Jólamaturinn okkar

Our Christmas dinner 2024

For Christmas, my children had expressly asked for a traditionally roasted bird (goose, or alternatively duck) with red cabbage, dumplings, potatoes and sauce, just like before. With warm red cabbage - not cold, as is more common in Iceland. So classic German food.

There were no special requests for starters and desserts, so I had free rein.

So I prepared two different dips for the first hunger, along with crackers and small pretzels:

A large portion of my still current favorite Icelandic dip with cheese and bacon ...

... and a smaller portion of salmon spread with egg (Savulohilevite), a Finnish salmon dip based on a recipe by Michaela from her blog Mahtava .

The cheese and bacon dip in particular went down wonderfully, especially my youngest offspring could have just spooned this dip away. My daughter and I really appreciated the salmon dip... definitely both very tasty, easy to prepare and quite filling for the hungry family.

For dessert, I made Finnish snowflake tarts (Lumihiutaletorttu) or Christmas tarts (Joulutorttu), also based on a recipe from Mahtava - simply fill ready-made puff pastry with jam, fold it, bake it and then dust it with powdered sugar. So beautifully uncomplicated!

The recipe actually calls for a pack of ready-made puff pastry and plum jam or other jam. I made 1.5 packs, just to be on the safe side, so that everyone would definitely be full, and filled them with plum jam, strawberry jam and nut nougat cream. The recipe is wonderfully simple, and although it takes a bit of time to form all the snowflakes, it's actually not difficult. And it tastes really good and looks great too!

The nut nougat cream stars in particular were a hit with the youngest members of the family.

We all really enjoyed our Christmas dinner with the entire family and everyone had at least something to fill up on. Nothing complicated, just easy to prepare, but still something different and visually appetizing. What more do I want..?!?

Merry Christmas!

[Translated from here.]