice or in gingerbread or other autumnal foods, I had expected to be like "Oh, that spice!" But this is apparently my first cardamom ever.

I would later learn that there are two main types of cardamom: black and green. I purchased the black kind. When I tried to look up what I had bought, I found that lot of websites have the same copy-pasted paragraph about black versus green. After I managed to machete my way through all the search-engine-optimized garbage, I gathered that apparently you don't generally use black cardamom in sweets or desserts. But although my black cardamom was apparently incorrect, I couldn't return it without driving several hours. And so, I proceeded to make these with our inappropriate cardamom, and they came out just fine. The cardamom added an almost-burning intensity to the other spices.

As for the taste? These are so much better than the short list of ingredients suggests. I thought that they would be identical to pizzelles, but they're sturdier instead of delicate. In terms of texture, they remind me a lot of waffle cones. You can probably use them as waffle cones if you're a little careful when you scoop ice cream in them.

 

Apparently these are traditionally made around the holidays. But for those of us who have no cultural connection to Norway, I would actually say these are better in the springtime or the summer. You're supposed to put fresh fruits in them, and winter just isn't the best time for that. Anything with whipped cream and fresh fruit is best in the summertime. And the cookies themselves are very light and crisp, which is always nice in the summertime.

Also, you can make a batch of these without starting the oven. If you use an electric krumkake iron, you may not even feel your kitchen heating up. And so, as springtime ensues, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend bringing a bit of Norway into your kitchen.