Birthday coffee for rowers

For the first of this year´s birthday celebrations I invited a group of wonderful female rowers around for "fødselsdagskaffe" or birthday coffee being the English translation. One of the guest is suffering from lactose intolerance, this is not an issue anymore, as you easily can find lactose-free milk, yogurt, butter and whipping cream in most of the Danish supermarkets. And I did use plenty of dairy products in my cake creation part.

The three key element for a traditional Danish birthday coffee is butter, cream cake served together with hot chocolate. Hot chocolate or chocolate milk has NEVER on my list over favourite food stuff !!!! I really dislike the taste of hot chocolate/chocolate milk. And I still remember my dislike, when I was served this at other children´s birthday as a kid :-(

The first of the birthday coffee table was the bun, which I "only" served together with jam, as the bun on it´s own contains plenty of butter. And my tradition is to bake saffron buns, as a treat for myself, as I just "love" the use of saffron (big amount of saffron) in a sweet, butter rich bun.

For the second traditional thing (the cream cake) I this year decided to bake/make the Mette Blomsterberg hindbærlagkage (Raspberry cream cake). I think I did a good job making this cream cake for most part of it. I still need much more routine in making the marzipan cake ban around the cake, as it was full of cracks.

Who cares about these minor details, when the taste is great ?

As the end part for this coffee table was served three smaller cakes in form of

these fantastic tasting liquorice cookies with cranberries

yogurt chocolate cake with great taste and soft texture

mini pies with rhubarb - this recipe really needs to be reworked !!!!

I received a very nice birthday gift in form of a ceramic candlelight holder by Finnsdottir in pale green colour. Thank you very much to my rowing friends for a great gift and your excellent company :-)