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Swedish Fika Calendar: Why you should spend today eating strawberry cake
The Local's Fika Calendar walks you through a whole year of Sweden's coffee-and-cake tradition, with information on the pastries and the history behind them. Today is Sweden's National Day, which means it's time to tuck into a National Day pastry.
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Hej and welcome to the latest instalment of The Local's Fika Calendar, where we guide you through the most important cake, pastry and other food-related days in the Swedish year.
Today is June 6th, Sweden's National Day, where Swedish municipalities up and down the country hold events to welcome new citizens.
There is – of course – also a special cake eaten on National Day.
This is the inventively-named nationaldagsbakelse (literally: National Day pastry), which usually takes the form of an almond-based cake or tart topped with something creamy (usually whipped cream, almond paste or pastry cream) and fresh strawberries with a sprig of lemon balm.
National Day has only been celebrated in Sweden since the 1980s, and has only been a public holiday since 2005, where it was swapped with Whit Monday.
Whit Monday always fell on – you guessed it – a Monday, while National Day falls on a fixed day, so it's only a public holiday five out of every seven years.
This means that by swapping the two, Swedes' total number of working days increased despite the number of public holidays remaining the same.
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Sweden's National Day pastry was invented in 1994 by Helena Bergsmark, a pastry chef at Café Gateau in Stockholm. Her version was relatively simple with just six ingredients, designed to be easy to make for home bakers.
If you buy one at a bakery or konditori they're usually slightly more fancy, perhaps with a layer of chocolate covering the cake layer to stop it from going soggy, or a glaze over the strawberries.
Whether you're baking your own nationaldagsbakelse or planning to buy one, we hope you have a great day off.
Grattis på nationaldagen, Sverige!
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