Is it necessary for a coffee cake to have some kind of streusel or crumb topping to be called coffee cake? I tend to think not, but with the exception of coffee cakes that are baked in bundt pans (and often have a layer of streusel running through them), it generally seems to be true. Untopped cakes can easily fall out of the coffee cake category and into some other class of cake. But regardless of whether crumb toppings are necessary, they are certainly delicious and it never hurts to have a generous amount of top of a coffee cake.

In this recipe, the cakeitself has a tender, moist crumb thanks to the presence of sour cream in the batter. It features the well-balanced flavors of vanilla and butter, both of which complement coffee excellently. I topped it off with a large portion of crumb topping, which I clumped together as I sprinkled it onto the cake batter in an effort to ensure that every piece of cake had an equal - and large - amount of the topping. If the cake were baked with just these two elements, it would be a fairly standard, classic crumb cake. But I wanted to take it a step further and add an additional flavor: strawberry jam.

I chose a jam (from Trader Joe’s, if you’re curious) with large chunks of strawberries and spooned it onto the unbaked sour cream cake batter once I had spread it into the baking pan. I gently swirled some of it into the batter, being careful not to over mix and turn my swirl into strawberry cake batter. The crumbs went on top of the jam. I recommend lining the cake pan with aluminum foil to ensure that you can lift out the cake without too much of the crumb topping falling off when you go to serve it.

Once baked, the result was amazing. The cake was even moister and sweeter with the presence of the jam, and the chunks of fruit in the preserves lent a fantastic, colorful look to the cake. While it is on the sweet side, when served with a strong coffee the flavors balance out perfectly. Heck - even if you serve it with rich hot chocolate, I suspect people will be going back for seconds. Whether it’s the jam swirl or the crumb layer that wins them over, I can’t say, but I can promise that this is one tasty coffee cake.

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Don’t be fooled by the cake-like appearance of the treat in the photo above, nor by the name. This coffee cake has only a slightly resemblance to the moist, dense cakes you can find in just about any coffee shop. It is actually more like a sweet bread than a cake because it is made with a yeasted dough instead of being leavened with a chemical leavener, such as baking soda.

The original recipe came directly from Fleischman’s and I used RapidRise/instant yeast to make the dough. This allowed me to incorporate the yeast without first proofing it in warm water and, at least in theory, cut down on the overall time needed for the dough to rise. If you want to try it with active dry yeast, just proof it for 10 minutes in a bit of warm water until foamy, then proceed with the recipe as written. You might want to let the dough rise a bit longer before putting it into the oven, but proofing should provide all the activation that active dry yeast needs to get started.

Getting back on topic, this is a very easy bread/cake to make and well worth the few minutes it takes to mix up the batter. The base dough is made in one bowl and put into a baking dish, no kneading required, and topped with fresh sliced fruit (nectarines, in this case) and a crumble topping. It needs only an hour to rise before it can be popped into the oven, baked and served. The bread is light and slightly eggy, with a taste that reminds me a bit of challah. The topping turns a bit caramely and complements the flavor of the fresh nectarines very well. The crumble comes out of the oven crisp, but will soften as it cools because of the natural juices that are released from the fruit. Don’t worry too much about this if you’re planning to bake the bread in advance. It tastes great both ways.

Fresh fruit will give you the best results, but if you do want to try it with frozen, defrost the fruit completely and gently blot up any excess juice before adding the fruit to the cake. I left the skin on for a bit of color and the slices are quite thin, so it is really unnecessary to peel the fruit if you are using one with a thin skin. In place of nectarines, you can use apples, peaches, apricots or plums in this recipe.
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Crumb cake is in a class by itself when it comes to coffee cake. The buttery, slightly crunchy, melt-in-your-mouth crumbs that top the cake make it not only delicious, but actually drive people to seek it out in bakeries, cafes and restaurants. If you’re used to a streusel-topped cake, which lacks the signature large clumps of topping found on a crumb cake, the prospect of making one at home can seem daunting. The fact of the matter is that it is actually quite easy to make. The hard part, when it comes to this type of cake, is resisting the temptation to have a second (or third) piece.

The crumb topping is formed by mixing flour, sugar, spices and melted butter. As these elements are stirred together, the mixture takes on the look and feel of wet sand. Like the sand, you can pick up handfuls of the mixture and gently squeeze them into clumps. Unlike the sand, which will fall apart when released, these clusters of crumb topping will stay togther when sprinkled on the unbaked cake.

Underneath all that crumb is a vanilla-flavored cake, made rich and tender with the addition of sour cream. The cake is a good match for the topping because it is sturdy enough to support it and prevent any sinkage, but not so heavy that the cake seems dense or dry.

