Aunt Hanna’s Cakes - Hanna-Tädin Kakut

Even if this those cookies are called “cakes”, they are small round cookies. They can be baked with cream or sour-cream. The recipe here is from the “Kotiruoka” (Home-Food) book from 1945 17th edition, but I read that the oldest recipe dates back to 1910. The cakes are named after Hanna Rehnbäck (in Finnish: Reinilä) (1877-1935) from Raahe. Raahe is a beautiful old town at the west coast of Finland where many old wooden houses still exist. She was a “kotitalous” teacher and director of the Helsinki School of Education. Kotitalous includes all kind of house related topics: cooking, household-bookkeeping, washing, health and nutrition etc. Hanna also authored the famous “Kotiruoka” book, which was published in 1908 and which was many times improved and reprinted.

These tender little cookies taste better the more sour or older cream. The story goes that Aunt Hanna liked to bake with the cookies with older cream. You can use sour cream, Icelandic or Turkish yoghurt.

Ingredients:

3 dl Sugar

1 ½ dl Sour cream or yoghurt or normal cream

150 g Melted butter (you can also brown the butter in a pot to give it an additional kick)

1 Teaspoon salt (depending on if you have strongly salted butter, then this is not needed)

1 Teaspoon soda

5 dl Flour

3 dl Potato starch flour

Instructions:

Mix the sugar, cream, soft butter and salt. In another bowl mix the soda, flour and starch and then add the cream-sugar mix. Let the dough rest in the fridge (or outside but remember birds and squirrels) for about 30 min – 1 hour. Divide the dough into two parts and form into a long sausage. Cut each sausage into roughly 20-25 pieces and form small balls.

Typically, each ball is pressed a little bit with a fork to give them a pattern make them more decorative. I personally prefer to make the balls very small (about 50 from this amount of dough, so they are slightly larger then amarettini), but the classical version is to make them somewhat larger and give them the fork pattern.

Bake for about 10 minutes in 200 C (top and bottom heat). The cookies will tear a bit, when they rise. Smaller cookies about 7-8 minutes.

Note: You can flavour the dough e.g. with lemon or orange zest, cardamon or cinnamon. For the cookies in the picture 100 g of finely cut candied lemon was added and browned butter was used.