Smörgåstårta

I don’t even remember how I found the original concept. I was searching for something else entirely and along the way, an egg salad sandwich cake popped up in my results. I immediately decided that the next time I hosted coffee hour at church, such a thing would definitely be involved. By a beautiful coincidence, Maria’s first weekend home for the summer and our deacon’s last Sunday before a new assignment coincided and were the perfect excuse to make this:

It is easily one of the silliest things ever to come out of my kitchen and it doesn’t even come close to rivaling the examples you will find if you search for it by name, which I heartily recommend doing. Smörgåstårta is a Swedish treat. It translates literally to ‘sandwich cake’. The sandwich fillings can be anything you would normally put in a savory tea sandwich, but with multiple layers (ours was egg salad, avocado, and more egg salad). It then gets covered with a mayonnaise-cream cheese icing and elaborate decorations that are meant to hint at what is inside.

I honestly thought I would be taking most of it back home with me, but it was a big hit. Silly or not, I will probably be making this again!

Donkey time

The donkey is restless. Before the first tractor mowing of the year, while the grass is still growing unevenly and other plants are just barely budding, I like to let the barn critters into the yard to ‘mow’. It requires supervision, of course. Even mature and dormant trees have to be defended from everyone except the cow. Once spring really gets going, the elderberries leaf out, the rhubarb puts out huge leaves, the willows become absolutely impossible to resist… and the crew has to stick to the pasture. Patsy objects. Lately, she will stand at the yard gate and bray or paw at it with her hoof even if the pasture is open to them. It is hard to tell if she thinks the yard is tastier than the pasture, or if she just likes wandering around otherwise forbidden territory.

She is also shedding a lot. They all are. Eunice is blowing out her mohair undercoat, Betsy is looking all peach-fuzzy pink, the sheep are enjoying scratching now that they can reach their skin, and Patsy is doing her best to shed by rolling. Eunice gets brushed every morning before milking, but the Conkey makes things difficult. Betsy demands to be brushed, stepping right in front of me to get her point across. I can brush or rub her until I get no more hair off, but if I try to brush Patsy she comes trundling right over to steal the attention. Patsy immediately gives way when she sees her other half coming. It is a ridiculous dance.

Yesterday afternoon I put the donkey on her lead and took her out to the chicken run to eat the long grass there and have my sole attention. I brushed her for a long time before the sky darkened and we had to stop, getting all the loose hair off and picking two ticks from her tail. (Another spot to check for ticks. Great.) She soaked it up, but even so, she couldn’t get entirely away from everyone else.

Hi Tansy. Do you need to be brushed now??