Tere!

There is a “holiday” that I celebrate (?) every year since I spent one year as an exchange student in Ireland, which is

“Pancake Tuesday” (Shrove Tuesday).

It’s always Tuesday as you might know. If you google “Pancake Tuesday 2020” or something like that you’ll get the specific date.

I used the word “celebrate” but it doesn’t mean they or we do something very ultimately special. In addition, I’m a Buddhist. (Apparently Pancake Tuesday isn’t a culture from our country.) As its name suggests, however, we/they eat pancakes.

They were selling pancakes at the restaurant (I mean, school restaurant) of DCU (Dublin City University) in Ireland. I really loved and still can never forget how tasty the pancakes with lemon and sugar were!

By the way, in Ireland “pancakes” normally look like crepes. Some people (especially the Japanese) may imagine fluffy huge pancakes like Hawaiian pancakes when hearing the word. I thought that too so I asked one of my Irish friends who was with me at that time and he said:

Because it’s a cake made in a pan

Totally makes sense.

Since then, I always eat pancakes on Tuesday around in the end of February. Even in Estonia too.

BUT!

In Estonia it’s different. Technically speaking this “Estonian” culture came from Sweden but anyways “Pancake Tuesday” doesn’t exist in Estonia but still they have  “Shrove Tuesday”, which means they don’t eat pancakes on this day and is called “Vastlapäev” in Estonian.

As mentioned earlier, this “Estonian” culture is said to have come from Sweden so there’s an alternative dessert replacing with pancakes, which you would often see at cafes in Estonia around from the beginning of February and it’s called “semla” in Swedish. In Estonian, however, it’s called

Vastlakukkel.

It seems that the dessert which they have on Shrove Tuesday is vastlakukkel and in regular days is just kukkel. Maybe. Not sure. Just my linguistic guess. But still you can get one if you say “kukkel” at a cafe or bakery. They would understand.

This year, in 2020, I made some resolutions which brush up my skills, one of which is “to make sweets that I have never made yet” so I decided to enjoy both cultures (Irish and Estonian Tuesdays) and make both pancakes and kukkel for this year’s Pancake/Shrove Tuesday.

1. Upgraded my regular (?) pancakes

I’m pretty sure almost all of you wouldn’t get surprised but flour products in Estonia are cheap from my point of view because Japan has a rice culture and the flour products are pretty expensive. We have a variety of cake flour products, okonomiyaki flour and takoyaki flour like cup cake flour or pound cake flour available in Estonia. We also have Japanese pancake flour called “hotcake”.

Anyways, who cares about the Japanese pancake flour here. This time I bought Vilma’s pancake/crepe flour. Usually you don’t need Google translate for the flour products in Estonia because they have image procedures on the side of the package, which are quite understandable. Vilma’s pancake flour is not exceptional.

If you buy this product, as seen on the side of the package, flour : water = 1 : 2 so I made pancakes with flour 100g + water 200ml. It’s a crepe dough but it doesn’t require the time to rest. Instant cooking.

After mixing the flour and water, just heat the pan and put some oil and then the dough. If the pan is enough warm the dough instantly gets bubbles on its surface so just turn over the pancake. You may fail to get a perfect pancake slice at the first time but it doesn’t affect its taste.

Of course if you eat it with nothing, it just tastes like the dough.

In the old town in Tallinn, there is a pancake restaurant called “Kompressor”, whose pancake with mushrooms and cheese are so tasty. Creamy. So tasty!

Then

One day I talked about this pancake to my Estonian friend and she told me that it’s easy to cook this sauce. She told me the recipe so I made it for my special pancakes for this year’s Pancake Tuesday.

Ingredients (Possibly for two)

• Small onion x1
• Relatively big mushrooms x3
• Sour cream 250g
• Butter (as much as you wish)
• Salt (as much as you wish)
• Pepper (as much as you wish)
• Dill (as much as you wish)

How to

1. Mince the onion and slice the mushrooms around 5mm thick.
2. Heat the milk pan (over medium heat) and put some butter.
3. Add the minced onion before the butter gets burnt.
4. After the onion gets half cooked, add the mushrooms and fry altogether.
5. As everything was enough cooked, heat the pan over low heat and add the sour cream. 
6. Pay attention not to burn the cream and add the salt, pepper and dill (which you may exclude) and stir it.
7. If you think it too creamy you may add some water or if you think it less creamy than you expected you may add some cheese.