Crumb cakes almost always use cinnamon as the primary spice in their topping. It is just about universally liked, so you really can’t go too far wrong with it. Of course, it can get boring after a while. I opted to use a chai spice mix in my topping, adding ginger, cardamom and allspice to the cinnamon.

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I like a good superlative as much as the next person, but I’m not one to throw around words like “amazing” and “the best” lightly when it comes to a recipe. In fact, I probably wouldn’t use them myself to describe this particular coffee cake. I will say, however, that the lucky people who got to sample this used those exact words to describe this moist, tender, light and crazily addictive cake.

Backtracking for a moment, the reason that I wanted to make this cake in the first place was twofold: I had a mostly-unused container of sour cream sitting around in my fridge that was looking for a recipe to work itself into and I had a package of Nutorious nuts that were also looking for a job.

Nutorious is a Wisconsin company that makes gourmet candied nuts. I’m not necessarily a big nut fan, but theirs are really outstanding. They use a mix of nuts and they come in flavors like Cherry Vanilla and Cranberry Orange. It is easy to breeze through one of their bags in no time flat, especially if you have someone to help you much, but the company goes out of their way to point out how good the nuts are in various recipes, so I wanted to try them out in something. I ended up using a mixture of their Original and Cherry Vanilla flavors with excellent results, as the candy coating blended right into the cake. Any candied or sweetly spiced nut will work in this recipe, and you can always opt for plain, toasted nuts, too. Nutorious mixes walnuts, pecans and almonds, so try to use a blend if you’re not using theirs.

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I was asked by Sara, from i like to cook, if I would be interested in trying a couple of recipes from Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, Baking: From My Home to Yours, I immediately said yes. My general feeling is that no matter how many recipes or cookbooks I have (a lot is an understatement), I can always have more. Besides, new cookbooks mean new pictures, and I love flipping through books for ideas even if I don’t make anything.

To choose my first recipe, I looked at the ones that were illustrated first. I wish that they all could have had pictures, as the photography was excellent, but given that the book was already 500+ pages, it was understandable that they didn’t want to make it any longer.

My first choice was for a recipe called Cinnamon Squares, slightly renamed here because I think that Cinnamon Chocolate Squares is a slightly more accurate name. The recipes is for a cake with a cinnamon-coffee-chocolate swirl running through the center of it. It would be a coffee cake, but for the fact that it is topped with a rich chocolate glaze - not usually a feature of coffee cakes.

The cake is dead easy to make and you don’t even need to cream the butter, since it goes in melted. The only difficult part is spreading the second half of the batter evenly on top of the cinnamon mixture without disrupting it. Once it is finished, the cake is moist on the inside and very flavorful. The corners of the cake were a tiny bit crisp at the edge, so keep an eye on the baking time. I think that this would be great with a streusel topping, but the chocolate glaze seemed to be a real showstopper - people loved it. Overall, this is a great cake. Make it as dessert and serve it with coffee or add your favorite streusel topping and make it for breakfast.

Incidentally, my only negative comment about the book is that there are only about 5 recipes for yeasted breads, and for a book titled Baking I would have expected all types of baking to be covered, not necessarily just a focus on baked goods. Of course, I love baked goods and the book is still a good one, but it’s not necessarily the only cookbook you’ll want if you want to bake breads, too.

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Crumb cakes differ from coffee cakes, though both often have streusel or crumbs component, because a crumb cake is mostly crumb. Sure, coffee cakes will have some on top or swirled throughout, but the bulk of the batter is cake. In this instance, the bulk of the “batter” was crumb.

The cake was a Martha Stewart recipe that I picked mainly on looks. Crumbs on top of a cake always look extremely appealing and promise to be buttery and sweet, crunchy and cake-like all at once. This one didn’t disappoint in any way. The cake was moist and tender and the crumb topping was crunchy and sweet, though not sugary, with a melt-in-your-mouth butteriness. The amount of cinnamon was just right.

That said, I did have a few small challenges when making the recipe. While mixing both the batter and the crumb mixture was very easy, the batter did not spread into the pan well at all! In fact, it only barely covered the bottom and I had such difficulty spreading it that I had to grease my silicone spatula to push it around. I still couldn’t get it into the corners, though the batter does spread and rise as it bakes, so this turned out not to be a problem in the finished cake. The main difference from the published recipe was that the cake took longer to bake than specified. Marth’s directions called for 20 minutes of baking time, while mine wasn’t done for about 28 minutes. Not that that is a big deal, since I used a cake tester to check it if was done, but a flaw nevertheless.

The cake can be served while still slightly warm, but it can also be cooled completely and stored, wrapped, for 2 days.

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