My mom bakes buns and pies almost every weekend, and this lingonberry and carrot pie is one of her staples, and super good at that! Anna wrote here a while ago that she grew up in a home that smelled of pulla, the sweet, cardamom-flavoured wheat bread that Finns have with their coffee, and she was not exaggerating one bit. The crust of the pie is made from the very same pulla dough as mom's cinnamon buns. That is very convenient, as a single batch of dough gives you several kinds of pastry.
Lingonberry and carrot is just one of the many flavours my mom bakes. Her other staples are apple (fresh apples or apple sauce, depending on the season), blueberry, plain carrot, carrot and apple, and rhubarb. Carrot in baking is nothing strange in Finland, where even Fazer makes carrot rolls. When I wrote about American carrot cake in January I had to admit that in a cake the carrot gives mostly colour and moistness and hardly any taste. I also learned then that in the Middle Ages carrots were one of the few sweeteners a European baker could get. In this pie it has a proper job. The lingonberry, a small red forest berry related to the cranberry, is seriously tart, and at this time of year it comes out of the freezer. The pie combines the tartness of the lingonberries with the sweetness of the carrots in an exquisite way, which makes it very refreshing. It is also very moist, and a pleasure to look at with its super intense shades of red. The finely shredded carrot takes on the colour of the berries, and in a slice it is hard to tell which is which.
The pulla crust underneath is thick and soft in a pan pizza kind of way. It is sweet rather than plain or salty, and it has a nice cardamom flavour to it. There is no butter in the dough at all, and half a decilitre of oil is all the fat it needs. The pie is baked the size of a full baking sheet and cut into pieces, and it only needs 17-20 minutes in the oven. The filling gets two tablespoons of potato flour, which as far as I can tell are there to bind the juice that comes out of the berries and the sugar, so that the crust does not go soggy.
If you double the crust recipe, you can make a batch of buns as well. I recommend rolling out the dough, spreading it with margarine or butter and sprinkling it with lots of sugar and cinnamon. The sheet is then rolled up and cut into bun-sized pieces. As a kid I loved to eat those buttered and spiced buns raw, before baking, and I always tried to steal at least one when mom wasn't looking. There is even a photograph of me at the age of two, licking dough off my fingers at a floury table with a pink apron on, so the habit started early. At Christmas I still go and pick at the ham while it is warm, and it is an art of its own to do it so that mom does not notice the traces. Not that I wouldn't like raw buns any more...
Recipe card
Pulla Crust
- One full baking sheet
You will need
| 250 ml (1 cup) | 2% milk |
| 25 g (1 oz) | fresh yeast, or 1 packet of dry yeast (12 g / 1/2 oz) |
| 1/2 tsp | salt |
| 1 | egg |
| 100 ml (0.4 cups) | sugar |
| 700 ml (3 cups) | plain (all-purpose) flour |
| 50 ml (0.2 cups) | rapeseed (canola) oil |
| 1 tsp | ground cardamom |
Method
- Mix the yeast into lukewarm milk until completely dissolved, then add the salt, egg, sugar, oil and cardamom and mix well.
- Add the flour gradually while kneading. Continue kneading until the dough feels firm. Add more flour if the dough is too moist and sticks to your hands or to the table.
- Let rise until the volume has roughly doubled.
Recipe card
Lingonberry and Carrot Pie
- Oven 200 °C (400 °F)
- Baking 17-20 min
You will need
| 1 portion | pulla crust (above) |
| 500 ml (2 cups) | lingonberries |
| 500 ml (2 cups) | finely shredded carrots |
| 300 ml (1.3 cups) | sugar |
| 2 tbsp | potato flour (or cornflour) |
Method
- Preheat the oven to 200 °C (400 °F).
- Mix the berries, shredded carrots and sugar. Check the sweetness by tasting: different batches of berries vary in sourness, so you may want to adjust the amount of sugar. The filling should be more sweet than sour. Finally mix in the potato flour.
- When the dough has risen, roll it out to fill a baking sheet. Press with your finger around the edges to make a rim that keeps the filling inside the crust.
- Spread the lingonberry and carrot filling over the crust. If you like, brush the edges of the crust with egg to give them a beautiful glaze.
- Bake for 17-20 minutes, until the edges have nicely browned.
Leave a Reply