This is it.

It’s easy isn’t it?

In some countries like Japan it may be hard to find sour cream though…

By the way, the cream would get separated in the end if you heat the pan too much so be careful. Heating the leftover in the microwave oven is also not recommended (as I experienced) not for the taste but for the looking. It’s better to have it with pancakes right after cooking.

2. Made Estonian sweets, vastlakukkel !

And!

As mentioned earlier, I wanted to celebrate (?) Estonian pancake Tuesday called Vastlapäev so I made vastlakukkel! I referred to this recipe. It’s in English and since I made some changes according to ingredients available in Estonia, I’m introducing my recipe. (It takes time and there are lots of procedures but it’s not that difficult. Though it may not enough convincing because I like baking sweets….)

Ingredients

• Buns
  • Milk 500ml
  • Dried yeast 25g
  • Regular flour 800g (divide into half and sift them before the use)
  • Sugar 3 Tbsp
  • Salt 1 tsp
  • Grounded cardamom seeds 1 tsp
  • Butter (or baking margarin) 200g
  • Egg x2
• Filling
  • Heavy cream 400ml
  • Sugar 40g 
  • Lemon juice 2 tsp

How to

• Buns
  1. Take all the ingredients out from the fridge one hour before starting making dough.
  2. Put the yeast in a bowl and add the milk little by little stirring it with a wooden spoon or spatula. (The yeast that I bought had an explanation of how to use so I heated the milk in the microwave a bit. As for the wooden spoon or spatula, I don’t know the reason.)
  3. Add sugar and the half of the flour (400g) and mix it. (Personally the rubber spatula was better than the regular spoon.)
  4. Cover the bowl with a clean cloth or kitchen towel, put it in a warm place and have it rest for 30 to 45 minutes. (Don’t ventilate the kitchen.)

     

  5. As the dough was sufficiently inflamed, add the salt, cardamom (which I didn’t use), melted butter and whisked eggs and mix them.
  6. Add the rest half of the flour (400g) and mix them.
  7. The dough is not liquid anymore so keep kneading for 10 to 15 minutes. (I kept using the rubber spatula to knead.)
  8. When the dough gets shiny and not sticky to the bowl, cover the bowl with the cloth or towel again and put it in the warm place for 45 to 60 minutes.

     

  9. Knock the dough in the bowl and have it rest for additionally 30 minutes.
  10. Take an egg-size dough and roll it like using a computer mouse.
  11. Leave the rounded buns for 30 minutes again. (I preheated the oven at this timing.)
  12. Coat the surface of the buns with milk or whisked egg and bake them in the oven at 200 to 225°C for 15 to 20 minutes.

      

• Filling
  1. Have some water with ice in the bowl or something and place another bowl on that, where add the heavy cream, sugar and lemon juice and whip it until it gets 80% thickened.
  2. Cut the top of the bun like a lid and scoop out the inside of the bun.
  3. Squeeze the cream in the bun until it slightly has “too much” cream and then place the “lid” on the top.

     

I forgot to do but you may also add powder sugar on them as decoration.

I also referred to a few Japanese recipes regarding the cream so probably my kukkel is less sweet than the ones available in Estonia. Moreover, the original recipe about the kukkel buns said there would be around 24 buns but

actually I got around 33 buns in the end.

My hands are relatively big among other Japanese girls but I guess the baker who originally made this recipe that I referred to may have bigger hands than mine.

Not sure though.

After all I gave two buns to my flatmates and more than 20 buns to my colleagues.

They seemed happy!
This recipe takes almost a whole day but the ingredients are quite simple so try to bake kukkel in your countries and enjoy Estonian (Swedish?) culture.

But I still believe cream-puffs are tastier.

Maybe next I’ll bake them.

Aitäh! 🙂