I scream, you scream, the Danes all scream for cream-filled fastelavnsboller

Fastelavn has always been a big deal in Denmark. It’s a festival that used to mark the beginning of the Lent period of fasting, back when Denmark was a Catholic country. Catholicism didn’t stick, but the holiday did. For most of its more recent history, it has been an occasion for children. They dress up, have a party and hit a piñata shaped like a barrel which once upon a time contained a live cat rather than sweets. Another feature of fastelavn is the making and eating of a particular kind of pastry known as a fastelavnsbolle.

All the Nordic countries have a sweet treat they eat at this time of year. In Sweden there’s semlor, cardamom buns with whipped cream. Norway, Finland and Iceland each have their own cream buns too. But in recent years, something has happened with fastelavnsboller (the plural of fastelavnsbolle) in Denmark that’s on another level altogether.

I was in town the weekend of fastelavn. Every baker in the city had spent the past few weeks in the trenches, working long, hard hours to meet a near-insatiable demand. Imagine if hot cross buns suddenly became the must-have, beg-steal-or-borrow items, and you get close to what I witnessed. “Can we call it a mass hysteria? I think we can,” one baker told me.

Fastelavnsboller have been around since at least the 13th century. The earliest reference to the buns is thought to be in a painting on the wall of a church just outside Skive, a town some 100km north west of Aarhus, in which the disciples sit before a table laden with rod-shaped buns at the Last Supper. These days, there are two types of bun. The ones closest to their medieval ancestors are now known as “gammeldags”: round, pillowy buns filled with cream, remonce (a butter and sugar mixture) and a flavoured jam, often blackcurrant, and usually topped with a chocolate glaze. Then there are the laminated type, which feature the same ingredients but without the chocolate glaze, and in a croissant-style dough.

It used to be that people would bake gammeldags buns at home, or buy some from the local bakery to take to school. Then, in 2021, everything changed. A new generation of artisan bakeries had opened in the city over the decade prior. Places like Juno, Alice and Hart applied the city’s famous cooking ethos to baked goods. This was the kindling. The spark was Covid.

In 2021, Denmark was in a full lockdown for the first time during fastelavn. Bakeries were one of very few businesses that were allowed to operate. Buying buns became almost the only entertainment available. Instagram was suddenly awash with posts about the photogenic fastelavnsboller on offer at various bakeries. And so the trend began.

Whereas once fastelavnsboller might be in shops in the week leading up to Shrove Tuesday, now you can get them from early January. Politiken, one of Denmark’s biggest newspapers, runs a fastelavnsbolle review each year. There are over 60,000 posts on Instagram tagged “fastelavnsbolle”, many of them featuring people buying and rating Copenhagen’s buns in categories like taste, appearance and texture. Elaborate new shapes and flavours emerge and vie for the city’s attention. Prices have leapt. A supermarket fastelavnsbolle might sell for a couple of pounds tops, but artisan bakeries are now selling elevated versions for close to £7. Queues snake around the block at the buzziest bakeries, and pre-orders are necessary to guarantee getting a bun before they sell out.

“It became like a huge competition, about who was making them better, who was making more. People went crazy about it,” one Copenhagen baker told me. The trend is not particularly widespread. In fact, it has made Copenhagen a subject of derision elsewhere in the country. A local TV station in Jutland did an online poll where only 5 per cent of people said they’d want to pay more than DKr36 (around £4) for a fastelavnsbolle.

The trend has been sustained beyond Covid because, even outside of lockdowns, January and February are cold, rainy, windy months in Copenhagen. People need something joyful. “Everybody always says they go on a diet in January and I’m like, you don’t want to go on a diet in January in Denmark, you wanna eat cake,” says Trine Hahnemann, the founder of the bakery Hahnemanns Køkken.

