Cakes in Finland are incredible. None of the super-sweet icing made of questionable ingredients like in the U.S., Finnish bakers use real cream and fruit to decorate their delicious cakes. My kids made this cake with a little help. It has homemade butterscotch topping, crushed pineapple filling, and fresh whipped cream.
Finnish cakes start with a rather dry cake. There is no fat in the cake base, except for the egg yolks. The dry cake base is baked in one pan and then sliced horizontally to make layers. Each layer is then moistened with fruit juice before a fruit or cream filling is added. This creates a much different texture than in cakes from the U.S. I've sometimes baked the layers in separate pans, but it really moistens best if the cake is baked as one piece and then cut.
The cake we made is a combination of several recipes from both cookbooks and the internet. We started by mixing the dry cake base ingredients: 2/3 cup flour, 2/3 cup potato or corn starch, and 1 Tablespoon of baking powder.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (175 C) and prepare a large cake pan, either by buttering and flouring it, or we like to use Crisco spray with flour. Don't use regular cooking spray, or the cake will stick.
Beat 3 eggs and 1 1/3 cups of sugar until they are light yellow and frothy, like this:
Next, fold in the dry ingredients:
Put the mixture into the prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes in the bottom half of the oven.
After the cake cools, cut it in half. On the cut side of the top half of the cake, we put the juice drained off of a can of crushed pineapple. On the bottom half, we drizzled about 1/3 cup of orange juice.
We put 1 cup of heavy cream in a saucepan, and added 1/3 cup packed brown sugar and 1/3 cup sugar. Let this come to a boil over medium heat and cook to soft ball stage (about 235 F if you are using a thermometer, otherwise put a drop in a glass of water and see if it makes a ball). Stir constantly!!
We poured the butterscotch over the cake and let it harden a bit before the kids decorated it with fresh whipped cream (sweetened with just a bit of powdered sugar) and LOTS of fresh strawberries.
The whole family agreed that this was the best cake we had ever eaten!
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