Strawberry and cream buns

It's Shrove Tuesday tomorrow, so I made these traditional Finnish Shrove Tuesday buns. I try to make them every year for this occasion, even though I don't bake much otherwise.

Ground green cardamom seeds give the buns their distinctive flavour and the buns are filled with lovely whipped cream and strawberry jam. Ever since my childhood I have loved these buns, they are just so tasty. This year my buns fell a bit flat. I might have put too little yeast or maybe the milk wasn't warm enough, so they became a bit more dense. They were still good, but didn't maybe look quite as appetising.

I have posted my standard recipe for the buns before, so please just have a look here, if you are interested in baking them.

Have a nice week!

Your VegHog

Pulled Oats – Nyhtökaura

A wonderful new sustainable protein product suitable for vegans and vegetarians was launched in Finland earlier this year and it has become a real sensation. It's Nyhtökaura aka Pulled Oats by Gold & Green. The product resembles pulled pork with the texture, consists of oats, broad beans and peas and it's sold as a cooled product from the fridge. There are currently three pulled oat flavours available: nude / kaffir lime sesame, ginger / tomato, smoked paprika, leaf parsley. The texture of pulled oats is pleasant, quite chewy and not too dry. The product itself doesn't require much preparation and through quick frying can be added to all sorts of dishes.

As most of my readers aren't from Finland, I thought I'd write about this product to introduce it. It may be a while yet before they break into the international market. It's very popular in Finland at the moment and normally sells out from supermarkets within a few minutes from stocking the shelves. It seems that the production can't quite keep up with the demand yet. Pulled oats have also boosted the sales for other veggie products in Finland and helped people to consider more vegetable based diets, which is a very good trend, as Finnish diets are still much too meat centric these days. Due to the high demand and rarity I wasn't sure beforehand if I'd be able to taste the product at all during my holiday, but quite unexpectedly I was lucky enough to have a several pulled oats experiences and can therefore report back to you. Gold & Green's web page is also in English, so do have a look, if you want more information.

I tried pulled oats for the first time when eating out in Helsinki in a veggie restaurant called OmNam. I had their pulled oat burger and sweet potato wedges: Brioche, pulled oats with OmNam BBQ sauce seasoned with orange, vegan hoisin mayo, fresh tomatoes, pickled cucumber and kale slaw and wedges of organic sweet potato, vegan smoked paprika mayo. Both were really excellent dishes and the restaurant was very cosy located a little bit hidden in an inside yard of a housing block. Pulled oats suit veggie burger dishes very well and there are so many possibilities to make different burgers and breads.

Already the next day I got the chance to taste pulled oats again as festival street food and this time it was cooked by the manufacturer themselves. Gold & Green had a stand at the Flow Festival offering some great vegetarian and vegan dishes. I had a Nordic rainbow bowl with dill & lime pulled oat, beetroot quinoa, vegetable chips, sweet peas, root vegetable coleslaw, red kale & sunflower dip, corn & seed cracker. It looked absolutely stunning and tasted the same way. I loved the currants in the salad and could eat this dish all day long!

 

There was another company serving pulled oat dishes at the festival called Fat Tomato – Nordic Twist. I had their Rootz Reiska, a flatbread with pulled oats, half dried plum tomato sauce, homemade cheddar, butternut squash, roast garlic, chanterelle mushrooms and wild thyme. It was another brilliant dish that I would happily eat every day and another successful pairing for the pulled oats. Both portions were incredibly colourful and cheerful and I'm really happy that I chose them.

 

After these tastings I got even luckier and found a few packets of pulled oats in a supermarket so that I could do some homecooking with it. From the tomato, smoked paprika and leaf parsley flavoured pulled oats I made Rye breads with tomato sauce, chanterelles and pulled oats. These were very tasty and filling breads and I got to use my self foraged chanterelles in them.

From the nude version of pulled oats I made a Reindeerless fry, a dish also recommended by Gold & Green transforming a classic Finnish dish to a veggie version. The pulled oats were just fried with some onions and served with potato mash and lingonberry jam. It was a nice and very Finnish style dish.

