'Danish pastry should come with a warning!' Why The Great British Bake Off's Scandi pastry week could spell disaster

The Great British Bake Off is in full swing – and this year, presenters Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding were asked to contribute their own ideas.

While Fielding is believed to be behind last week's newly introduced vegan week, Copenhagen-born comedian Sandi Toksvig has suggested a Danish-themed week to challenge the bakers.  

But according to Danish baker Betina Skovbro, the founder of Brød, a Danish 'bageri' and coffee shop in Cardiff, Toksvig may have set the bakers up for a fall.

"Danish pastry recipes should come with a warning – you need a lot of patience to make them!" she laughs when we catch up at Brød, where the heady scent of freshly baked bread and cinnamon permeates. 

"Traditional Danish pastries like spandauer, a breakfast pastry made with layers of sweet pastry with a custard or jam centre and an iced topping, are really complicated to make. There are more disasters than success stories. It'll be interesting to see if any of the contestants end up throwing their dough out of the tent.

Brød founder Betina Skovbro

"The biggest challenges are to get the temperature, the texture and what we call the sheeting or 'laminating' right. If the butter is too soft, it melts into the dough and become a flat biscuit with no rise. Although the ingredients are the same, it will taste and look very different.

"The pastry dough should be tough, firm and almost rubbery, like Play-Doh, clay-like but still stretchy without breaking. If you're making spandauer, you also need to make sure that it’s a perfect square before you fold it. We use machines to help us to roll our straight," she admits. 

Skovbro is looking forward to seeing what the bakers come up with: as well as the classic custard or jam spandauers and cinnamon snails (kanel snegl) we're familiar with in the UK, she points to other Danish bakes such as her own favourite, the overskårne - a pastry slice with a vanilla custard centre and a cinnamon and marzipan filling, topped with chocolate icing. 

A much easier option for home bakers, she suggests, would be to steer clear of Danish pastry dough and to bake a Danish dream cake (drømme kage - a vanilla sponge with a coconut caramelised topping) or a Danish layer cake (Dansk lagekage), which is often served to celebrate a birthday with whatever fresh berries are to hand.

One of Skovbro's motivations for setting up Brød was that she could only find a watered-down version of Danish baking when she moved to Wales in 1998;  a lack of variety, and pastries which "tasted of nothing". She wanted to set the record straight, and show people how Danish bakes are really supposed to taste and look. 

But as well as the bakes themselves, Skovbro hopes that the Danish week will also shine a light on the Scandinavian culture of taking a coffee break and time out to share bread (brød), pastries (wiener brød) and cake (kage) - a tradition known as 'fika', which in turn contributes to 'hygge', a sense of cosiness, kinship and conviviality.

While true Danish-style baking may have been scarce in the UK back in the Nineties, us Brits are finally cottoning on. Danish bakery chain Ole and Steen opened it's first bakery outside Denmark in St James's Market in London in 2016, and now has a total of seven bakeries in the capital, with an eighth set to open in Oxford this September.

Meanwhile, The Bread Station in London Fields and ScandiKitchen in Fitzrovia also specialise in natural Danish baking. There are yet more which take their cue from the specific traditions of other Scandinavian countries.

Danish aristocrat Caroline Fleming, star of reality TV series Ladies of London and the former host of Denmark's Next Top Model has also helped to pique our interest in Danish baking, with her book Cook Yourself Happy: The Danish Way.

In Denmark, says Skovbro, baking is "just a part of daily life", and takeaway bakeries are more common than cafés. "If I were to visit you for a get together, I would pop via a bakery to bring a sharing cake or pastry to your home, and you would serve the coffee at your house.

"It’s rare that you find a café bakery in Denmark, but having lived in the UK for a few years I felt that the Danish tradition wouldn’t work for the British, so I merged the café culture here with the Danish way.

"At the beginning, we baked lots of sharing cakes for people to take home but we found that our customers preferred to buy one portion for themselves. They would think that a pastry for four people to share was all for one person, and that it was too much to eat. Now, I make pastries like the cinnamon rod (kanelstang) the same, but we slice it up ready."

Skovbro's father was also a baker, and some of her earliest memories are of punching out the shapes for home-made biscuits at the kitchen table from a big lump of dough at Christmas. "Keeping a tin of biscuits at home for visitors is a great way to create hygge right away," she says. 

"Bake Off is brilliant, because it encourages people to bake at home again. It also makes you appreciate how much time and effort goes into it. I love seeing people get excited about baking, enjoying it, seeing how things are made and realising that there's so much more to it than just buying something off a shelf."

With that in mind, here, we present a selection of recipes inspired by Denmark - including Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood's recipes for Danish pastry dough and apple Danish pastries with sultanas, as well as Betina Skovbro's light, luxurious Danish dream cake, and Caroline Fleming's cinnamon buns. 

Paul Hollywood's apple Danish pastries with sultanas

"Danish pastry dough is extremely versatile and can be used to make a variety of delicious morning goods, from apple turnovers to strawberry-and cream-filled pastries," says Hollywood. "It’s easy to shape in different ways, too. Well-chilled, good-quality butter is essential. Neatness when folding is also imperative."

MAKES

16–20

For the Danish pastry dough

• 500g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting

• 10g salt

• 80g caster sugar

• 10g instant yeast

• 2 medium eggs

• 90ml cool water

• 125ml tepid full-fat milk

• 250g chilled unsalted butter, preferably a good-quality Normandy butte

For the apple Danish pastries with sultanas

• 1kg dessert apples, peeled, cored and chopped

• 80ml water

• 100g sultanas

• 1 quantity Danish pastry dough, chilled

• Flour for dusting

• 2 medium eggs, beaten

For the orange icing (optional):

• 200g icing sugar

• 2 tbsp water

• Finely grated zest of 1 orange

METHOD

For the Danish pastry dough 

1. Put the flour into the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook. Add the salt and sugar to one side of the bowl and the yeast to the other. Add the eggs, water and milk and mix on a slow speed for two minutes, then on a medium speed for six minutes.

