The slender tree branches, laden with luscious, dark sour cherries, seemed in dire need of relieving their seasonal burden. As always, it’s on a first come first serve basis: us or the birds.
As I walked through my friend’s delightful garden teeming full of berry bushes and fruit trees (each with a long history and proclamation to the land which their roots sink deep into), I couldn’t help but begin to recount all of the times my friends and I would use the garden as our own playground when we were little. We would pluck fruits from the trees in such earnest that our hands would be stained, the lower parts of our shirts became makeshift baskets, our conversations became limited as we kept our mouths full of our succulent findings, and our greediness was shown outright as we left with full bellies and more fruit than we could carry. (more…)
Sponge cake baked with meringue and almonds becomes the centerpiece of this delightful layer cake filled with custard and whipped cream. It began its inception in the north of Norway and has earned it’s nickname as verdens beste, “the world’s best”. 
Winter came with a fierceness this year, unlike last year’s somewhat bleak and disappointing season where pockets of snow and slush lay strewn about fields of brown. This winter had other ideas. Grandeur ideas. A plush blanket of white snow, covered with another blanket, and another, and yet another. In some places, the snow towers so high that when I peer out my window I can only see the skyline. 
In the bright of the day, looking toward the bay, the water sparkles as the sun’s rays reflect off the waves with an intense luster creating an almost magical atmosphere. This reoccurring picture and likening to glitter is what gave inspiration for the name of a farm in Rollag three generations ago. It would, in recent times, be the inspiration behind the name of the baked good so loved and so often served at this farm, by the hands of Maj-Lis. 
Smultringer is considered one of the seven Norwegian Christmas cookies (syv slag), with very interesting origins. Before smultringer, Norwegians were making similar-looking fried cakes called hjortetakk out of horn salt (ammonium bicarbonate) or what was earlier referred to as hjortetakksalt. It’s suspected that hjortetakk came to Norway from Germany, as there are German recipes for them tracing back to the 1700s.