I really hope that these pulled oats will make it internationally. There can never be enough interesting vegetarian protein products and these happen to have an excellent texture, are versatile and very easy to use. I took one packet with me back to England and will post soon what I cooked with it.

Have you heard of pulled oats before or even been able to taste it? What do you think of it?

Your VegHog

Strawberry and cream buns – Laskiaispullat

It's Shrove Sunday, so it's the perfect timing to make these traditional Finnish Shrove buns that are mainly eaten on Shrove Tuesday and on the days before it. I love these strawberry and cream buns and my partner is also quite happy to get them. He might want them more often than once a year...

My standard recipe for these buns can be found here. I followed it otherwise, but used double cream for the filling and added some sugar nibs on the top of the buns before baking. It's quite traditional to add coarse sugar on Finnish buns.

Have a wonderful week!

Your VegHog

Lime and white chocolate cake with green jellies + blog anniversary

Vihreät Kuulat, these green jelly spheres on the cake, are a product that probably every Finn knows and every other Finn gets every year for Christmas. I read on Wikipedia that the manufacturer Fazer makes 17 million green jelly spheres every Christmas and there are only about 5 million Finns... so yes you may get the picture that they are pretty popular. By the way, they are suitable for vegetarians.

Ever since I saw this recipe for Finlandia lime and white chocolate cake on Fazer's webpage, I wanted to make it. The jellies on the top of the cake just looked so delicious and all other ingredients sounded nice too. I only never had the Finlandia jellies around, which are just like the green ones, but in different colours and flavours. Now that I got a box of green jellies for Christmas (what a surprise!), I thought that this is the perfect timing to bake this cake. I wanted to make a cake to mark my 3^rd blog anniversary anyway, which happens to be today! Yayyyy, thank you so much for reading the blog, commenting, liking and sharing my posts and photos on social media. I really appreciate it so much, you are very close to my heart and I can't thank you enough! 

A blog anniversary gives me more motivation and a new boost for blogging and I have loads of recipe ideas and bookmarked recipes that I want to cook this year. I can also announce full of excitement that I will be co-hosting the Eat Your Greens vegetarian blogging challenge every other month taking turns with Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table who is the creator of this great event. We hope to see many lovely vegetarian and vegan recipes made with green vegetables, so please take part, as it's so much fun. See the link for more details on how to participate.

Now I'm almost going to stay on the subject of eating greens, but in a bit different way (Please note that this is not my entry for Eat Your Greens!!). So for this cake I pretty much followed the recipe by Fazer, but wanted to translate it for you here. Have a look at how it was made.

Ingredients

150 g soft butter

1,5 dl sugar

3 eggs

3 dl wheat flour

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp vanilla sugar

2 limes (zest + juice)

100 g white baking chocolate

For the topping:

Couple of cups icing sugar + about 3 tbsp lime or lemon juice or water

6 green jellies

Method

Melt the white chocolate in a water bath.

Grate the lime zest finely and press out the juice.

Whisk the soft butter and sugar into foam. Add the eggs to them and keep whisking.

Mix the wheat flour, baking powder and vanilla sugar in a separate bowl and add them to the whisked mix.

Whisk it all into an even dough and pour it into a cake form lined with non-stick baking paper.

Bake at 180 C for about 35-40 minutes and let the cake cool down.

Once the cake has fully cooled, you can continue with the decoration.

Mix icing sugar and juice or water together to make icing and pour it onto the cake.

Cut the green jellies into quarters (or some other jellies) and place them on the top of the cake.

Serve it with a good coffee and enjoy!

Your VegHog

Happy Independence Day Finland!

Today Finland has been an independent country for 98 years (can't wait for the big celebration in two years, maybe I should even go there then!). This year I haven't prepared anything special for the independence day, so instead I decided to share 10 Finnish recipes that I really like and have posted here before. I'm linking back to the original recipes. These are quite typical Finnish dishes, made from simple ingredients, honest and tasty, food of my childhood. It's a mix between sweet and savoury dishes and I hope that you'll enjoy this post.