At the bakeries, invention is the name of the game, to the extent that today’s fastelavnsboller are sometimes unrecognisable as the original item. Mascarpone has overtaken cream, and the jams now come in every flavour, from apple to yuzu. As long as it is a pastry with cream and some kind of jam element, it’s a fastelavnsbolle, many of the bakeries seem to have decided. Not everyone agrees. “I’m being really conservative, but I don’t like when they start putting all kinds of weird things in, like pistachio and liquorice,” Hahnemann says.

The buns have become associated with a certain kind of Copenhagen hipster, according to two anonymous bakery workers (let’s call them Peter and Jens), who run an Instagram meme account — @fastelavnsbollememes — dedicated to fastelavnsbolle mania. They started their account in 2022, poking fun at the kind of customer who viewed getting buns from the most hyped bakeries as a status symbol. Memes on the page include the famous image of Al Pacino from Scarface, his face covered in white powder, with fastelavnsboller on the table instead of cocaine.

These hipsters, according to Peter, “like drinking natural wines, wear Salomon shoes, a super tiny hat, put up all the right things on Instagram, and are willing to pay those kind of prices”. And people are not just going to have one or two buns in a season. They’re having dozens.

“It’s basically like Pokémon; you’ve got to collect them all,” Jens says. It has become a social contest, a badge of honour. How many buns can you be bothered to wait and pay for?

My first two fastelavnsboller were from Hart Bageri, a bakery with seven shops around the city. They were a gammeldags and a laminated one: croissant dough filled with vanilla mascarpone cream, with an olive oil and passion fruit curd inside and flaked almonds on the top. The former was dense but soft and mildly flavoured, a gentle and soothing sort of pleasure like I imagine cows must feel when they chew cud. The latter was crunchy, tangy and sweet, and made a gratifyingly decadent mess when I ate it. They were very good buns.

My third, fourth and fifth buns I had as part of a tasting event at Perron, a bakery in Copenhagen’s BaneGaarden development. This is something Perron decided to do to formalise a process that people were already doing on social media: critiquing and ranking the buns. I was given three laminated buns in different flavours (blackcurrant, coffee and chocolate, bergamot and salted caramel) and a scorecard to rate them out of five in various categories.

I duly filled out my card, giving scores between 3.5 and 5, and then looked around at what other customers were doing and realised I was not taking this nearly as seriously as the Danes were. I watched one woman at the next table write “1” in the box for the blackcurrant bun’s taste without batting an eyelid.

But we were in the amateur league. I spoke to Christel Pixi, a pastry chef who, until recently, worked on the breakfast show Good Morning Denmark, who does a fastelavnsbolle review on her Instagram page every year. To do this, she visits 25 bakeries in Copenhagen and buys 33 buns in a single day, spending over £200 of her own money on them.

In the hour before the first delivery at 6.30am, the mood in the bakery was halfway between a hospital and a rave

At the weekend, I hit the pavement, to see the hype in action. I passed dozens of people holding bakery boxes, their loot already secured. I arrived at Andersen at midday. Andersen is a Japanese-inflected bakery in Islands Brygge, a buzzy neighbourhood in the south of the city, that was one of the first bakeries to produce “luxury” fastelavnsboller. There were about 30 people in the queue. As I waited, I spoke to other customers. A group of friends in their twenties laughed in my face when I asked if these were their first buns of the year. They didn’t even know how many they’ve had, or felt too embarrassed to tell me. I went for a rhubarb bun, shaped like an open mollusc with an oyster of cream poking out.

Next was Juno, another wildly popular bakery in a backstreet of Østerbro. This year, they’re doing one banana and one blackcurrant fastelavnsbolle. At 1.15pm, there were at least 60 people waiting. The duo in front of me had eaten eight buns between them this season and told me they would be getting a ninth today. By this point in the day the wind was blowing right through me. I did not feel strong enough to put myself through it. By the time I got to Andersen & Maillard in Nørrebro at 2pm, there was a sign in the window saying they were sold out.

