Skrabbkaka

There's nothing remotely Nordic about this snap of my Christmas preparations, but it gives me an excuse to mention an obscure Swedish word I learnt recently: skrabbkaka. It means the little runty thing that you make with the leftover dough when there's not enough left for a full unit of whatever it is you're baking. 

It's invariably eaten by any child who lingers in the vicinity. Or else the cook eats it. My own gluten-free skrabbkaka was plain to the point of insipidity, but I appreciated it nonetheless. (I should've added some mincemeat.)

The same doesn't apply to the skrabbkaka in its usual Swedish context, the baking of pepparkakor (the biscuits marketed over here as "ginger thins"). Then the leftover is just as spicily delicious as the other biscuits, only smaller.  

The word skrabb means "scrape". As in a scraped-together artefact, I suppose. 

The word kaka is cognate with "cake", but in Sweden it's apt to mean what we call "biscuit".  An elaborate cake with a layer of filling and icing tends to be called a tårta. Not always, though. For instance Swedes also make a spiced cake, rather like ginger cake, which they call mjuk pepparkaka (i.e. "soft peppercake"). I haven't researched this, but I imagine Swedish kaka corresponds to German Kuchen (e.g. Lebkuchen) and that the German word also lies behind the American cookie.