Coffee Cake

I love coffee cake. You can absolutely make this one without a stand mixer, but I massively prefer using it, so I've written this with that in mind.

This is is easy to remember, because it's pretty much just one-seventy of everything. Look:

Ingredients

Cake

• 170g sugar
• 170g butter (soft, room temp, plus a bit extra for greasing if you're using metal tins rather than silicone ones)
• 170g self raising flour
• 3 eggs (preferably large, but I used medium and it turned out alright)
• 1 tbsp hot water
• 1 tbsp instant coffee
• Jam or chocolate spread to help hold the layers together (approximately one metrix splop)
• Cherries/walnuts to decorate (optional)

Icing

• 225g icing sugar
• 100g butter
• More coffee (same as before, a tbsp each of instant and hot water, but this is a bit loosey goosey. If it's not a very strong coffee, you might want 1.5tbsps of instant, 1 of water. Ish.)

Equipment

• Stand Mixer
• Summat to weigh your shit with
• Silicone spatula
• Mixing spoons or something, I dunno.
• Couple of round sandwich tins (stupid name, no one puts sandwiches in them.) Also, I used square ones, and nothing bad happened.

Method

Oven on (you guessed it!) 170 degrees C

Step one: Beat the everloving crap out of the butter and sugar until it's pale and fluffy. Chop your butter up into little cubes like you're a drug lord and it owes you money. Then wang it in the mixer, and start beating it, once again, like it owes you money. It is my unprofessional and unhumble opinion that it is really bloody hard to overbeat the butter at this stage, but easy to underbeat. So get the jump on it.

Add the sugar, and watch that mother turn pale and fluffy before your very eyes. Kiss your underdeveloped biceps and thank the ancestors who made this miracle possible.

Step two: Beat the eggs and measure out the flour. Add the egg in dribs and drabs (professional measurement), with a tbsp of flour each time. Add the coffee mix in the same way.

Step three: Once all the egg is mixed in, there will be some flour left. Get the bowl off the stand mixer and work in what's left by folding. I use a silicon spatula for this part.

Use a gentle, even lover-like touch for this step. Don't knock the air out of it. Your under-worked bingo wings should barely wobble.

Step four: Get the batter in the cake tins. If you aren't using silicone cake pans and haven't already greased and lined them, now is the time. Chuck the batter in (half in each, ofc), and bake these suckers in the oven for about 25 minutes. They should look goldenish, be firm to touch, and a skewer will come out clean. Pretty standard stuff. If they're underdone, pop them back in for a few more minutes. I will be astonished if they need more than half an hour. I let them cool a bit in the tin and then turn them out on to a rack to cool.

Step five: Ice the cake. I've noticed they don't take long to cool, so don't dilly dally: scrub up that mixer and get beating your 100g soft butter. Add the icing sugar. I found I get a better result adding a tbsp or so at a time (I got impatient the first time and dumped it all in, definitely didn't turn out quite so well). Finally: the coffee. Ta-dahhhh! Jam or spread on one slab, and about half the icing on the other. Sandwich them together, and bung the rest on top. You can decorate it with cherries, walnuts, chocolate shavings, sprinkles, anything you like really. No, really, anything.

Ingredients Notes

Sugar: The first time I made this, I used caster sugar, but regular granulated sugar would probably be just as good, and costs less. My favourite option is light soft brown sugar. It just works. Brown sugar and coffee is **CHEF'S KISS**.

Butter: It should be softish, but not runny or melted. I wouldn't put it in the microwave, to be honest. If you have an uncooperative block of rock hard butter that you forgot to take out of the fridge, worry not! I gotchu, babe.

What you want to do is, boil the kettle (you need it for the coffee mix anyway). Get a safe jug (not glass! Pyrex, maybe) and rinse it in the boiling water. Stick your unwrapped block of butter on a clean surface and pop your jug over it. It'll be soft enough to work with in hardly any time at all.

Coffee: I used a decent instant. I haven't tried using proper coffee, no idea on amounts or how that would turn out.

Eggs: I used medium rather than large and it turned out very edible indeed. Large would have made a better amount of batter, though. I will definitely use large in future.

Jam: A good strawberry one is fine. I had a really nice cherry one, and that worked well. Best option is chocolate hazelnut spread, especially if decorating with nuts. (Walnuts you perv.)

Other notes: I'm going to use a loaf tin next time and see how that turns out.

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Thank you for reading!