2. Tip the dough out on to a lightly floured surface and shape it into a ball. Dust with flour, put into a clean plastic bag and chill in the fridge for an hour.

3. On a lightly floured surface, roll out your chilled dough to a rectangle, about 50cm x 20cm and about 1cm thick. Flatten the butter to a rectangle, about 33cm x 19cm, by bashing it with a rolling pin. Lay the butter on the dough so that it covers the bottom two-thirds of it. Make sure that it is positioned neatly and comes almost to the edges.

4. Fold the exposed dough at the top down over one-third of the butter. Now gently cut off the exposed bit of butter, without going through the dough, and put it on top of the dough you have just folded down. Fold the bottom half of the dough up. You will now have a sandwich of two layers of butter and three of dough. Pinch the edges lightly to seal in the butter. Put the dough back in the plastic bag and chill for an hour to harden the butter.

5. Take the dough out of the bag and put it on the lightly floured surface with the short end towards you. Now roll it out to a rectangle, about 50cm x 20cm, as before. This time, fold up one-third of the dough and then fold the top third down on top. This is called a single turn. Put the dough back in the plastic bag and chill for another hour. Repeat this stage twice more, putting the dough back into the fridge for an hour between turns.

6. Your dough now needs to be left in the fridge for eight hours, or overnight, to rest and rise slightly. It is then ready to use.

For the ​apple Danish pastries with sultanas

1. Put the apples and water into a saucepan, bring to a simmer and cook, stirring often, for about 10 minutes until the apples are soft but still holding their shape. Stir in the sultanas and leave to cool.

2. Line four baking trays with baking parchment or silicone paper.

3. Cut the rested dough in half. Roll out one half on a lightly floured surface to a rectangle, about 35cm x 20cm. Cut in half lengthways to make two 10cm-wide rectangles. Repeat with the second piece of dough. Spoon the cooled apple mixture along the length of each rectangle, leaving the edges clear and dry. Brush the long edge closest to you with beaten egg, then fold the opposite edge over the apple filling to enclose it in a long, thin case of dough. Press the edges of the dough together firmly. Cut each strip into four or five pastries.

4. Place four or five pastries on each baking tray and put each tray inside a clean plastic bag. Leave to rise at cool room temperature (18–24C) until at least doubled in size, about two hours.

5. Heat your oven to 200C.

6. Using a sharp knife, make diagonal slashes on the top of the pastries to expose the apple filling. Brush the pastry surface with beaten egg. Bake for 15–20 minutes until golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

7. For the icing, if required, stir the ingredients together until smooth. When pastries are slightly cooled, brush icing on top of each one

Betina Skovbro's Danish dream cake

This light, luxurious Danish drømme kage or dream cake is a combination of a soft vanilla sponge and a caramelised coconut topping. 

SERVES

12-16

INGREDIENTS

For the sponge

• 225g caster sugar

• 75g softened butter

• 225g self-raising flour

• 2 tsp baking powder

• 3 eggs

• 150ml milk

• 1/1 tsp vanilla sugar

For the topping

• 100g butter

• 150g dessicated coconut

• 250g dark brown sugar

• 100g milk

• Pinch of salt

METHOD

For the sponge

1. Mix caster sugar and butter until combined, then add the res of the ingredients with a whisk. The longer you mix, the denser and flatter the cake will be, so try to be as efficient as you can be and mix for the minimum time. 

2. Pour the mixture into a greased and floured 22cm spring form cake tin, and bake for 35 minutes at 190°. 

3. Ten minutes before the sponge is ready, start the coconut topping. Mix all the ingredients in a saucepan and stir over a medium heat until combined.

4. Make sure the sponge is fully cooked by checking the centre. It should spring back when pressed lightly, and a wooden skewer or think knife poked into the sponge should come out clean. Smooth the topping and level it over the cake, then place it back into the oven to bake for another 5-8 minutes. Leave the cake to cool in the tin, and then serve. 

Caroline Fleming's cinnamon buns (kanel snegle)

MAKES

16–20 buns

INGREDIENTS

For the buns

• 500ml milk

• 125g icing sugar

• 60g butter

• 50g fresh yeast

• 1kg plain flour, plus extra to dust

• 1 tsp ground cardamom

• 2 eggs

For the filling

• 175g butter, softened

• 250g raw cane sugar

• 3 tbsp ground cinnamon

METHOD

1. In a large saucepan, gently heat the milk until it is warm, not hot, then add the icing (confectioner’s) sugar and butter. Remove from the heat, stir to combine, then leave to cool.

2. Once cool, add the yeast and stir well, then slowly add the flour and cardamom, stirring well. Whisk the eggs, then add to the saucepan and stir well to combine. Remove the bun dough from the saucepan and knead well, then cover with a clean tea towel and leave in a dark place for 1 hour to rise.

3. Lightly flour your work surface. Roll the dough mixture out into a large rectangle about 1cm (1⁄2 inch) thick.

4. Mix the ingredients for the filling together, then spread the filling all over the top of the dough rectangle. Roll up, starting from one end, so that it resembles a jam roly-poly cake or Swiss roll, then cut into 2cm (3⁄4 inch) thick slices. Spread the slices out on baking (parchment) paper on a baking tray (sheet) and allow to rise for another 30 minutes.

5. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/gas mark 6.

6. Bake the cinnamon buns for 10–15 minutes until golden brown. Enjoy warm from the oven, or cold, with a cup of tea or coffee. These also freeze well.