A Taste of Finnish Easter
And a recipe for honey custard bun brûlée pudding
Hello and welcome to a wee Easter missive for you from The Recovering Line Cook.
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The Returning Winter
I’ve had 5 years to get used to Finnish life now and I’m convinced spring and autumn just don’t exist here. Instead, winter moves to summer like a switch flickering back and forth. Over the past few days as I’ve been writing this edition of The RLC, it has gone from balmy Nordic shorts weather to snowing once again, to something entirely summer by my standards.
They call this takatalvi in Finnish, which I like to translate as The Returning Winter.
Luckily for us the returning winter departed once again in time for the weekend (April 12/13) for us to visit an absolutely idyllic little place not from from where we live in Turku, Finland called Kylämäki.
Kylämäki is a charming little preserved 1950’s rural farm village, though the area has been inhabited since the Iron Age (with an Iron Age burial site to prove it). And, since I’m very much turning into some kind of home-smoking, culture-my-own-butter throwback in my old age, Kylamäki is something of a heaven to me.
Certainly in this weekend’s weather.
With Easter a few days away, the farm houses of Kylämäki had been set up with traditional Finnish Easter dishes and decorations. And, since traditional is often how things are done even in modern Finnish houses, mine included, that segues nicely to me telling you all about them!
Try the brown stuff, it’s delicious
The particularities of Easter in Finland have made it one of my very favourite times of year.
For one thing, the Finns have invented what I do consider (despite my enduring love of those hollow chocolate eggs, Cadbury’s Mini Eggs and Creme Eggs) the Platonic Ideal of the chocolate egg.
It comes in the form of the Fazer Mignon, an egg that is as delicious as it is singularly stylish.
What you are looking at is a real chicken egg shell, divorced of its eggy innards, and replaced with a filling of almond and hazelnut chocolate nougat. No dairy at all, which I suppose, would make it vegan if it weren’t for, well, the egg shell bit of it.
In fact, those hollow chocolate eggs aren’t a thing here in Finland at all. Instead, we fill cardboard eggs decorated with terrifying cartoon characters with candy of our choosing…
On the more esoteric end of Finnish Easter delicacies, certainly less accessible to modern palates than a Mignon, is mämmi.
This traditional Finnish Easter dessert is made from rye flour, water, malted rye, sugar, salt, and (sometimes) orange zest. It’s slowly baked into a dark, sticky pudding with a malty, slightly bitter-sweet flavour. Yes it does look rather like mud or tar, but with a splash of cream and liberally dusted with sugar, it’s really pretty fucking good. A bit like when your morning Weetabix has been left in the milk too long and it goes all soggy.
Well, if that sounds good to you, you’d maybe not hate it.
Easter witches
Another idiosyncratic tradition entirely new to me with my adoption of Finnish life, is that of the Witches of Easter.
Young children will dress up as Easter witches at this time of year, put on colourful old clothes, add freckles to their faces (?) and wrap scarfs around their heads in that babushka style. As you’d more likely expect at Halloween, these young witches will go door-to-door, carrying willow twigs with garish feathers and crepe paper attached to them, which they offer as blessings to ward off evil spirits in exchange for, yep, candy. They will recite (as my wife has tried in vain to teach me)
Virvon, varvon, tuoreeks terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks; vitsa sulle, palkka mulle! (I wave a twig for a fresh and healthy year ahead; a twig for you, a treat for me!)
I’d love to share a picture of my kids in their Easter witch garb, but in place of that, you can enjoy this one of my dog instead.
A Recipe for Honey Custard Bun Brûlée Pudding
If there’s a dish I consider very nearly perfect, it would be creme brûlée.
But only nearly perfect..
Being largely cream and sugar, the portion is always too small. To eat one means inevitably to hear the sound of a hundred taps of metal on porcelain as the eater, heartbroken at that last bite being taken, desperately scrapes the dish for any final scraps with their spoon.
The dessert I have for you today is my attempt at extending that brûlée experience. It is one part French toast, one part creme brûlée, one part traditional English bread pudding.
The “bread” element here comes in the form of leftover buns you might recognise from this recipe.
Now, normally for a bread pudding sliced bread would be used, but for my recipe I want us to keep the buns whole. I really feel doing so benefits the dish in many ways. Firstly, doing so reduces the surface area on the top of the pudding, keeping everything flatter, which makes dusting with sugar and brûlée-ing it that much easier and effective. Secondly, I find baking the buns whole makes for a more cohesive internal texture that contrasts so well with the crunchy topping.
