Making Danish Kringle

My relatives on my dad's side of the family all live around the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.  About twice a year, I visit my aunt's house in Minnesota and get to see my aunt, four "boy cousins" and Beste (short for bestemor, the Danish word for "grandmother").
So Beste's really into teaching everybody about our Scandinavian heritage, through her various photo albums, books, and especially her cooking.  At Christmas we make Swedish meatballs, "snow pudding" (or rombudding in Danish), and lefse, which are delicious Norwegian potato pancakes, rolled very thin, grilled, and eaten with plenty of butter.

But my favorite Danish treat is kringle.
The horrible cheese "danishes" from Tim Hortons don't hold a candle to this.  It's basically a flaky croissant-like dough with an apricot filling and almonds on top.  Some people make it with pecans as a filling but I prefer fruit.  The best part of it is the cardamom in the filling.  This gives it a great scent!

Here's a copy of the recipe:

First you've gotta make the yeasted dough and roll it out into a big rectangle...

And then you've gotta add the frozen butter block (butter + a bit of flour), folding one third of the yeasted dough on top...

And then the other side on top, like a business letter.

After repeating this process three times, you'll get lovely, flaky layers of the butter laminated inside the dough (during baking, the butter melts and releases steam, causing the flakiness of many pastries).

Just LOOK at all that butter!

Meanwhile, soak 2 packages of dried apricot halves (the more tart, California kind, not Turkish) in 1 1/2 cups of boiling water.  I added a little vanilla bean too.  Soak them until they're plump and then drain off the excess liquid.

Now you're going to cream butter, confectioner's sugar, cardamom, and a bit of cream to a frosting-like consistency...

...and then add it to the apricots and mix thoroughly.  It'll look weird.

Roll out half of your pastry dough into a very long rectangle.

Then add the apricot mixture.

Close it all up, using water to help keep the seams shut.

Put it on the baking tray into a pretzel-like shape (for some reason this reminds me of ram's horns)...

And top with beaten egg, sugar, almonds, and more sugar.

Bake for 25 minutes, and VOILA!  Isn't it pretty?

Just perfect with a glass of milk.  Enjoy!