As Berlin Midsommar Festival is getting closer, we thought about this well-known german advice: “Vorbereitung ist das A&O!!” (means: “Preparation is the most important thing!!”). So in the next weeks you will get guides by Berliners on how to pamper yourself for the highlight of the Nordic by Nature year: Berlin Midsommar Festival. Food is one of my most favorite things. And a good Midsommar partey should ALWAYS have enough food, so I asked journalist and lecturer Aida from Improkitchen and soon to be launched online magazine Misanthropic-Traveler.com  to show us how to stuff our faces Midsommar-Style. FYI; you will find carbs, fat and lactose!

Oh, Midsommar! It’s not only a time for merry discounts at Ikea, but also everyone’s favorite time of the year, when you can finally strip off those knit-jumpers and dance around a maypole half-naked with a flower-wreath on your head. But that’s only half the fun, because Midsommar is also about stuffing your face with all the best summer produce you can possibly imagine, with the people you love the most.

Potatoes

Traditionally, the first potatoes of the year are eaten in basically every potato-salad-variety possible, just keep in mind to use those tiny delicious morsels called «new potatoes». Our favorite recipe is to just mix it with a little bit of yoghurt and loads of fresh herbs. The salad is paired with home-cured salmon and pickled herring. “W h a t ! ?”, you may think, “I am supposed to make that at home? I can’t make a fire and smoke fish in my tiny Neukölln-flat! What about the Brandschutz?” Don’t fret, you don’t need fire to turn raw salmon and herring into luscious swedish delicacies, it’s way easier.

Salmon

Season the salmon with loads of salt, sugar, some kind of high-octane alcohol and dill. Pack it into loads of cling film and leave it to cure for two to three days, while massaging on a regular basis to distribute the brine all over your lovely fish. This way, your fish will not be raw anymore without you actually having to cook it. Magic! You can find a quite good basic recipe in English over at the BBC.

Herring

With the herring, it works quite similar, just without the massaging: You need salted herring filets, soaked in water overnight and drained. When ready for pickling action, you fire up the stove and boil a mixture of:

- Vinegar
- Sugar
- Water

Mix it with:

- Peppercorns
- Bay leaves
- Carrot pieces
- Onion slices
- Allspice
- Cloves

Now let it cool. Once it’s cold as ice (not really), you mix it with your herring and leave it to its own fate for at least three days in the refrigerator.

Both fishy dishes are obviously BFFs with the potato-salad. And loads of horseradish and knäckebröd. If you’re really, really ambitious, you can even combine all the things you’ve prepared so far in one dish and make a Smörgåstårta, which is essentially the love-child of a sandwich, a salad and a cake. But you can also call it a day and start getting drunk on Aquavit, because you’re young and you’re beautiful and it’s Midsommar.

But stop! One last thing: what would life be without dessert? The most typical dessert is strawberries, strawberries and some more strawberries with loads and loads of whipped cream. Oh god, it’s better than anything else. Although it can’t really get any better than just combining fresh strawberries with cream, many Scandinavians will go the extra mile, and turn something good into something fantastic by turning the world’s most beloved summer dessert into a cake. Inspired by the Scandi-Foodie-Superstars over at Green Kitchen Stories and Foodie Underground, I came up with my own Midsommar-Cake for people who are really, really bad at baking. And time-management. And people, who would rather spend less time preparing and more time dancing around a maypole with flowers on their heads.

Midsommar Cake - lazy baker style

For this recipe, we’ll use yoghurt and quark instead of cream, to make it all a bit lighter and, most importantly, faster.

For the crust:

- 200 g grounded hazelnuts
- 200 g grounded almonds
- 200 g chopped almonds
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 tablespoons agave syrup or honey
- 2 tablespoons water
- A pinch or two of salt

For the filling:

- 400 g greek yoghurt
- 250 g quark
- 2 tablespoons agave syrup or honey
- 2 tablespoons olive oil

For the topping:

- Strawberries to taste
- Mint to taste
- Optional a hand full chopped chocolate seeds of one vanilla bean

Mix all the ingredients for the crust until a sticky dough forms. If you want, you can add a bit of chopped chocolate to the mixture, because chocolate makes everything better. Since there is no egg in the dough, you can already snack on it! Try not to eat it all and press the dough into a tarte pan, try to do it as evenly as possible. Meanwhile, make somebody mix all the ingredients for the filling in a separate bowl. If you want to use real vanilla, slice the bean open lengthwise and try to scrape as many beans out as possible and put them in the yoghurt-mixture. Pour the filling over your crust, make it look as nice as possible and put it in the freezer for at least two hours. While the cake freezes, slice the strawberries, chop up the mint into tiny pretty ribbons and mix it.

When you’re ready to serve, pop out the cake, arrange the strawberry-mint-salad on it and present your midsommar-inspired-fro-yo-strawberry-cake to your hungry friends. They’ll fall in love with you, for sure.

Berlin Midsommar Festival I 19th of June I Urban Spree I Facebook Event