Rabarbrakake – Norwegian Rhubarb Cake with Meringue

Perhaps the one dish I would most look forward to my Norwegian grandmother making every summer we visited her in Telemark was her rabarbrakake, or rhubarb cake. Well, she called it a cake, but I guess it might better be described as a rhubarb meringue pie.

I’m a huge fan of rhubarb and meringue, but actually what made this rabarbrakake so good was the crust. It’s a bit thicker and fluffier than a traditional pie crust but more dense than a cake, and oh my is it delicious.

I asked my mother if she had the rhubarb cake recipe, and she sent over a photo of it.

And that’s when I realized something strange.

I have so many memories of making Norwegian waffles, krumkaker, sandnøtter, and all sorts of other Norwegian baked goods with my grandmother, but I don’t remember ever helping her with her rhubarb cake. And that was bad news for me when I saw the recipe, because if you read Norwegian you’ll see that it’s not much of a recipe. The measurements are vague (eg. “3 egg whites, preferably more”), there are no baking instructions, and there’s not even a mention of rhubarb – apparently this was originally an apple cake.

I considered asking my mother if she remembered more details, but then I thought back to the one time she attempted to make this rhubarb meringue pie herself, and it… wasn’t great. And I guess that wasn’t all too surprising, considering how my grandmother always made her rabarbrakake when we happened to be out for the day.

So I’m beginning to think that this was intentional on her part, because this wasn’t just her best rhubarb cake recipe, it was her secret rhubarb cake recipe.

But don’t worry, after a bit of trial and error (okay, a lot of errors), I think I’ve figured it out! And now I’m going to share it with the Internet, because I’m terrible at keeping secrets.

Tips

I don’t peel the rhubarb, but I do remove any particularly stringy bits while chopping the rhubarb into small pieces. The rhubarb will cook down for quite a while, so you don’t have to be too exact here. I also just guessed with the amount of rhubarb. If you cook up extra, stewed rhubarb tastes delicious on its own, or served over ice cream!

In fact I now always intentionally cook up a lot of extra rhubarb whenever I make this cake because it’s so good over ice cream (and the cake itself always gets eaten up immediately).

Add the sugar to the rhubarb slowly at the end so you can decide if you want it more or less sweet. I prefer the rhubarb on the less sweet side, since the meringue topping is sweet as well.

Try to use the best quality butter you can find for the crust. The flavor of the butter really shines through in this cake, so the better the butter the better the cake.

My pie form has a 27 cm (10.5 in) diameter, so if yours is smaller you might not need to use all the rhubarb pie dough.

I bake the crust until it just starts to turn golden on top. Then I let it cool a bit before adding the rhubarb and meringue on top.

Make sure you whisk the egg whites and sugar long enough to get truly stiff peaks (they shouldn’t melt back down), as you’ll want the meringue to hold its shape on top of the pie.

When adding the rhubarb on top of the pie I leave the edge free so the meringue can seal the rhubarb in the pie.

Then when adding the meringue topping I use the back of a spoon to make lots of peaks across the top – because I think it looks pretty that way.

Keep an eye on the pie in the oven to make sure the meringue doesn’t burn, but the tops and edges should get a bit brown.

I think this rabarbrakake tastes best once fully cooled, and it also tastes best eaten the same day.

You can switch the recipe from US measurements to metric by clicking from “US Customary” to “Metric” under Ingredients.