Icelandic rye bread cakes
I love rúgbrauð, that heavy, sweet, moist Icelandic rye bread.
In Iceland, this bread is often baked in hot earth, usually in a tin can that is buried in the ground for 10 to 24 hours (depending on the local temperature). This bread is known, for example, from Heimaey after the 1973 volcanic eruption, from the Mývatn region, or from the geothermal bakery near the "Fontana" swimming pool in Laugarvatn.
In some places there are also communal "ovens" where the inhabitants can bake their rye bread in special devices using the hot steam from geothermal energy.
Since I don't have hot earth or a nice village community oven at my disposal, I usually bake my rúgbrauð in clean, washed milk cartons for about 11 hours at 90°C fan-assisted oven.
The rye bread tastes so delicious - and you can also use the bread for other purposes. For example, old, dry rye bread can be used up wonderfully in classic, sweet rye bread cakes.
If you would like to try a typical Icelandic rye bread cake, you can find various recipes here on the blog:
This recipe comes from an old Icelandic cookbook from 1858. The cake is made with bread, lots of eggs, a generous amount of sugar, grated almonds, and—most luxuriously—juiced fresh oranges. You can also substitute orange juice. My husband thought the cake had a bit of a Christmassy feel.
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This recipe for a rye bread cake with eggs, brown sugar, cocoa and potato flour, as well as plenty of cream filling and grated chocolate, comes from a collection of Icelandic Christmas recipes from the 1960s.
This was the first rye bread cake I tried for the blog, back in 2015—a delicious cake with ground hazelnuts, sugar, lots of eggs, and a rich cream with whipped cream, mascarpone, grated dark chocolate, and blueberries.
Very tasty — and reminded me of the hazelnut cake with cranberries and cream that my mother often baked for birthdays when I was a child — I almost felt nostalgic about this rye bread cake.
Rúgbrauðsterta með jarðarberjum - rye bread cake with strawberries
And sometimes it's not so easy to follow a particular recipe in Iceland. Last year, I wanted to recreate the recipe from 2015, but then I couldn't find the ingredients at the supermarket. So I had to get creative. I replaced the ground hazelnuts with a mixture of ground almonds and chopped hazelnuts; I used cream cheese instead of ricotta, but adjusted the ratio of cheese to cream; and I used strawberries instead of blueberries.
I was absolutely thrilled with the result—and I found the chopped nuts in the soft dough particularly delicious!
I recently found this recipe for a traditional Icelandic rye bread cake ("the good old rye bread cake") online, in an old article from the magazine Morgunblaðið from December 1967.
For the cake, apart from the Rúgbrauð, you mainly need eggs, sugar, some flour and a bit of potato flour, and the filling consists of cream, bananas, apples and grated chocolate.
Alternative: Pumpernickel
In Germany, I use pumpernickel for these rye bread recipes. It's not the same, but the result is really good; the taste and consistency are ultimately really good.
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