This often happens, and has been the source of friction in the city. In stark opposition to the measured way Danes usually behave in public, customers have been known to get irate at servers when they arrive too late for a bun. This was one reason Peter and Jens started their meme account, to vent frustration at angry customers. One bakery, Alice, went so far as to post on Instagram in 2022 asking customers to understand that they could not simply “make more” buns to meet demand.

“I really saw adult people behaving like seven-year-old kids not getting a lollipop,” a worker at another popular bakery told me. “They were literally screaming at the front of house like, can’t you just increase the production?” For Danes who love cake, the fastelavnsbolle craze has been an interesting exercise in coming up against the material realities of how their pastries are made.

On Sunday, I went to find out for myself why they can’t just make more. At 3am, I arrived at a bakery’s main shop and production space, to join their troops in the war on dough. When I arrived there were just two bakers there, including the bakery’s creative director.

All the buns, as well as the other pastries the bakery produces, had been proving overnight, for slightly different lengths of time. You don’t want 5,000 items (yes, really) ready to go in the oven at the same moment. And each type of pastry has a window of ideal proving time. The gammeldags need to prove for three hours, and then go in the oven within 45 minutes after that. Certain items can bake together, and others can’t. Some pastries can only go in certain ovens. At this stage of the day, it was about playing what the creative director referred to as “oven Tetris”.

I got to work helping one of the bakers with egg washing the fastelavnsboller before they went in the oven, which is done using a vaporiser gun loaded with liquidised egg. At 4am, more bakers arrived, including a mild-mannered Swiss man who would be overseeing production. On busy days, the other bakers allow him to play loud, insane techno in one of the larger production spaces, to get him in the zone, and soon the building was throbbing with it.

A difficulty with fastelavnsboller, I learnt during the course of this morning, is that they are made of two primary ingredients: pastry and cream. Pastry shouldn’t go in the fridge, and cream shouldn’t really be out of it. Pastries are, of course, warm when they come out of the oven, which is death to cream. It is a live-wire performance to put these things together at scale.

By 5am there were so many people in the building that I was actively in the way. The bakers moved as a single organism. There was little need to talk: they had got this down to a fine art over the season. I was put to work extracting the laminated fastelavnsboller from their baking trays, and preparing them to be filled with jam, then cream, then topped with mascarpone and dusted with icing sugar. At completion, each delicate and beautiful bun has had perhaps a dozen people’s attention. There were at least a thousand buns in my sightline at any given time.

In the hour leading up to the first delivery to the shops at 6.30am, the atmosphere in the bakery was half way between a hospital and, thanks to the soundtrack which had now segued into happy hardcore remixes of Disney songs, a rave. They simply could not be making more buns than this, or any faster. By the time the bakery opened at 7.30am, my back ached after a pitiable four hours. This is work.

“People don’t really get what it takes,” Lea Strøbæk, the head baker at Perron, told me. The work has to be done to a high standard, by hand, and done by the same core staff that work in the bakery during the rest of the year. “It’s not that we just click two times more on the machine to make more buns,” Mathias Fabricius, the co-founder of Andersen & Maillard said, “and we’re not gonna hire people just to work for three weeks.” And all this bun-making is done on top of the production of all the other goods a bakery sells.

It’s a tricky balancing act for the bakeries. They have to make money and build enthusiasm for their particular buns, but also not overpromise to customers and overwork their staff. The money taken at this time of year has come to form a core part of a Copenhagen bakery’s business model. Selling out of fastelavnsboller at 11am as Andersen & Maillard does, Fabricius said, can seem like an exercise in building hype around scarcity, but it is also a function of the limited production space and the extent to which you can responsibly stretch your workers.

The mania shows no sign of letting up. In fact, it’s spreading elsewhere in the country. DR, the Danish public broadcaster, published a piece earlier this week about a new wave of bakeries in Jutland and elsewhere outside of the big cities that are selling gourmet fastelavnsboller. The bakers and front of house staff I spoke to hope, though, that when next year’s fastelavn rolls around, people will think a little more about their reactions to not getting the fastelavnsboller they wanted. After all, as Jens put it, “it’s just a fucking bun”.

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