This recipe is for a cinnamon streusel coffee cake. I have the recipe up top with more details below.
Coffee Cake Recipe (aka Muffin Cake)
Equipment
- 9 x 13 baking dish (glass)
- Large Mixing Bowl
- Food Processor
Ingredients
For the Cake:
- 1 C Sugar
- 3 C Flour
- 3 tsp Baking powder
- ½ tsp Salt
- 1 C Vegetable Oil
- 1 C Milk
- 2 Large Eggs
- 1 tsp Vanilla
Struesel Topping
- ½ C Sugar
- ⅓ C Flour
- ¼ C Butter (cubed)
- 1 tsp Cinnamon
- ½ C Melted butter (optional)
Instructions
The Concept
- You are making a coffee cake with a layer of cinnamon streusel in the middle and a struesel crumble on top. You will make two layers of cake batter and streusel to do this.
To make the coffee cake batter
- Preheat oven to 350°F.
- In the large mixing bowl, blend the sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt.
- Make a small well in the middle of the mixture.
- In the well, combine oil, eggs, vanilla, and milk.
- Begin stirring everything together with a whisk, beginning in the middle and working your way to the sides as everything incorporates.
- Set aside.
Cinnamon Streusel Topping
- Add the sugar, flour, cubed butter, and cinnamon into the food processor.
- Blend it until it forms a crumble.
Preparing for baking
- Pour half of the batter into a prepared 9 x 13 pan and spread evenly throughout the pan.
- Pour half of the streusel and spread evenly. (This will make a layer of struesel in the middle of the cake)
- Pour the remaining batter on top of the streusel and spread evenly.
- Top with the remaining streusel.
- If you desire, you can drizzle the top with ½ C of melted butter.
- Bake for about 45 minutes at 350°F.
Backstory to this Coffee Cake Recipe
When my wife was a kid, her family would eat muffins and eggs almost every Sunday morning. That was a family tradition I could get behind so we started doing that with our own family.
However, the thing I did not like about muffins was cleaning the muffin tray. Also, as our family grew, we started to have to double the muffin recipe, meaning we went from making 12 muffins to 24 muffins.
I did not like having to spoon out 24 muffin cups and then clean two muffin trays.
Therefore, I decided to try to turn the muffin tradition into a coffee cake tradition. Now, instead of having to spoon out a bunch of muffins and clean the little muffin holes in the trays, I can dump everything into one 9×13 baking dish. It’s faster and easier to clean than muffins.
Also, since we don’t do coffee in my household, we call this recipe “muffin cake.” It is our muffins tradition in a cake form.
Notes on the Coffee Cake Batter
When I first started making this coffee cake, I would make the well in the dry ingredients as described. I don’t do that as much anymore. So if you don’t know what I mean by “make a well” you can just ignore that part. Otherwise, I would say you just make the dry ingredients look like there is a sarlacc pit in the middle (minus the sarlacc). You then put the wet ingredients (oil, milk, eggs, vanilla) into the pit.
Also don’t worry too much about whether your layers of batter and streusel are perfectly divided. You use about half of each for each layer of batter and streusel. In fact, I’ve even swirled the layers together and it’s been fine.
Making the Streusel
Before we had a food processor, I made the streusel by hand with a whisk. It took forever and was quite a workout to beat the butter into the crumbly texture. It’s much easier with a food processor.
When you are grinding everything with the food processor, the streusel can go through three phases.
First, it will become a sandy texture.
Second, it will become a crumbly texture.
Third, it will become a more chunky or doughy texture.
You want to stop the food processor during the second phase. I actually like to stop the mixing just after it gets passed the sandy stage and begins forming smaller chunks.
It will still be good if you get to the chunky stage though. In fact, everyone will want the pieces with thick streusel. But it is harder to spread the streusel evenly if it gets too chunky.
Adding butter on top
You can add melted butter on top of the coffee cake prior to baking. To do this, envision making a winding river of butter that goes up and down the entire coffee cake.
I will say that adding the butter river is quite delicious.
I don’t add it anymore though.
A 1/2 cup of butter is 814 calories. Obviously, coffee cake is not a superfood–muffins is how we get away with eating dessert for breakfast. Leaving out the extra butter makes me feel a little better about serving this to my kids for breakfast.
It’s still really good without it.
Adding other Coffee Cake mix-ins
If you want blueberry coffee cake, add 2 cups of blueberries.
Banana cinnamon coffee cake? Cut or mash up 2 or 3 over-ripe bananas and sprinkle some cinnamon into the cake batter.
Would you like peach coffee cake? Add 2 cups of diced peaches.
I’ve also done chocolate chip coffee cake by adding a package of chocolate chips (but not very often because, again, this is supposed to be breakfast).
The variations are really only limited by your own imagination. If you think something might be good in a coffee cake, add it and see what you think.
