Learning Erlang Recursion

I’m learning the Erlang Programming Language and am currently working on the recursion exercise in the erlang course.

The min and max functions seemed pretty straightforward;

min([X,Y]) when X > Y -> Y;
min([X,_]) -> X;
min([H|T]) -> min(H,min(T)).

max([X,Y]) when X > Y -> X;
max([_,Y]) -> Y;
max([H|T]) -> max(H,max(T)).

min_max(List) -> {min(List),max(List)}.

But this is the best I could come up with for the Swedish Date problem; convert an Erlang date in the format {2001,02,03} to “010203″ recursively.

swedish_date() -> swedish_date(date()). 

swedish_date(Date) -> swedish_date(tuple_to_list(Date), "").

swedish_date([H|T], DateString) ->
        List = "0" ++ integer_to_list(H),
        String = lists:sublist(List, length(List)-1, 2),
        swedish_date(T, DateString ++ String);
swedish_date([], DateString) -> DateString.

Can anyone improve on that? I feel sure that recursion could help with the number of digits in each part of the tuple. 2001 → 01, 2 -> 02, etc.