Norwegian Christmas Traditions

Last week Randi, an incredibly sweet lady who works at the Stavanger Chamber of Commerce, opened up her home to 10+ of us expats so that we could experience some traditional Norwegian Christmas cooking!

It's traditional in Norway to make 7 different sweets at Christmas time. Our group tackled making all of them (except for the bread which needed to rise to Randi made it the night before). 

She began out evening by introducing us to the traditional gløgg. It's a spiced drink that's traditionally mixed with cheap red wine and warmed up on the stove. (But since she knew there were pregnant ladies amongst us she made it non-alcoholic so we could all indulge. Thanks Randi!). It was absolutely delicious!! You add trail mix to it as well, which seems weird, but was actually quite tasty. 

Here is the delicious jule kake (Christmas bread) both with the infamous brown cheese and without. I wasn't brave enough to try the brown cheese yet... maybe when I am not pregnant. ;-)

We all divided up to tackle the remainder of the cookies. With all hands on deck we were able to get everything made and ready in just a couple of hours!

Ristopper (a chocolate and cereal puff concoction) - 

Kokosmakroner (a coconut cookie) - 

Brente mandler (toasted almonds) - 

Krumkaker (a pancake-like cookie that's rolled to a cylinder) - 

Chocolate sweets (milk chocolate and biscuits melted together) I didn't get a picture of the final product, but it looked a lot like the ristopper. - 

Marzipan balls with chocolate on top - 

Everything was absolutely wonderful and we all got to take some sweets home to our loved ones (and we still have a few left that Jason hasn't devoured...)