Heitt súkkulaði

Hot chocolate

This year my husband gave me an Advent calendar with Icelandic chocolate bars, one bar of chocolate every day. By the way, quite a few of them are made with licorice chocolate - typically Icelandic!

In the evening I made hot chocolate with milk from a large bar of my beloved Þristur licorice chocolate.

I think there's nothing like hot chocolate with a light licorice flavor when I want to make myself comfortable in the winter evenings and relax and wind down after a stupid day.

Ingredients for 1 cup

250 ml milk

60g chocolate

Preparation

Bring the milk slowly to the boil in a saucepan.

Cut the chocolate into small pieces.

Add the chocolate to the hot milk and let it melt, stirring constantly, until you have a nice, uniform liquid.

Then serve straight away, decorate to taste with whipped cream and, if necessary, a little cinnamon, coffee spice, licorice sprinkles or similar.

Well then - have a nice evening!

[Translated from here.]

Sweet recipes for Easter

I'm thinking about what I could maybe bake for Easter and I'm digging through my notebook for old recipes...

I just realized that my blog will be 10 years old in July, 10 years since I collected and tried out Icelandic cooking and baking recipes and shared and posted them here... I think I'm getting sentimental.. .

So it’s better to quickly get back to meal planning for Easter!

By the way, the very first recipe I posted here was Gulrótarkaka, Icelandic carrot cake, my daughter's declared favorite cake. I think we were able to lure her to Iceland for the first time with the prospect of carrot cake at Café Loki. So carrot cake is always an option when I'm thinking about what cake to bake for a special occasion.

A few years ago, especially for Easter, I baked this Páskakaka (= Easter cake), a sponge cake with two layers and yellow and orange butter-sugar-chocolate cream, because yellow is the typical color for Easter here in Iceland.

I decorated the cake with Easter eggs and bunnies, even though you rarely get small eggs in Iceland and especially not small Easter bunnies. Icelandic Easter sweets are big, literally.

I baked this Appelsínukaka (= orange cake) here for Easter two years ago, for a cozy coffee hour - thanks to the good weather, even on the terrace. A nice, quick recipe for a fruity sponge cake that can be prepared quickly even at short notice. Even my youngest, who isn't really a big cake fan, wanted a second helping of the cake...

8 years ago, when my mother was still alive and my sister was able to visit at Easter, I made a small peppermint ice cream cake with Oreo cookies and licorice as a dessert for the big family feast on Easter Sunday. It was also delicious, but I haven't made it in a long time...

This Húsfreyjuterta, the "housewife's cake", is also a very tasty but somewhat complex dessert cake. To be honest, I have no idea how the cake got its name, but I definitely like it and it looks good too, with the cream filling and the caramel icing. And you can have fun with the decoration on the cake if you like.

Or I'll just make the raspberry licorice cake that I baked recently...? With the mixture of fruit, chocolate and licorice, I found the cake wonderfully refreshing, fruity and really interesting with the licorice balls!

A classic option is of course Kransakaka. Such a "wreath cake" is a special specialty for festive occasions in many parts of Scandinavia and here in Iceland you can often find it on the cake buffet, especially at baptisms and confirmations. A cake like this actually has 15 to 18 stacked cake rings.

The cake consists of a lot of marzipan and sugar and is really delicious, but I don't like eating large portions of it in one go. That's why I only limited myself to 6 wreaths when baking - we're not such a big company and, to be honest, marzipan is pretty expensive here in Iceland...

Very important for an Icelandic Easter are of course these huge chocolate Easter eggs, filled with sweets and a note with a good wish or advice - either homemade Easter eggs ...

... or one of the many eggs in different sizes that you can buy everywhere in the supermarket. A huge Easter egg like these two, which a dear friend gave to our youngest and our grandchild, weighs an impressive 520 g!

Well, I still have two or three days until I have to decide what I want to bake for Easter this year...

Happy Easter, happy birthday!

[Translated from here.]

Lakkrísterta með hindberjum

Liquorice cake with raspberries

The recipe here is for a small but rich raspberry licorice cake. Wonderfully fruity, wonderfully chocolaty and with a distinct licorice taste! Yes, I know, not everyone loves licorice, even in our family - but those who do like licorice found this cake very tasty!

By the way, I have my husband to thank for the bag with the licorice balls:

On one of the last flights to Iceland something went wrong on the way to Germany, the plane had technical problems or a suspected defect, but in any case it only left Keflavík with a long delay. However, there were meal vouchers for the waiting time at the airport, and because despite a generous breakfast and delicious pizza for lunch there was still plenty of voucher left, my husband then used the rest for Opal schnapps and chocolate licorice.

I then used one of the bags of licorice balls (130 g) for this cake: about 30 g went into the melted chocolate cream, I then cut about 12 balls in half and used them for decoration. There were still a few balls left over to snack on...

