The ‘roze koek’ is a much loved and eaten Dutch cake with a thick layer of pink fondant or icing.
Klik hier voor de Nederlandse versie
My family cannot get enough of these pink cakes. The beauty of making your own is you get to put in what you like, and leave out what you don’t. The supermarket version of these cakes, famous and equally loved and hated in all of Holland, does not taste of real butter, vanilla, lemon or raspberries. This easy homemade version does! Provided you use the best and freshest ingredients, real vanilla extract, zest from organic lemons, fresh dairy butter and raspberries.
We have been baking these cakes for some time now, from the time the pink cakes baking virus swept over the country and everybody started baking them. This recipe gives you the easiest version to make, great baking fun with kids too. Just like the famous Dutch ‘rondo’, which we also love to bake, these homemade pink cakes are the real deal and there really is no going back.
There is no raising agent in this cake, just eggs, and the trick is to get them not to dome so the flat surface can be easily coated with a smooth layer of pink. You can also fill the cakes with a dollop of raspberry jam or you can add a fresh raspberry inside to create a nice raspberry surprise when you bite into one.
Happy baking!
Ingredients for the cake batter
makes 12
165 g pastry flour or all purpose flour / plain flour
150 g butter at room temperature
150 g sugar
pinch of salt
3 eggs (165 grams)
zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp vanilla extract
Ingredients for the pink glaze
120 g icing sugar, sifted
10 fresh raspberries
15 ml / 1 tbsp lemon juice
water if needed
Making the pink cakes
The batter
Preheat your oven at 170 ºC / 340 ºF conventional setting. Grease a muffin tin (for twelve normal size muffins) with melted butter or pan coating. Combine butter and sugar and beat with a hand mixer for one minute until creamy. Add the eggs, one by one until incorporated. Add the lemon zest and vanilla extract and beat for one extra minute. Add sifted flour and salt to the mixture and combine until you have a smooth batter.
Divide the batter equally over the twelve muffin cups. Place muffin tin in the middle of the preheated oven and (this is important) cover the tin with a metal baking sheet. This sheet will prevent the batter from rising too quick. This way they stay nice and even on the surface and can be coated with a smooth pink surface.
After 10 minutes, remove the baking sheet and reduce the oven temperature to 160 ºC / 320 ºF. Bake for 7 minutes more, until light golden brown, then take from the oven. Leave to cool for about 5 minutes before removing them from the tin. Then leave to cool completely before applying the pink glaze.
The pink glaze
Using a sieve and the back of a spoon, squeeze the raspberries to get the essence of the fruit and leave the seeds behind. Mix the fruit puree with the lemon juice, add the sifted icing sugar and combine until you have a very thick paste that is almost not runny.
If necessary you can add some water to reach the right consistency. Apply an even layer of pink frosting on each cake and leave to dry.
Ola says
Hello,
I followed this recipe but it didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. I expected the batter to turn out dense, much like a Swedish “mazarin”:
sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/…_(bakverk)
This turned more into a muffin batter and so I wonder, are there 2 different schools of doing this? When googling images of roze koek, I find some are more muffin-esque, like this recipe, while others are more dense.
The one I was hoping to recreate is Albert Heijn’s roze koek.
Weekend Bakers says
Hello Ola,
Thank you for your comment. You could be right about the cakes being different. This cake batter has eggs in it and for it to stay dense not too much air should be beaten into it and because of the inhibiting of the rising of the batter, it should come out denser than normal cake batter too. For us it comes out more compact than ‘normal’ cake or muffin crumb, but maybe the mazarin recipe (we have not tried this)or another recipe comes closer to the store bought version (which of course contains no butter but palm oil, among many other ingredients a home baker would not normally use, so that makes it a bit of a challenge).
We hope you will find the right recipe and will come close to your perfect roze koek!
Ola says
Thank you for the reply!
I’ll try to give it a go – appreciate your detailed answer.
TLW says
I want to do these for our ‘wear it pink’ fundraiser. Are the cakes ok for freezing as I would like to get a load ready the week before then put the frosting on on the day.
Weekend Bakers says
Hello TLW,
We think it’s a very good idea to bake the cakes ahead and freeze and do the frosting on the day. We would however always recommend doing a trial run with a small batch to avoid disappointment on the day, because we can never fully judge the outcome of different ingredients and appliances and hands.
Hope it will be a great event!
Tracy says
Thank you 🙏
J G says
Recently I was diagnosed Celiac and I miss these cakes sooo much. Do you have a gluten free flour you recommend? I live in the US
Weekend Bakers says
Hello JG,
Very sorry to hear about your condition. We have never made a gluten free version of the cakes, it is not our field of expertise, but we would start with almond flour at least being part of it, maybe combined with a gluten free cake flour that is usually a combination of things like rice, tapioca and other flours to get a good result. We hope you will be able to taste a great pink cake soon!
Hugo says
Hi Guys,
Compliments for awesome site.
Question or actually a comment; you keep ‘pushing’ for using metric system and that is very good in my opinion as well, but you mention like 3 eggs but not the size or the weight.
Egg weights can easily vary from 45 to 70 gram depending on size number.
So I would suggest in recipe eggs also in metric net weight.
Thank you.
Hugo
Weekend Bakers says
Hi Hugo,
Thank you for your comment. You are very right of course. Egg is always the most challenging because of the container it comes in and the consistency and indeed they vary a lot in size. We have updated the recipe with the egg weight.
Happy baking,
Marieke
Edie says
Hi, the Dutch recipe for Roze Koek requires Bloem (all purpose flour) and the English recipe requires Cake Flour. Aren’t those very different?
I am Dutch, living in San Francisco and always very confused about all the different flours in the US and the Netherlands. For instance, self rising flour here seems very different than in the Nl. it tends to be very salty here.
Weekend Bakers says
Hi Edie,
Yes you are right and very right for pointing it out. Cake flour is a confusing term and can mean different things in different countries and can contain things like corn flour or maybe other ingredients or additives. You could use it for this recipe probably, but the main point is there should be no raising agent in the flour. In Holland cake flour (cakemeel) definitely contains baking powder.
So what we use for this recipe is fine white ‘patent’ flour and in the English version we should advice to use pastry flour or all purpose / plain flour as an equivalent.
Thank you and enjoy your baking in SF!
Edie says
Thanks for your quick answer, bedankt!
Willy Bulters-Dutcher says
wish it was in tsp. and tbsp. and cups
Weekend Bakers says
Because we consider baking to be an exact science and because measuring can lead to deviations of 10% or more we always advice to use scales and weigh ingredients to get good results with our recipes.
We do have a baking conversion page that you can consult for all the important ingredients:
www.weekendbakery.com/cooki…nversions/
patricia says
Hello,can I use flour Type 45 for this recipe? I live in France and don’t know what kind of flour to use for cake flour?
Thanking you
patricia
Weekend Bakers says
Hello Patricia,
Yes you certainly can. We also have used Type 45 for this recipe and it is quite perfect for it.
Happy baking!
Marieke
Tom Windsor says
This looks great, I will definitely try this. It seems like a great recipe that avoids the “fake” taste of places like Dunkin’ Donut, their donuts were so fake tasting, it wasn’t good. I love how the icing is coloured by raspberries, I must try these!