Carrot, banana and ginger cake - a snack out of hours

3.45 pm on Saturday I suddenly got an incredible yen for something sweet, 15 minutes before the shop in the village nearby closed. I realised I wasn’t going to be able to make it, and I really didn’t feel like driving 20 km to the nearest town. 

A rummage around in the cupboards and fridge produced some carrots, bananas and a piece of ginger which started looking really sad. 

Living in the countryside we can’t just nip out and get goodies when we feel like it. Well, of course we can, but it isn’t just going to the corner shop to grab something. It means getting in the car and driving to the village or, if it´s outside of their fairly limited opening hours, to the town 20 km away. Even in town you won´t find a 24 hour open shop or garage, the nearest one is 100 km away. You soon learn to plan and to be inventive, or you simply go without. 

Wearing my thinking cap I made a cake which turned out to be fabulous. Recipe as follows; 

Carrot, banana and ginger cake with a ginger thin flavoured cream cheese frosting 

Ingredients: 

For cake 

3 eggs 

175 g butter 

175 g plain flour 

100 g sugar 

175 g grated carrot 

2 ripe bananas, mashed 

A thumb sized piece of ginger, grated 

1 orange, zest and juice of. 

2 tsp baking soda 

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda 

1 tsp cinnamon 

½ tsp grated nutmeg 

A pinch of salt 

For frosting (optional) 

100 g cream cheese 

100 g butter 

100 g icing sugar 

1 tsp ginger thin spice mix (available in Sweden as ”pepparkakskrydda” but you can mix your own using this recipe.) 

A tiny pinch of salt 

For decoration 

Cookie crumbs, I used gingersnaps. 

Method: 

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C 
2. Weigh up your ingredients separately. 
3. Grease a cake tin. 
4. In a little bit of the flour, mix in the spices, salt, baking soda and bicarbonate. Set aside. 
5. Mix butter sugar eggs and spices until fluffy, unless you’re Arnie you may want to use an electric whisk. 
6. Fold in grated carrot, ginger and the mashed banana. 
7. Using The electric whisk, mix the flour mixed with the raising agents and spices into the batter. Blend carefully. 
8. Mix in the rest of the flour. 
9. Pour batter in the tin and bake for roughly 1 hour. You can check if it’s ready by sticking a fork in the middle of the cake. If it comes out dry the cake is ready. 
10. Let the cake cool until it’s room temperature before putting the frosting on. If it’s warmer than that the frosting will melt, as I discovered to my peril a while back when I ended up having to serve a cake swimming in melted frosting. 

The frosting is made by simply mixing the ingredients well and then smearing it on the cake. This is probably obvious to most people, but if you – like me – are fairly useless as a cake maker, just mix and smear.

Ginger thin spice mix - if you haven't got, you make

I love ginger thins, the Swedish type ginger cookie. It's the peppery, gingery taste of it which can give pretty much anything sweet a lift. Ginger thin fudge, for example is an absolute treat.

In Sweden you can pick up the spice mix in most grocery shops, but if you - like me - can't get to one of those at any given time, you can easily mix it on your own from spices you may very well already have at home.

• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ground cardamom
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon ground cloves

Mix and use in biscuits, on porridge, in frosting or anywhere you find it tasty.

Country life - a background

I wasn't born a country-girl, neither did I spend most of my life until now as a countrywoman, but I always had a strong urge to live in  more rural area. The first 46 years of my life I lived in large cities, and I enjoyed it, but once we bought this place we simply felt so at home we decided that rural life was for us - at least for now.

We went from a life in the city, with it's easy access to culture and shopping, to living in a small house in the woods. It's 20 km to the nearest small town, but fortunately we have a small shop in the village 1.5 km away. Museums and theaters we have to travel quite a bit further to, but it doesn't matter. We lived in London, with  those on our doorstep, but if I'm perfectly honest we didn't really take advantage of that fact as much as we could have.

Blessings and hardships - then and now

Our house isn't all that old, not in Swedish terms. It was built 1936 as a worker's cottage outside a village in the north of Sweden. When the house was built Lugnvik, our village, was a reasonably large community with around 2000 inhabitants who were employed mainly in saw mills and related industry. 

There were several shops, cafées and craftsmen in the village, two schools for the children - of which there were many - and life was, if not prosperous for most people, at least not terribly poor by the standard of the time. Work was plenty for both blue and white collar workers in and around the saw mills and the port, houses cheap to heat with all the woods around and fishing was free in the river. When not at work there were sporting, fishing and the village hall - Folkets hus Olympia - which hosted functions and doubled as a cinema. There was also a "dansbana" - a dedicated decked area where people gathered to dance and listen to music in the summers.

Contemporary accounts of life in and around Lugnvik mid 20th century conjures up an image of a neither prosperous nor poor community,  but with rich social engagement and spirit.

Lugnvik, Kramfors municipality.
Image: Public domain - Wikimedia

Fishing is still free, and of the several shops one is still open, but that is pretty much where similarities end. 

Currently around 350 people live in the village, and almost half of them are retired. Those who are not mainly commute to work - if they're not unemployed. Only 62% of those between the ages of 20 and 64 are engaged in paid employment and the average income is 10% below the rest of the country. As there is a shortage of children in the village (7% below the age of 18) the council considered it no longer viable to run a school, and that makes it difficult for young families to establish themselves. 

What is more, as this is an area of outstanding natural beauty, quite a few tourists come to visit. Property prices have for many decades been extremely low, so naturally this has attracted many who do not live and work locally - or even in this country -  to look for second homes here, something which has driven the prices up to ridiculous levels. As an example our property would today be considered fetching between 200-400% of what we paid for it six years ago. It was unusually cheap then, granted, but the increase is not of this world and as a result young families often find themselves unable to buy and this often leaves villages around the rural parts of the country deserted during winter months. Shops and local amenities can't survive on passing trade and holiday makers alone.  

This may sound like doom and gloom, as if life in the area would be covered in a cloud of grey and that people are supplementing their flour with bark. Nothing could be further from the truth!

True enough, there are precious few community activities now compared to 70 years ago, but there are still some. Many people here hunt and fish, and those who don't can often buy meat from those who do. Life is not as stressful and the cost of living is far below that in more urban areas. You know your neighbours, even though it can be difficult building a network as a newcomer, and should you need help it is usually there for you.

We love our life here in the woods and for now this is where we want to be.