Ingredients for the floors

2 eggs

180 g sugar

100 g melted butter

100 g wheat flour

2 Tbsp baking cocoa

1 pinch of ground vanilla

100 g raspberries

Ingredients for the cream

1 Tbsp butter

120 g chocolate with licorice

30 g licorice balls

100 g cream cheese

3 Tbsp powdered sugar

Ingredients for the decoration

150 ml mascarpone

200 g cream cheese

100 ml whipping cream

80 g powdered sugar

25 g raspberries

30 g dark chocolate

Liquorice balls

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 350 °F (180 °C) upper/lower heat.

Mix the eggs and sugar in a bowl until frothy.

Add the melted butter and stir.

Add the flour, baking cocoa and ground vanilla and work into a smooth dough.

Add another 100 g of fresh raspberries to the dough and stir in briefly.

Line a springform pan (approx. 20 cm) with baking paper, pour the dough into it, smooth it out and bake in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes (stick test!).

Take the cake out of the oven and let it cool thoroughly.

Meanwhile, for the cream, melt the butter and chocolate in a saucepan.

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cream cheese and powdered sugar until you have a nice, smooth cream.

Let the filling cool in the refrigerator.

Then cut the cooled cake in half to create two layers and spread the chocolate cream on the bottom cake board.

Place the top cake layer on top.

For the decoration, whip the cream until stiff.

In a second bowl, mix the mascarpone with the cream cheese, powdered sugar and the remaining fresh raspberries and finally carefully fold in the stiffly whipped cream.

Cover the cake completely with the raspberry cream - if you like, you can also fill a cake piping with cream for decoration and set it aside before covering the cake with the cream.

Then grate the dark chocolate over the cake.

Spread the cream from the syringe as decoratively as possible over the top edge.

Cut open the required number of licorice balls and spread them over the cream on the cake with the cut side facing up.

Chill the cake in the fridge for several hours...

...and then serve in small pieces (for me the cake was enough for 8 pieces).

Bon appetit!

[Translated from here.]

Lakkríssnúðar

Licorice rolls

I love yeast dough rolls in almost every situation and I can actually always give them to my family! Everyone loves cinnamon rolls!

But sometimes it gets to me and I want a change - and then there are no cinnamon rolls, but I try licorice rolls, for example! As a filling I add raspberry jam, powdered sugar and licorice sprinkles!

This recipe was enough for me to make 24 small licorice rolls.

Ingredients

260 ml milk

100 g margarine

450 g flour

1 pinch of coarse sea salt

80 g brown sugar

1 packet of dry yeast

4 Tbsp jam

2 Tbsp powdered sugar

4 Tbsp licorice sprinkles

Preparation

Slowly heat the milk and margarine in a saucepan over low heat and melt the margarine.

In a large bowl, mix the flour with the salt, brown sugar and dry yeast.

Then pour in the lukewarm milk with the melted margarine and knead everything thoroughly.

Then cover the dough and let it rise for at least half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 °F (180 °C) upper/lower heat.

Divide the yeast dough into two portions and roll out thinly into a rectangular shape.

Sprinkle the rolled out dough with two tablespoons of jam and one tablespoon of powdered sugar, then spread a tablespoon of licorice sprinkles over it.

Carefully roll up the dough over the long side and cut the roll into slices approx. 1 cm thick.

Sprinkle the rolls with some licorice sprinkles.

Place the rolls on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake in a preheated oven at 350 °F (180 °C) for about 20 minutes until they are golden brown.

And if visitors come over at short notice, I even have something unusual to offer!

Okay, not everyone is a converted licorice fan like me - so it was a good thing that I traditionally prepared half of the rolls with a sugar cinnamon filling. My offspring was also happy...

The licorice rolls have now been eaten!

[Translated from here.]

Þristaís

Þristur ice cream

Þristur is an Icelandic chocolate bar with a filling of soft caramel and small pieces of licorice.

I love these soft chocolate bars with their delicious licorice flavor - and I also love using them in the kitchen. For example, I once made a licorice cheese cake with it in the summer.

Ingredients

500 ml UHT cream

100 g brown sugar

250 g Þristur chocolate bars

250 g milk

1 pinch of ground vanilla or 1 tsp vanilla sugar

300 ml whipping cream

2 Tbsp licorice sprinkles

Preparation

First put the heavy cream with the brown sugar in a pot, bring to the boil and reduce by about half while stirring repeatedly. Then let the mixture cool down.

Thoroughly chop 2/3 of the Þristur chocolate.

Mix the milk with the reduced sugar-cream mixture, the chopped chocolate, the grated chocolate and the ground vanilla or vanilla drops.

Meanwhile, melt the remaining 1/3 of Þristur chocolate with 50 ml of whipping cream in a saucepan. Stir frequently while the sauce thickens.

Now whip the 250 ml of cream until stiff and carefully fold it into the milk-chocolate mixture.

Pour half of the cream-milk-chocolate mixture into a suitable loaf pan and pour half of the sauce over it.

Pour the remaining ice cream mixture over it and pour over the remaining sauce.

Then cover the ice cream with foil or something similar and let it freeze in the freezer overnight.

The next day, let it thaw slightly, portion it out and serve sprinkled with the licorice sprinkles.

[Translated from here.]