It is almost a rule that you need to eat cake on your birthday (except Rasmus who has requested cookies rather than cake – that I can accommodate). And since baking cakes is one of my favourite pastimes and I have far too few opportunities to do it, I decided to bake my own.
This coffee cake was probably one of the very first I learned to bake. It is my mum’s recipe – I don’t know where it originated from, probably the side of a flour packet. And it was always a favourite in our house growing up.
It’s very simple to make: my mum’s instructions are basically “mix all the ingredients together and put in the oven”. And it is incredibly moist and yummy. The coffee flavour is more subtle than overpowering and the butter icing is the super sweet contrast to the coffee cake.
I realised last year some time that when Americans talk about “coffee cake” they mean just a style of cake that you eat with coffee, not cake that actually tastes like coffee. This one actually tastes like coffee – just making that very clear for my American readers!
I decided to make three small cakes instead of one big one, as they look so ridiculously cute this way! I was given some mini cake pans last year some time so I used those.
The other great thing about this cake is that it doesn’t have to be coffee cake at all if you’re not a coffee fan! Just take out the coffee, and add some cocoa or lemon juice instead…