Sweet things first:

Nutty apple pie – All kinds of fruit and berry tarts and pies are very typical in Finnish baking. This one is a Finnish apple pie recipe, very tasty with some added nuts and almonds. 

 

Chocolate and peppermint balls – Sweet chocolate balls covered with peppermint crush made from Finnish sweets.  

Yule porridge – A traditional Christmas porridge, similar to rice pudding, served on Christmas Eve with cinnamon, sugar and a hidden luck bringing almond. 

Laskiaispullat – These super tasty strawberry and cream buns are traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday. 

And then the savouries:

Potato pies – These potato pies are similar to the traditional Karelian pies, but filled with mashed potato instead of salty rice pudding. I absolutely love both savoury pastries and should make them much more often. 

Pea soup – A great soup made from dried peas and cooked slowly for ages to achieve one of the most comforting vegan soups for this season. 

Carrot and spelt rolls – The addition of grated carrots to rolls is a very nice thing and this is just one of the basic recipes for such rolls. 

Mushroom and pearled spelt cabbage roulades – Cabbage roulades can be surprisingly nice, especially filled like these ones with pearled spelt and mushrooms and they aren't even too fiddly to make.  

Vegetarian cheesy oven sausages – This is Finnish 1980-1990s working class grub at its best, veggie sausages filled with cheese and then baked, best served with potato mash (of course this is only the vegetarian version of the original recipe). 

Finnish swede casserole – A traditional Finnish Christmas casserole made from mashed swede. This would be a great addition to any vegetarian Christmas feast. 

 

Your VegHog

Oat biscuits

This is one quick and easy baking recipe when you feel like making a small batch of something sweetish to gnaw on. These are also great to take to work as a snack or just have with some coffee or tea. This is quite a Finnish style oat biscuit, thin yet little chewy in the middle and crispy around the edges. Here's the recipe.

Ingredients

50 g butter

1 dl sugar

2 dl oat flakes

1 tbsp wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 egg

Method

Melt the butter and sugar together in a pan. Take off the heat and mix in the other ingredients quickly to make an even dough.

Place about 1-2 tbsp of the dough for each biscuit onto a baking paper. Leave enough space between them, as they will spread in the oven.

Bake them in the oven at 200 C for about 5-8 minutes. And all done!

Your VegHog

Sibelius

This year is the 150^th anniversary of the birth of the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (8.12.1865–20.9.1957). This means that there will be plenty of Sibelius themed events in Finland throughout the year. Sibelius is the one who composed the masterpiece Finlandia, probably his best known work (have a listen here). 

A beer by Vakka-Suomen Panimo was released this year to mark the occasion and Lasse Rantanen's illustration of young Sibelius is proudly presented on the bottle. I tasted this celebratory beer and here are my impressions of it.  

Sibelius Beer 4,5 %

• Foretaste with grassy barley and hints of tangerine
• Powerful toasty, caramel malts with bitter hops
• Fresh, orange citrus aftertaste

This is a good beer to be enjoyed this year and beyond, if you can only obtain it somewhere. I'm lucky enough to be able to visit Finland in a few weeks again, so I'm hoping for some nice Sibelius tasting times.

Your VegHog

Belated buns

 

Laskiaispullat are special seasonal buns or cakes, only this year I missed the season by a couple of weeks. I was in Bruges on Shrove Tuesday, so didn't have enough time even before the trip to make these. Traditionally these buns are made in Finland (and variations in other Nordic countries) for Shrove Tuesday and a few days around it, and also eaten on the Sunday before.

The special flavour in the pulla dough itself comes from ground green cardamom seeds and the clue is in the filling: strawberry jam and whipped cream. They are so tasty, so why not make them more often than once a year? They are not too much trouble either.

If you fancy some, have a look into my recipe from last year that makes around 10 buns. I followed that same recipe again this year. Serve them with coffee, hot chocolate or even tea and enjoy! They are wonderful to be shared with friends.

Your VegHog