Laura Hall/BBC:

In Norway, there is a cake for just about every celebration and event. For weddings, there is the tower-like kransekake, made of 15 to 20 ground almond-and-egg white rings stacked in concentric circles. At birthdays, a layered sponge cake with cream and berries called bløtkake is served. And for general success, Norwegians enjoy an aptly named “success cake”, made of almond meringue and a vivid yellow layer of custard.
While each of these cakes is made to celebrate specific special moments, there is one cake that is at home at every kind of celebration. That cake is the ​​Kvæfjordkake, also known as the verdens beste (world’s best) cake.
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The cake is a lush, layered confection that brings together custard and cream, the crunch of almonds and the snap of meringue, plus the steadying base of a light, airy sponge cake.
“It’s the national cake of Norway,” said Nevada Berg, who published her second cookbook, Norwegian Baking through the Seasons, in April 2023. The book features 90 sweet and savoury recipes, including traditional baked goods for Norwegian holidays and other special occasions. In addition to authoring cookbooks, Berg publishes a blog called Northwildkitchen, and also offers in-person cookery tours around Norway and online cookery classes.
“I love this cake! It definitely lives up to its name. It is one of the first cakes I had in Norway,” said Berg, who moved from Utah in the US to Norway in 2015. “There are so many amazing flavours and interesting regional traditions in Norway and it’s good to be able to bring them to the world.
The Norwegian cake tradition is very different to the US one. There are not so many ingredients and fewer nationalities influencing how cakes are made.”
The origins of Kvæfjordkake date to the 1930s, when cattle farmer and baker Hulda Ottestad bought some recipes from a Danish pastry chef to expand the range of cakes she was offering at Café Alliance, the bakery she ran with her sister in Harstad, a small city in in Northern Norway. One of the cakes was the kongekage, a Danish cake that used a lot of almonds. Since the nuts were pricey, she adapted the recipe and cut back on the quantity of nuts. In time, the cake grew in popularity and the recipe was tweaked as it passed around homes. It became known as the ​​Kvæfjordkake, after the Kvæfjord area Ottestad came from.
In the 1970s, the Norwegian newspaper Norsk Ukeblad featured the cake, and it became a national success. Thirty years later, in 2002, Nitimen, a national radio show, asked its listeners to help them choose the best cake in Norway, and the ​​Kvæfjordkake was unanimously voted as number one, above the kransekake, carrot cake, marzipan cake and chocolate cake. It has since become known as “the world’s best”, in Norway at least.
The cake is now recognised as the official cake of Norway, and is still eaten with much pride in Kvæfjord today. Next to the ferry port in the town of Refsnes, Susanne Hentschel runs a garden cafe called Refsnes Matglede with her husband. They see a lot of demand for the creamy, custardy creation.
“It’s one of the bestsellers in our coffee shop,” she said. “If four Norwegians come for a coffee, unless they are feeling very experimental, they usually order four slices of ​​Kvæfjordkake. Swedes might order four different types of cake, but Norwegians usually choose this one.”
When at home, Berg’s advice on making the world’s best cake is to take it slow when you come to the final assembly stage.
“I was told it would be quite difficult to make, but it has turned out for me to be a very forgiving cake,” she said. “The homemade custard looks daunting to make, but it’s not. The meringue is not baked like a pavlova, where you have to have a certain temperature to get it just right.
“The hardest thing is at the end, when you have to divide the cake in half, with the meringue flipped to the bottom,” cautioned Berg. “Timing it and making sure it doesn’t break is tricky!”