Being a preservation gal at heart,

Being a preservation gal at heart, I couldn’t resist going online and finding a first edition of the Prinsessornas Kokbok. I am now the proud owner of a lovely, vintage set of the cookbooks and can definitively report that the original edition does not have a recipe for a cake anything like the prinsesstårta that is so popular today. So I enlisted the help of hembakningsrådet (the Swedish home baking council) who had access to several editions of the Prinsessornas Kokboks. The recipe doesn’t appear in the 1937, 1945, or 1952 editions, but there IS a recipe for Grön Tårta (green cake) in the 1948 edition and hembakningsrådet confirmed it is the prinsesstårta recipe as we know it today. For whatever reason the recipe was dropped from the 1952 edition, but the name Grön Tårta explains the green color.