The birthday cake for a licorice fan

My husband's favorite candy is licorice. For a baking enthusiast, first girlfriend, now wife, this caused minor problems in the beginning. Chocolate, which is my favorite, is so much easier to use in baking than licorice. After the first couple attempts it even seemed that licorice is not suited for baking. Since then my eyes have opened to the possibilities and last Friday when I baked my husband his birthday cake, the theme was licorice. I adapted the licorice muffin recipe by Kinuskikissa.

1 ½ dl of milk
6 Kick bars
150 g of margarine
1 ½ dl of sugar
2 eggs
2 ½ dl of flour
2 tsps of baking powder
2 ½ tbls of cocoa powder
1 dl of Tyrkisk Peber crush
1 Lakumatto

At first I greased and sprinkled the cake form with breadcrump and took out the margarine from the fridge to soften. If you don't have Tyrkisk Peber crush, I would crush the candies at this point. My advice would also be to cut the Lakritsimatto in pieces at the same time and not do as I did, which was nearly forgetting the whole licorice bar.

Next I cut the Kick bars into pieces and put them in the saucepan with the milk. I used non-fat milk, but others are fine too as well as cream. I let them heat up mildly until the licorice had melted into the milk, which took surprisingly long. I let the mixture cool down, but the milk was still somewhat warm when I mixed it up into the batter.

I foamed the margarine and sugar and added the eggs. I mixed the dry ingredients and the Tyrkisk Peber crush and added into the batter with the licorice milk.


According to Kinuskikissa's recipe the batter makes 12-20 muffins and because of that I was confident that with the same amount of batter I could make a cake. In addition, I didn't make the frosting, because my plan was to serve the cake with vanilla ice cream.

I kipped the batter into the cake form and sprinkled the pieces of Lakritsimatto on top and pressed them deeper with a fork.

I baked the cake in lower part of the over in 175 C for roughly 40 minutes.



The result was loved by the birthday boy, which made the baker a happy wife indeed. We didn't miss the frosting as the soft vanilla ice cream replaced the need and complemented the flavor perfectly. Kick-milk provided ab all-round licorice flavor. The pieces of licorice inside the cake soften to wonderful lumps, that you can't see but will taste. The Tyrkisk Peber also gave a nice salty and strong touch. The biggest flaw of the cake was that it was so fulfilling that you couldn't possibly eat more than one piece, but thinking positively, now we have a licorice dessert waiting in the freezer for two more times.

After such a delightful experiment I'm also happy that the favorite candies of both of us seem to be well suited together. The first time I baked with licorice I made muffins with an ordinary white batter. Later I have discovered that cocoa and chocolate indeed go well with licorice.

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