THE FUSE

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I can’t say that I have much in common with celebrity life, but Jennifer Garner sometimes gives me the illusion that maybe just maybe, we could be friends?! Her #pretendcookingshow is a fun little glimpse into her hosting style — warm, friendly, eager, and ever so slightly anxious about getting it “right.” Relatable, for sure.

In one of the episodes, she makes an Espresso Crumb Coffee Cake for her friend and children’s book illustrator, Marla Frazee. She doesn’t talk too much about the cake itself, but it does look really delicious. In her caption she credits Love & Olive Oil. I did a quick search and headed over to the blog to read through the whole thing before baking it myself.

Reading through the headnotes, this Espresso Crumb Coffee Cake is actually a play on blogger Lindsay Landis’ grandmother’s traditional sour cream crumb coffee cake. Most coffee cakes (including my own recipe!), do not contain any coffee; they’re just meant to be served alongside a hot cup of Joe. But this recipe calls for espresso in both the crumb topping and the glaze.

First, you’re going to make the espresso crumble. Melt the butter, then add the sugar, espresso powder, and flour. Mix until moist but crumbly.

To make the cake, cream the butter and sugar in a stand mixer, then add the egg and vanilla. Stir together the baking soda and sour cream in a small bowl (more on this later!)l, and the flour and baking powder in another bowl. Add the flour and sour cream mixtures to the bowl of the stand mixer, alternating between both.

Spread the batter evenly into a greased and parchment-lined 8×8 baking pan. Top with the crumble, starting at the edges and working your way into the middle. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few moist crumbs, about 30 minutes.

Once the cake has cooled, make the glaze. Stir together brewed espresso (or espresso powder and water) with powdered sugar. Drizzle over the cake. Let set 15 minutes, then serve.

This was a really nice coffee cake! I wouldn’t say it tastes super strongly of coffee, but the touch of bitterness is a nice foil to the buttery sweetness. The ratio of cake to crumb is perfect, and the crumble is nice and crisp, not cakey at all. I don’t typically care for a glaze on crumb cake — it usually doesn’t add anything but sweetness for sweetness sake in my opinion— but here with the espresso, it works really nicely.

One thing I did find curious about the recipe’s method is that it instructs you to add the baking soda to the sour cream (while the baking powder is added to the flour in a separate bowl). Typically, leaveners are added together with the dry ingredients so that they can be mixed well before being activated by the wet ingredients. When I added the sour cream-baking soda mixture to the batter, it was already bubbly. Would the texture of the cake have been different if I had combined the baking soda with the dry ingredients instead? I’m not sure. The recipe doesn’t mention why she does it this way, but I did some digging elsewhere on her site and it was exactly as I suspected — this is how her grandmother made it, it works well, so she doesn’t mess with it. If it ain’t broke…

Stir the baking soda into the sour cream. If you’re an avid baker, it might be muscle memory to add it to the dry ingredients, but stick to the recipe!
Dollop the batter into the baking pan. Because the batter is quite thick, this will make it much easier to spread out into the pan.
Check on the cake sooner than the recipe instructs. The recipe suggests a baking time of 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs attached. After 30 minutes, mine was well browned and the toothpick came out totally clean. Fortunately, the rich sour cream batter meant it wasn’t dry at all. But next time, I would start checking it a few minutes earlier.
Halve the glaze. I used less than half of it, and thought it was plenty. I might also add a drop of vanilla extract next time.