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Norway · Dessert

Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake

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Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake

About this recipe

Norwegian cooking reflects its long coastline and short summer: cured and smoked fish, preserved meats, root vegetables, dairy, and the sweet-bread traditions of Christmas baking. Ingredients are few; quality and freshness do the work.

As a dessert, Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake is the part of cooking where ratio precision matters most: a five-percent miss on flour or sugar changes the texture in a way no savoury dish would notice. Weighing in grams beats measuring in cups every time.

The scaler above resizes every ingredient to the number of servings you actually want; Cook Mode walks you through the recipe one step at a time with hands-free timers.

Curated by the ScaleRecipe editorial teamReviewed

Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.

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Method

  1. Crust
  2. Mix together sugar, vanilla and butter until light and fluffy. Mix in the egg yolks. Add in the flour and baking powder and knead with hands until the dough is smooth.
  3. Pack the dough in plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
  4. Almond filling
  5. Run the almonds and sugar together in a food processor until the almonds are finely ground (you can decide for yourself how coarse or fine you want them).
  6. Stir in the butter, egg, cognac and/or almond extract (if using).
  7. Assembly
  8. Line the bottom of your cake form with baking paper and grease the sides of the form.
  9. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).
  10. Cut 2/3 of the crust dough into slices and press down into the cake form. Cover the bottom of the cake form with the dough and bring the dough 2-3 cm (1 inch) up the sides of the form, pressing until even.
  11. Scoop the almond filling on top of the crust, spreading it evenly across the cake form.
  12. Roll out of the rest of the dough and slice into long strips. Lay the strips of dough across the cake in a grid. Don't worry of the strips break – simply press them back together on the cake.
  13. Gently brush the dough with egg wash.
  14. Bake for about 45 minutes. The top of the cake should be golden brown while the almond filling will remain soft.

Cooking notes

Baked goods are unforgiving with rounding — use weights rather than volumes whenever possible, and verify pan capacity if you scale up or down significantly.

For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.

When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.

Scaling notes

Scaling Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake

Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.

Desserts are the most scaling-sensitive category, and Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake is no exception — the leavening, fat, and liquid ratios all interact. Doubling means a doubled pan AREA (not diameter), and bake time scales by the cube root of the volume change: a doubled cake takes about 26 % longer, not 100 %. Weigh ingredients in grams rather than measuring in cups for consistent results.

This recipe calls for eggs, which are the trickiest ingredient to scale to non-integer multiples. A US "large" egg weighs about 50 g; if a fractional scaling lands on, say, 1.5 eggs, beat one egg and weigh 25 g of the beaten mixture rather than guessing. The same goes for halving recipes — half an egg is 25 g of beaten egg, not a dramatic estimate.

Because this recipe is built around flour and sugar, weighing in grams (rather than measuring cups) is what separates a consistent bake from a one-time win. A cup of all-purpose flour can weigh 113 g or 150 g depending on how you scoop — that's a 30 % swing that ruins texture.

Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →

Beyond the recipe

Substitutions & make-ahead — Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake

Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake is doing structurally — here's the practical version.

Substitution ideas

Eggs

For binding (cookies, quick breads, meatballs): 1 large egg ≈ 1 tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 tbsp water, rested 5 minutes until gelled — structurally closest to a real egg. For moisture without structure (cakes, brownies): ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana per egg, accepting some loss of rise.

Butter

For sautéing or browning, equal-weight olive oil or a neutral oil works directly. For baking, equal-weight coconut oil (melted, then chilled to the same softness the recipe expects) gives a buttery richness; a quality vegan butter brick is the structural match for cookies and pastries where firmness matters.

Brown sugar

Brown sugar = white sugar + molasses. For 1 cup light brown sugar, use 1 cup granulated sugar + 1 tbsp molasses; for dark brown, 2 tbsp molasses. Coconut sugar is a near-1:1 swap with slightly less caramel depth — works for both light and dark.

For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.

Make-ahead and storage

Most desserts in Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake's family can be made one day ahead, but storage matters more than for savoury dishes. Cakes and breads go in an airtight container at room temperature — refrigeration stales them faster than room air. Custards, cream-based fillings, and any dessert with eggs as a structural ingredient must refrigerate. For freezer storage, unfrosted cake layers wrap tightly and keep 2 months; frosted versions ice-crystal within 3-4 weeks.

Recipe video

Fyrstekake – Norwegian Prince Cake

Go deeper

Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.

Each guide below is a real essay on the cuisine or the category — pillars, staples, techniques worth learning — paired with a curated grid of recipes filed under it.

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