A Perfected Scandinavian Swirled Tiger Cake

I’ve lost track of all the butter and sugar.

I started writing about Scandinavian food seven years ago last month. I have no idea how many sticks of butter and cups of sugar I’ve whipped into cakes and cookies since then, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Scandinavian sweets are among the world’s best.

At the beginning, I would flip through The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas—one of the first Scandinavian cookbooks I bought—like a student. Almond, butter, sugar, and spices appeared time and time in the ingredient lists. I wanted to bake nearly everything.

Though I had grown up eating Scandinavian sweets and knew many of them by taste, I was new to baking most of them. These days, I’ve switched my focus to creating my own recipes, taking classic or traditional desserts and creating versions that are as delicious as possible while retaining authenticity.

That’s where this tiger cake comes in.

I first made a tiger cake last spring while baking from one of my favorite Nordic cookbooks. The result, however, was lacking. Sure, it was good, but if I’m going to eat cake, I want it to be worth every calorie and grain of sugar.

I got to work, boosting the intensity of the chocolate flavor and making the variations in color less marbled and more like stripes—the Scandinavians call it tiger cake, after all. This cake has become a new favorite of mine, and I hope you enjoy it just as much.

Scandinavian Swirled Tiger Cake
The marbled cake can be found throughout the Nordic countries. Baked in a loaf pan or a Bundt pan, it reveals swirls of chocolate and vanilla or citrus-flavored cake when sliced. Marble cakes are hardly unique to the Nordic countries. We know them well in America, where they go back at least to the 19^th century. German immigrants have been attributed as bringing them here prior to the Civil War (What’s Cooking in America).

2 sticks butter (salted), room temperature
1 ¼ cups sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 ¼ cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons natural, unsweetened cocoa powder
2 ounces dark chocolate, finely chopped (I used semi-sweet)
2 teaspoons instant espresso powder
1/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter and flour a loaf pan (9x5x3).

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well between each addition. Stir in vanilla extract. Sift together flour and baking powder and add to the batter, stirring to incorporate. Set aside two thirds of the batter and set aside.

In the remaining third of the batter, mix in the cocoa powder, chopped chocolate, espresso powder, and milk.

Spoon about a quarter cup of the plain batter into the bottom of the loaf pan, spreading it out slightly with a spatula. Add a spoonful of the chocolate batter in the center. Repeat, alternating the layers, until all the batter is gone.

Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out mostly clean, approximately one hour. Let cool on a wire rack.

Makes 1 loaf cake.

Find even more sweet and savory treats in my cookbook Modern Scandinavian Baking!