This recipe brings all my birthday pleasures back – it WAS my birthday cake for many years. I had to have this cake and no other. It is so delightful, this combination of chocolate and butter cookies. And you don’t even bake it! Of course when I was a kid I didn’t care how it was made, I just wanted to eat it.
You need special vegetable fat called Palmin. It is firm coconut oil and the other ingredient is a special chocolate frosting. Both ingredients you won’t find in an American supermarket. I already checked it out. Maybe in Illinois where you find little german communities.
Other names for this cake are “Zebra Cake” or “Cookie Cake”. Some call it “Cold Snout” because it is kept in the fridge for hours before served, so it is very cold.
I found this recipe on a German website called Marions Kochbuch (Marion’s Cook book) – Thanks Marion! — (Picture from Dr. Oetker)
Ingredients300 g Coconut fat (Palmin); available at http://www.germandeli.com/
300 g powdered sugar
120 g cocoa (de-oiled)
2 eggs
4 tbsp orange juice
8 tbsp hot water
40 g almonds
225 g butter cookies preferably from Bahlsen Leibniz
200 g chocolate cake frosting (Kuchenglasur)
How to make it
– Put coconut fat in a skillet and melt it on medium heat
– Let if cool off a bit (off the stove)
– Sieve the powdered sugar into a bowl and add the cocoa, mix it.
– Beat eggs in a separate bowl until foamy
– Mix in slowly the sugar-cocoa mix; add orange juice and stir it until it is a smooth mass.
While stirring add the slightly cooled off coconut fat in thin streams into the mass
– Add the hot water and stir it until smooth
– Put almonds into a bowl; blanch them by adding hot water; have them 5 minutes in the water, then sieve them; remove the brown skin between your thum and index finger (this is optional, you don’t have to have the almonds)
– Line a loaf pan with parchment paper
– Put almonds on the bottom of the pan
– Fill in 5 tablespoons of the chocolate mass and make it smooth
– Fill a layer of cookies on top of it
– Repeat layers of chocolate and cookies until pan is full BUT only add 2 tablespoons of chococlate mass on the cookies
– Have the cake for at least 2-3 hours in the fridge until it is really cool
– Before you serve turn out the cake and remove parchment paper.
– Make cake frosting per instructions and pour it over the cake.
– Keep the cake cool until served.
Tips
Fix the parchment paper with tape on the outside of the pan.
You can keep this cake in the fridge or in a cold basement up to 1 week; wrap it in aluminium foil.
You can make this cake days before, just keep it cool.
German Food, the way you love it! 