Lolly Cake

Pink, yellow and green sweets show as scattered spots on the brown cut surface. New Zealand’s lolly cake is made by binding crushed biscuits with sweetened condensed milk and other ingredients, then chilling and slicing it. Because the outside is coated with white desiccated coconut and the mixture is set in a log and cut into rounds, it is also called lolly log. Lolly means candy and similar sweets, and log means a length of tree trunk.

Crushed biscuits bound with condensed milk and chilled

The base is made from malt biscuits, which are dry and already baked. The crushed biscuits keep their malty flavour and brown colour in the finished lolly cake, after they have been mixed with condensed milk and set.

A cake is usually set by baking eggs and flour in an oven. Lolly cake is different: here the added ingredient is condensed milk, which brings moisture and sweetness, and some recipes (the proportions of ingredients and the method) also use melted butter. The basic method is to mix the ingredients, shape them and chill them until firm.

Recipes from Bin Inn and Griffin’s add butter, while Chelsea has a method that binds the mixture with condensed milk alone and adds no butter. In Chelsea’s method, part of the coconut is also mixed into the mixture.

The sweets are not mashed fine but left in pieces. This gives a chew that differs from the biscuit base, and colourful pieces appear in the cross-section.

The mixture is pressed into a log, coated on the outside with more coconut, and chilled until firm enough to slice. Griffin’s recipe calls for 4 hours in the refrigerator. Because it is set by chilling in the refrigerator, there is no baking step in the oven. Chelsea also offers a version rolled into bite-size balls, so the same ingredients can be finished either as a log for slicing or as bite-size balls.

Lolly cake seen in Dunedin. Colourful sweets are visible in the cut surface, with coconut on the outside. Photo: Daderot, 2024-10-24, Dunedin, New Zealand. Original image / CC0. Reduced-size version from the source site; no additional processing.

Homemade lolly cake and shop-bought products

Lolly cake is made at home and is also popular as a shop-bought product. A recipe from the dairy company Anchor includes the writer’s memory of seeing it at a local bakery.

No one has established who invented it or when. Ingredient manufacturers have taught home cooks how to make it, and it has also continued as a sliced sweet sold in shops.

Original Foods currently sells a large, pre-cut slab and the individually wrapped 65-gram “Sweet As Lolly Cake.” Both combine malt biscuits, soft fruit puffs and coconut, as the homemade version does. However, they are sold in forms that make them easy for shops to handle piece by piece and easy to carry. Sweets sold under the name lolly cake include slab products like these as well as ones with a round cross-section.

Lolly cake on a plate with other sweets at a café in Waimate, New Zealand. Photo: DrThneed, 2020-11-15, Waimate, New Zealand. Original image / CC BY-SA 4.0. Reduced-size version from the source site; no additional processing.

The sweets renamed “Explorers”

Pascall’s “Eskimos,” which appear in older recipes, were renamed “Explorers” in 2021 because of concerns about the term as a name for Indigenous peoples. The manufacturer said the flavour would stay the same. Shoppers now find the same ingredient for the same recipe under a new name.

These soft, fruit-flavoured sweets and fruit puffs are the most typical lollies used. They are similar to marshmallows, but they are mixed in as pieces rather than melted into the mixture.

As a result, colourful bits appear in the cross-section when the cake is sliced.

Adaptations into cheesecake and cookies

For Griffin’s Lolly Cake Cheesecake, the mixture is pressed into a round tin and topped with a layer of cream cheese. In this recipe, the mixture of crushed biscuits and sweets becomes the base of a cheesecake.

In 2021, Cookie Time sold a limited-edition cookie with the same name. It is a different, oven-baked product that combines malt, coconut and coloured lollies with white chocolate. It was sold at some New World, Four Square and PAK’nSAVE stores, as well as at petrol stations and local retailers.

It is made differently from the chilled sweet based on malt biscuits. However, the product takes over its ingredients of malt, coconut and coloured lollies, as well as its well-loved name.

Glossary