Cooking and Cabins

Hands-On Experience!

Today I tried my hand at making karjalon piirakka (Karelian pie). I am not much of a cook, but my activity choices were cooking or choir, so cooking it was! We haven't actually been served them yet, so I can't say yet how they turned out, but several of the others in the group were very experienced and had the process down to an art form. Here are a few pictures.

Preparing the dough 

Peeling hard boiled eggs. I am not sure what they are used for yet. Maybe a topping?

Rolling the dough into a log 

Rolling out the small pieces of dough to make the individual crusts. They have to be very thin and round. This is not as easy as it seems!

Filling the pastries. They are filled with rice pudding.

This is what they look like when they are filled. Hopefully, I will have a picture of them baked tomorrow!

My first piirakka!

Can You Tell the Difference?

We had a guest speaker today named Frank Eld who shared information about the craftsmanship of Finnish log cabins and how they differed from other log cabins built in early America. He even included a demonstration of the building process with miniature-sized tools.