Fancy a break in Sweden? It’s a piece of cake
Tucking into coffee and cake in the fika capital Alingsas THERE’S no better place to have your cake and eat it than Sweden – the home of fika (coffee and cake). It’s a bit like the British concept of afternoon tea, except that it happens in the morning, too.
In Sweden, the law says workers must have a break twice a day, and this usually involves an accompaniment of coffee, cake, sweets or biscuits.
Fika, which can be used as a noun or a verb, comes from 19th Century Swedish slang. You can fika by yourself or with others. And if you’ll forgive the coffee pun, it’s a relaxed way to take a break from the daily grind. There’s even something called ‘gofika’ – a superior version more likely to be encountered on a Fridayay and that includes somethingng extra-creamy such as chocolate or princess cake instead of a cookie or cinnamon bun. Although Sweden’s lack of a pub culture is given as one reason for the popularity of fika, it’s actually been a Swedish institution for centuries.
The so-called ‘capital l of fika’ is Alingsas, just under 30 miles north-east of Gothenburg. In the Middle Ages the town became home to the people of nearby Nya Lodose after invinvading Danes burnt it down.dow The Swedes hav have never quite fo forgiven them. Today Alingsas is home to many patisseries, enabling the town to celebrate the fika concept with g guided tours in E English, which inc include wonderful selec selections of cream cake cakes, cinnamon buns and even prawn sandwich cakes. Many of the cafes here are mentioned in Sweden’s leading restaurant guide, The White Guide.
But my favourite, Conditori Nordpolen (the North Pole patisserie), was in Vara, a further 30 miles up the road towards Vanern, the largest lake in Sweden and the EU.
Run by Per Larsson, Conditori Nordpolen commemorates the ‘heroic age’ of polar exploration after the sensational crash landing in 1894 of a hydrogen balloon at nearby Onum.
It was a sort of dress-rehearsal for an expedition three years later to the North Pole which ended in tragedy. Three explorers crashed on the deserted Kvitoya (White
Island) in Svalbard, and although they were not badly injured, they eventually died there. No one knows how, and the fate of the expedition remains one of the unsolved riddles of the Arctic.
All this made for a fascinating if unlikely contrast with the Conditori Nordpolen’s delectable array of classic Swedish princess cakes – light sponge covered with green marzipan and topped off with a pink marzipan roses that Larsson was so skilled and speedy at creating.
Needless to say, the coffee he offered us to go with the generous slices was delicious: the Swedes, like the Italians, take their coffee very seriously. When I provocatively joked to one group of fika fans that I could do with a cup of instant instead, they all but snarled at me as if I were an invading Dane!