Creative Cake Shaping in Christmas Pastry

According to Norwegian traditions, one should make seven types of Christmas cakes. This could be a good chance for children to enjoy odours, tasteful and soft pastry while forming the cakes with their fingers! Of different consistencies, more or less sticky (because of the large content of butter and sugar), these plastic materials offer new tactile experience and possibilities for creative play with three dimensional forms… of course if one is not too strict to retain the cake’s traditional shape, size and form.
At my home we usually don’t manage to make all seven sorts, but we at least make gingersnap (“pepperkaker”). This year the pastry was readymade (from IKEA), but we have a “local tradition” of using homemade cake tins.

The metal cake tin shaped as a fire engine was made according to my son’s drawing, when he was 5 years old, and very interested in all sorts of cars with lights on their roof. The last years our favourite is the “Kerry Blue Terrier –cake”.

When making gingersnap one rolls out the pastry and prints cake forms out of it with a cake tin. The ready cakes are almost two dimensional, and can’t express the volume of the form they imitate. Anyone who has tried to translates a three-dimensional form inn to a two-dimensional knows that this in not always easy to do. To make a recognisable shape, one has to find a specific angle, with the most typical contour. And the outline must be a single continuing line.