Tiger Cake ‒ Tiikerikakku

Random facts about Finnish coffee culture #11: Nowadays stores compete over who sells the cheapest coffee, sometimes even under their own purchase price to get us coffee addicts do all of their shopping in the same place. But in the 80's a packet of coffee was still expensive enough to be a popular present item when going for a visit, and that's still more common than bringing say, a wine bottle.


"I'm taking part in this food blogging challenge this month. And so it wouldn't be too easy I took a theme of Finnish coffee table pastries."
"Finnish pastries? What, like tiger cake?"
"Why yes, I some one on the table actually! Care some?"

The conversation above took place on Sunday evening. Before that I asked another friend if he would happen to have a ring mold he could lend me and he asked: "Oh you mean a tiger cake mold?". I think these stories describes beautifully how plain and ordinary this cake is thought to be among younger Finns. Yet there is usually a good reason why some foods become so iconic in the first place that they practically start to bore us.

Though the recipe is as simple as it can get, this time I almost failed the whole thing. I took some model from another recipe, took it out of the oven way too early, tried to turn it onto a plate and got some hot, still runny batter on my hands. Ouch. Miraculously, most of the cake came out just fine after some more time spent in the oven. So in the following recipe I've given you the total baking time I used, which is in line with the three other dry cakes I'm posting this MoFo.

- 4.5 dl wheat flour
- 200 g margarine
- 3 dl sugar
- 1 dl oat or soy milk
- 1 dl apple or orange juice
- 2 tbsp dark cocoa powder
- 2 tsp vanilla sugar
- 2 tsp baking powder

Melt the margarine. Mix the dry ingredients except for the cocoa powder. Add the liquids into the dry ingredients. Divide the batter in two portions, the other one being slightly bigger. Mix the cocoa with the slightly smaller half

Grease a ring mold and apply breadcrumbs too if you wish. Pour some white batter in the, cocoa batter carefully on it and so on. Try to make the white layer the last. Quite often you see version with just one large cocoa stripe, so that's totally acceptable too. Bake in 175°C for about an hour.

Nutritional values / 970 g:
energy 3468 kcal
fat 152 g
protein 45 g
carbohydrates 476 g
fiber 15 g