Why is it called coffee cake if it doesn't taste like coffee? Seriously, I've always found that kind of confusing—though I do take things too literally sometimes. But it's not just that coffee cake sounds like a dessert flavored with coffee. It's that coffee cake actually should be flavored with coffee. After all, the rich, deep flavor of coffee goes with so many other ingredients that are right at home in coffee cake, like sweet spices and rich chocolate. So I decided to create a coffee cake that truly earns its name.
For the ultimate coffee-flavored coffee cake, I wanted the coffee flavor to shine in as many ways as possible. After baking a slew of versions in the Epicurious Test Kitchen, we discovered that we needed three different forms of coffee used in five different ways to get the cake right where we wanted it: Bursting with rich, sweet, coffee flavor that's highlighted by a trio of contrasting textures. Here's how we made it happen:
Bakers know that that the easiest way to get coffee flavor into a baked good is to add instant espresso powder to the batter. But it turns out that espresso powder alone doesn't give the fullest flavor: you need a little bit of spice to bring out the coffee flavor. Add some cinnamon and a hint of cardamom and you play up the coffee flavor in a wonderful new way. Once we figured that out, the cake still didn't quite taste like coffee though, so we replaced some of the liquid in the batter with extra-strong brewed coffee and finally the finished cake batter tasted like coffee, smelled like coffee, and even gave our taste testers a little caffeine buzz. Adding brewed coffee does something wonderful to the texture of the cake, too: it's more moist and dense—one of our editors even called it "pudding-like."
Chocolate and coffee are always a good combination. Chocolate in coffee-flavored cake is an even better combination—decadent and indulgent like a mocha latte. So we melted semisweet chocolate, butter, and more extra-strong brewed coffee and layered it between the batter before baking to create two dark mocha swirls in the cake. Then, we put pecans in the mocha swirl to give it extra crunch and a touch of nutty sweetness.
Coffee cake is always better with a crunchy crumb topping. For the ultimate coffee-flavored cake coffee cake, it stands to reason that the crumb topping has to have some coffee flavor in it too. Here's where the instant espresso powder comes in again. We mixed more of it into the crumb mixture to add another caffeine hit to the cake.
By the time the cake was finished, we'd already used two different kinds of coffee in four different ways. But even though we risked overkill, we thought the cake needed one more touch of coffee. So we created a glaze that looks and tastes a bit like the foam on a creamy latte, combining sour cream and confectioners' sugar with a bit of coffee liqueur. The extra-concentrated flavor of coffee in the booze enlivens the coffee character of the cake and carries the scent straight to your nose, just like a freshly brewed cup of joe.
