It’s snowing outside, and the holiday baking is finally underway. Yesterday, after eating a plateful of lefse with lingonberries, I made Norwegian krumkaker with an old-fashioned iron, briefly setting my stove on fire.

My mom makes her krumkaker with a modern electric iron, but I am just stubborn enough to want to do things the old-fashioned way, like my grandmother did. So I brought out my classic stove-top krumkake iron and got everything ready, and then realized I had no cardamom. So much for being authentic.

I put together the batter, which is heavy on melted butter and light on sugar. Some recipes call for milk, but I fold in whipped cream.

The presence of these rich ingredients, combined with my stove-top cooking method, may explain why the butter dripping onto my burner caught fire at one point. I did not take a photograph of the leaping flames, since I was busy panicking. As one might expect.

Making krumkaker is labor intensive, since each pastry contains about a tablespoon of batter, and they bake one at a time.

I love these things! They’re paper-thin and barely sweet, and they crunch delightfully when you eat them, like a really delicate ice cream cone. I’ve heard of people who dust their krumkaker with sugar or dip them in chocolate or fill them with whipped cream, but they are doing it wrong. The right way to eat krumkaker is absolutely plain, after setting your stove on fire.