From Alice Enevoldsen

Julekake
Image © 2010 Jason Gift Enevoldsen

• 1 Cup Oat Milk or Milk of your choice.
• ½ Cup Sugar
• ¼ Cup Lard and Oil or butter substitute of your choice
• 1 Dash Salt
• ¼ Cup Warm water
• 2 packets 1 Pkg. active dry yeast (~1.5 Tbsp)
• ¾ Tsp Cardamom
• 3.5 Cups Flour
• ¼ Cup Raisins
• ¾ Cup Mixed candied fruit

New Directions:

Heat the milk until warm, but not hot – 130F max.

Mix dry American* plain yeast with 1/4 cup warm water. Add a dash of sugar or honey or something for the yeasties to eat.

Pour milk into the room-temperature mixer mixing bowl. Add fat, sugar, cardamom, salt (yes, I put salt in this time – I never do but I’ve been frustrated at this dough so I decided to follow the recipe more closely in some ways). Mix a little – your fat won’t mix in, don’t worry about it. If the yeast is foamy, add it and 2 cups of flour to the mixing bowl. Mix with dough hook until smooth. You want this dough to be as “loose” as possible, while still holding together as a dough.

Sprinkle your raisins and candied fruit with a generous dose of flour, and toss till all are coated lightly. Add these to the mixer.

Continue to add flour as you’re mixing (but wait in between to see the flour get mixed in, and see how the consistency changes while mixing) until you have dough that holds together as a lump, not sticking to the sides of the bowl too much. You should be mixing for about 7 minutes. You may well not use all the 3.5 cups of flour, but you don’t want sticky dough.

Detach all dough from dough hook, transfer to a greased (IMPORTANT) bowl, cover, and let rise in a cozy, warm place until doubled in size – about an hour. Punch down. Rise again until doubled in size – about 2 hours (IMPORTANT, but maybe you can skip this by doing your first rise for 2 hours, I’m not sure yet). Punch down. Form into round buns on a greased or non-stick baking sheet. Let rise again until half again as big – another hour. Brush liberally with oil, bake at 350F degrees for about 25 minutes. Brush with oil while still hot. Cool. Slice and eat.

I FINALLY GOT IT TO WORK! The texture was light and fluffy and AWESOME. Yay! So, the major changes were doubling the yeast, adding a second double-time rise, and rising the dough in a greased bowl.

*I think American yeast is different than Scandinavian yeast. In all these high-fat, “warm the milk”-first doughs I seem to never be able to get them to rise. I follow the recipe diligently, and where it says “doubled in size” mine always comes out 1.25 times in size. In discussions with a Danish baker, we determined that the directions on her package of yeast were quite different from the directions on mine – always calling for the dry yeast to be mixed in with the flour while still dry. The above directions are a modified version based on what we need to do with American yeast, and what I saw watching a Norwegian video about making Julekake.

This is my first attempt at using a dough hook.

We used to get these all the time at a local Scandinavian bakery. Eventually I started having minor reactions to the cross-contamination, and I wanted to share them with my more-sensitive husband. As they’re an integral part of Christmas for me, I had to learn to bake them myself.

I always struggle with not killing my yeast, and with getting them to rise enough.