I Tried ‘Kladdkaka’: Swedish Sticky Cake Recipe And Review

IMO, the beloved bakes simply have to be gooey. Otherwise, they’re just a chocolate tray bake.

But I wasn’t thinking about brownies at all when I discovered Sweden’s kladdkaka, or “chocolate sticky cake”. Instead, I was searching for quick, empty-cupboard cake recipes that would go from mixing bowl to mouth in less than an hour.

The fact that kladdkaka’s runny base and shatteringly crisp top ended up delivering the perfect brownie texture with far fewer ingredients and a much shorter cook time was just a bonus.

Sometimes described as Sweden’s “most famous” or “most beloved” bakes, it’s a five-ingredient “sticky” chocolate cake with a molten-style base. The texture is somewhere between a brownie and a chocolate lava cake.

You’ll need cocoa, eggs, butter, flour, and sugar to make it. Kladdkaka takes about 15 minutes to bake and roughly the same amount of time to assemble.

Side note – I knew I was in for a gooey good time when I read that the recipe relies on cocoa, not melted chocolate, for its flavour.

We’ve written before about how, even though it sounds counterintuitive, putting melted chocolate in brownie batter can actually make it less luxuriously fudgy.

That’s partly because a bar of chocolate contains a fat called cocoa butter, which is solid at room temperature (you can’t spread a bar of chocolate on bread, for instance).

But when you include cocoa powder, which contains next to none of the fat that chocolate bars contain, your batter ends up relying on the other fat in the mix for its texture – butter.

Butter is just about solid at room temp, but less so than cocoa butter. That’s why brownies which use it as its main source of fat tend to be more velvety.

• 2 eggs
• 200g sugar
• 100g plain flour
• 30g cocoa powder (unsweetened)
• 115g butter

• Dash of salt
• A couple of drops of vanilla extract
• Raspberries
• Cream, mascarpone, creme fraiche, or any other cream to dollop on top
• Icing sugar for dusting – about 10g

• Greased 20cm tin, though a pie tin or even a loaf tin would do
• Large mixing bowl
• Smaller bowl for melting the butter
• Whisk
• Spatula, for folding in the dry ingredients and scooping out the batter

• Preheat your oven to 190°C fan, 200°C conventional, or gas mark 5.
• Place the butter in a bowl and microwave it for 15-second intervals. Check on it regularly until it’s melted, then leave it to one side.
• Whisk the sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract (if using) together until well incorporated.

• Sieve the cocoa, flour, and salt into the egg and sugar mixture and fold it in until just combined. Don’t over-mix: stop once the batter is more or less homogeneous.

• Slowly add the melted butter, mixing it in as you pour. Keep going until it’s become an integrated part of the butter rather than just sitting on top of it. The result should look glossy and a little bit bubbly.

• Scrape the batter into the prepared cake tin.
• Bake for 12-15 minutes. Because the bake is meant to be gooey, you can’t use traditional methods – like poking it with a toothpick or skewer – to see whether it’s cooked. Instead, look for signs like a just-set top that’s still a little wobbly in the middle; I feel it’s better to go slightly under than over, as the cake firms up as it cools.
• The hard part! Wait for at least 15 minutes for the cake to cool. Then, either remove it from the tin and place it on a plate or eat it warm.
• Sprinkle with a bit of icing sugar and add cream and raspberries before eating if you like. It can be stored in the fridge if you’re not eating it warm, but don’t sprinkle icing sugar on it before placing it in there – this runs the risk of becoming wet and sticky.
• Enjoy!