I hope that sells it.
With the version I’ve photographed for you here, I used 4 small buns in a 20cmx20cm square baking dish.
But what I enjoy about this dessert is that, since it makes great use of left-over/stale buns, if you have fewer to use, it’s really just a good. Maybe better. Fewer buns just means less custard being absorbed leaving you with more of that delicious, free-standing creme brûlée set custard instead.
Best of both worlds.
Ingredients:
300ml milk
300ml double cream (something around 40% fat)
4 yolks + 1 whole egg
70g honey
1 vanilla pod
2 bay leaves
2-4 leftover buns of your choice
3 tablespoons sugar (for brûlée topping)
Method
Get your oven heated to 150°c/300°f (if you use fan I’d drop to 140°).
Split your vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds. Add it all to your milk and cream in a pot with the bay and heat it just to the point it starts steaming. Let this infuse for 30 mins or so off the heat.
Meanwhile, slice the very bottom of your buns off. You don’t need to take more than a few millimetres away, doing this just lets the custard penetrate the buns more fully.
Mix your egg yolks and whole egg together with the honey and then slowly add the now slightly cooled milk/cream until fully blended. Place this, along with the vanilla pod and bay, into your oven dish. Most recipes will have you sieve these out but I find they continue to add a lovely flavour dining the slow cook.
Let the buns sit in their custardy bath for 10 mins. Meanwhile, fill a baking tray, one large enough to fit your baking dish in, with a few centimetres of boiling water and get this in the hot oven. This bath of water promotes the very gentlest cooking of the custard. It’s pretty much universally used for creme brûlée recipes but only occasionally for bread pudding. But I really want this custard (and the eggs within) to cook gently so they are impossibly smooth when baked.
It’s worth the effort.
With your water bath ready and buns soaked, add the baking dish to the oven. Ideally the level of the water bath will reach around halfway up the baking dish. If it’s less it will still help, but more than half and you risk water splashing into the dish, which we really don’t want.
Let your custard bake for around 1 hour. Keep an eye on it though. If your custard looks like it is “soufflée-ing” even slightly, then turn your oven down a bit. Check the “wobble” of your custard after 45 mins at least. Back at culinary school we described the particular type of wobble we want in our custard as “violent”. This basically means your wobble returns to position with an abrupt certainty, a real haste, and certainly isn’t liquid any longer. 45 mins to an hour is a good estimate, though it will depend on your dish/oven.
Let it sit for a good 30 minutes to an hour out of the oven. We want the temperature to be that of a warming spring sun, not oven hot! Then brush a little butter on the exposed buns to help the brûlée sugar stick to them. Sprinkle both the exposed custard and buttered buns with a thin layer of sugar and caramelise with a blow torch. I do several layers of this by immediately sprinkling another thin layer of sugar once the first is browned and blow-torching again until I have a good, substantial layer of “brûlée”.
The bun will be entirely enriched with the custard and set to a pudding-like, almost mousse-y consistency. The custard it sits in is light but, topped with that dark sugar, really hits that creme brûlée spot.
It is lovely served as is, warm from the oven. However, a coulis sauce of blended and strained berries would be lovely with this as well.
This will be on my Easter table this year. I hope you have the chance to try it yourself soon as well.
Notes
Like the number of buns you use, the type of bun is also where you can make this your own. I would even suggest doughnuts, though maybe that’s a cholesterol step too far even for me. My tip is to have the flatter side of whatever bun you choose placed upwards in the custard so you can brûlée the top evenly.
You could cut the bun out entirely and this would make a beautiful, though somewhat lighter than traditional, creme brûlée. If you do so, let it chill in the fridge overnight before brûlée-ing the top and serving. This way the “set” will be even better.
Thanks for joining me this week. Coming up next from me is the second instalment in The Prep List. This one will go through what I know and love about foraging throughout the year here in the Nordics, which feels nicely timed considering everything is coming to life once again in the wild here in Finland.
If you want to get that, please become a paid subscriber.
Thanks again,
Wil
That sounds delicious and I will have a go although shhhh I don’t have a blow torch🤭
"Well, if that sounds good to you, you’d maybe not hate it."
Umm, actually it sounds REALLY good to me, Wil - any chance we can get your recipe for mämmi too 😝?