Swedish Smörgåstårta

Another sandwich cake! *shudder*

We wrote about sandwich cakes back in December, those nightmares of mid-Century Americana that haunted many a cookbook and family gathering of the upper Midwest 50 years ago or more.

Well, Swedish Smörgåstårta is the original. Popular in Sweden around the same time as its American counterpart was in the US, it’s possible that the custom had existed for hundreds of years previously.

When we covered the Americanized version of sandwich cakes, the fillings included such standard Midwestern deli fare as egg salad, ham salad, chicken salad, etc. Given Sweden’s thousands of miles of coastline, the fillings of a Smörgåstårta tend more toward seafood, especially smoked/preserved seafood. Based on my searches, they also appear to be more attractively decorated.

Well I don’t want to overthink this one, so I’ll go with a proven recipe from a trusted source. The Saveur recipe calls for baking one’s own round bread in a springform pan, making the final product more familiarly cake-shaped. While it’s a wheat bread rather than the white or rye commonly cited in descriptions of the dish. The only alteration I made to this recipe was to replace a bit (100g) of the all-purpose flour with bread flour, and to use a little sourdough starter in addition to baking yeast.

The fillings for this sandwich cake include smoked cured salmon with shredded lettuce and a mustard sauce, and a smoked herring mousse with sliced cucumbers. For the smoked herring mousse, I used that finest of tinned snacks, King Oscar kippers, pureed in a blender with heavy cream and mayonnaise.

The crust is removed from the bread–bottom, top, and all around the sides–and the remaining crumb is cut horizontally into three slices. We start with the first slice.

On top of this goes a thick schmear of the smoked herring mousse.

Next I arranged a layer of thinly sliced cucumber evenly atop the mousse.

Next comes another layer of bread, and this layer gets buttered before adding any fillings.

Now we add the cold-smoked salmon, sometimes called Nova Lox. I also had a small container of gravlax, perhaps more appropriate for a Swedish dish, that I kept aside for garnishing later.

Now the recipe calls for pouring the mustard sauce over the salmon. Unfortunately, when I did that, it spilled over the sides and all around the base of the cake.

So I used the shredded lettuce to mop up the spilled mustard sauce and put it on top of the salmon.

Finally the top layer of bread is added, and the whole is frosted with a seasoned cream cheese and sour cream mixture.

This went into the fridge to chill for a bit, while I gathered my thoughts regarding garnishes and decoration. The Swedish version of this sandwich tends toward the more elaborately and aesthetically decorated, and I wanted to make sure I made something that fit, while still following Saveur’s recipe in the most basic sense.

I was serving the cake for Easter dinner, so the Spring-like theme evident in many of these examples seemed doubly appropriate. I ringed the top of the cake with tiny shrimp, as suggested in the Saveur recipe, with a flower-like arrangement of gravlax, cucumber, radish, and boiled egg on top.

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On the sides, I arranged sliced of cucumber, radish, and sprigs of flatleaf parsley decoratively.

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Overall, I think it turned out quite nice.

We served the Smörgåstårta along with a small roast of boneless leg of lamb and a Waldorf salad for Easter dinner.

Unlike the sandwich cakes I made in December, we actually ate this one. Some of it, anyway.

And it was good! The cream cheese frosting was the highlight, but cream cheese is a perfect accompaniment for both smoked salmon and for smoked herring mousse. The lettuce and cucumber, as well as the garnishes, provided a cool and crisp textural contrast. It was more cohesive than the melange of fillings from December’s sandwich cake. It worked.

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Now I haven’t suddenly fallen in love with the form. It’s unnecessarily complicated and difficult to make, and I’d just as soon spread some cream cheese and smoked fish on a bagel instead. But for a special occasion, when you want something impressive-looking, a Smörgåstårta can be just the thing.